NL 23, 1st of July of 2022, CasaLina, Steppe FM
CasaLina :
Puglia, Southern Italy, 38°C on average.
It's already been almost three weeks since Jé and I arrived here, in CasaLina.
CasaLina is the name of a house in the middle of Puglia, five kilometres from the first village: Spinazzola. It's so hot that nobody sleeps in the house, which is mainly used as a kitchen and a power source. Everyone sleeps in the campsite (about ten tents and other light dwellings) set up in a small pine forest, one of the few areas almost always in the shade.
Before talking about the daily life here, what is CasaLina really?
It all began in March 2018, when Angela, an Italian living in Belgium but born in Spinazzola, returned to Puglia for the funeral of her grandmother. During the few days she spends here, she rediscovers some family land, including a house, which has been abandoned and at the same time meets Gervasio, director of the Osservatorio Migranti Basilicata.
On her return to Brussels, in her shared flat of about ten people, she proposed the following project: to restore the house and offer it to the observatory to house migrants in better conditions. Three months later, following a fundraising campaign through participatory financing and the organisation of cultural events, twenty or so people from Brussels (Belgians, Italians and French) spent a month in Puglia restoring the house. In August 2018, the house is finished, CasaLina (in homage to Angela's grandmother) is born.
Unfortunately, the observatory does not have enough manpower to organise the management of the new house.
However, a new project was launched for CasaLina: to set up a profitable snail farm in order to offer year-round work and decent living conditions to the migrants. This new attempt lasted a total of two years and ended in failure due to... three burglaries! The thieves took everything from tools to snails. To cope with the financial problems caused by her thefts, Angela and her Brussels collective created two associations: one in Puglia, the CasaLina association, whose objective is, among other things, to improve the living conditions of migrants in the region &, in parallel in Belgium, the BSR association (Building Social Resilience) whose main objective is to obtain funding and volunteers for CasaLina's activities, via the organisation of cultural events (markets of local products, mobile pizzeria, organisation of parties, weddings etc.).
The general functioning is as follows: from October to March, the collective lives in Brussels and takes care of fundraising, and from March to September, which corresponds to the season when migrants come to work in Puglia, a good part of the collective goes down to Italy to organise missions to help with basic needs. Indeed, migrants are either housed in ghettos and suffer from the Caporalato system (see box below), or in old, abandoned and unhealthy houses without running water or electricity. The CasaLina association therefore offers, in addition to the essential needs (food, electricity refills, showers, medical emergencies, etc.), help in updating residence permits or regularising their asylum application by putting them in contact with other associations or lawyers.
This brings us to March 2020, the period of Covid and the beginning of the confinement in Italy. Angela, Raffa and Coco are stuck in CasaLina and the precarious conditions of the hundreds of migrants who have come for the tomato season are getting even worse. For almost six months, they carry out emergency aid to migrants in the abandoned houses and ghettos around and about ten of them come to live in CasaLina. In addition to this, permaculture projects began on the land around the house: soil regeneration (following years of mono-cultural exploitation), organic market gardening to start selling products from this sustainable agriculture. The products (tomato sauce, dried vegetables and fruit, olive oil, herbal teas, jams, etc.) are mainly sold in Brussels.
The financial needs of the CasaLina association are growing as a result of the increasing number of aid activities. The sister association in Belgium gradually became independent and began to offer more and more awareness-raising projects. It also starts to investigate the caporalato system (see box below), which has its equivalent in Belgium and throughout Europe.
At CasaLina, the project is growing. There are more and more volunteers and therefore more and more eco-buildings, more land dedicated to sustainable agriculture, more fruit and vegetables to produce, harvest, process and preserve, and more help to give to migrants (Campagna è Vita project consisting of going around the houses in the area to give help).
In 2022, the association was even contacted by the Italian Ministry of the Interior to help with the management of migrants, in particular by setting up the File application, which is still far from being perfected, and which is supposed to provide an alternative to the Caporalato system by directly linking migrants in need of employment with farmers looking for labour.
Now, as CasaLina is becoming more and more important and legitimate, it is seeking to establish itself more and more in the region by organising events and creating a mutual aid network with other similar associations in the area.
Source : Caporalato: lo schiavismo del Terzo millennio, https://www.anmil.it/, translate from Italian.
What does CasaLina mean in day-to-day life?
Briefly, it is a community life with a division of tasks according to obligations and interests.
Angela, who lives here for six months of the year, is responsible for coordinating the projects and life on the spot, in addition to the administration of the two associations. We are not a fixed number, which means that there are volunteers who come and others who leave and others, like me, who stay for a while. In three weeks here, I have seen CasaLina almost depopulated, where there were only eight of us, and CasaLina full to bursting, where there were more than twenty of us because we were organising a party, or because we were accommodating cyclovoyageurs.
So there is always a renewal of people coming from all over the continent: Italy, Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Turkey... And then, in addition to all these people who live there, there are also immigrants from Africa: Gambians, Nigerians, Moroccans... to fill water tanks, charge their phones or have dinner with us. CasaLina is like a mill where all the winds meet.
For the work, the main tasks are divided into four sectors: Eco-construction (restoration and construction of facilities), Production (harvesting, processing and conservation), Permaculture (management of the vegetable garden and creation of different agricultural missions) and long-term projects (reforestation, soil regeneration...).
Every morning, at 9am, we organise a meeting to form the teams of each sector and according to the priorities.
For example, a few days ago we bought about 250 vegetable plants so the next two days, Enzo and I, both in charge of the Permaculture sector, were in charge of setting up a large team to weed, work the soil, plant, and set up the irrigation of new cultivation areas as soon as possible.
In fact, there are always a thousand things to do. In addition to the priorities defined at the beginning of each day, there are other tasks to be done: weeding, creating liquid fertilisers (macerates), sowing... or harvesting cherries or amarene (wild cherries), then pitting them and processing them (drying or jamming) and again repairing the joints of a wall with adobe or varnishing a surface that is leaking. Or going shopping, washing dishes, preparing food, cleaning the common areas, welcoming new people, discussing and thinking about new projects.
And all this is without counting the projects of creating events such as the participation in local markets or in the various festive events in the village of Spinazzola. About ten days ago, we all participated in the big festival in the village of Spinazzola. And so after the competition to eat the spaghetti the fastest without hands (won by Angela to the acclamation of the whole CasaLina), we participated in the cucagna. The objective: a team of four people must manage to climb a pole, coated with 2 cm of engine grease, to unhook the sausages and cheeses hanging from the top of the pole. We didn't win, but we were close to winning Spinazzola's flagship event! Almost two weeks later, when you walk around the village we are still recognised as the team that almost won the sausages.
And then, as if there wasn't enough work to do, CasaLina is organising its first big awareness-raising event in Spinazzola: on 6 July we are organising a market with our products and other local farmers in the village square, followed by the premiere of a documentary about the adventure of an Apulian community in the very opposite of the rural exodus from this region.
So there are lots of new things to do. Finding the rental of the projector and the sound system, agreeing with the commune on the date, proposing a debate between the public and the director who will be on site, creating and arranging the locations of the market, of a bar for local products, touring the surrounding villages to put up posters and communicate with the inhabitants. There is also the communication by internet, the invitations to the local producers, the organization for the decoration, the seats (which will obviously be straw bales) to bring, the few races and especially the production to transform (bottling, creation of sorbets...) to be able to sell it on the spot.
Finally :
Life at CasaLina is busy. Jehol is with two girlfriends, and in addition to the dogs, we have two cats, chickens and a multitude of mosquitoes. Three languages are generally spoken: French, English and Italian, people come and go.
We are in the south of Italy and the daytime temperature never goes below 35°C, so we work until noon, and then after lunch, during the hottest hours, there is hardly anything going on: it's time for a nap under a tree, or to splash around in the tiny children's pool. It's usually around 5pm until 9pm.
After dinner, we can finally enjoy the only cooler hours of the 24 hours. The discussions are going well, the local wine is often part of the party. We go to bed late, making the most of the most lively hours in the heart of Puglia.
It's a life full of meetings and activities in contact with the land. In other words, everything is going well for me.
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