Milan, Italy - ARCI Ragazzi

So, first of all, apologies for the small gap in the blogging stream, but it has been extremely hectic, and also we have not had good, consistant access to the internet. We are now in Portoroz, Slovenia, spending time with marine conservation charity, Morigenos, however, I will take this opportunity to tell you about our experiences in our third country, Italy.

Italy has always been the country we have found the most difficult to organise, and thus we arrived with some concerns about how the week would pan out. The problems, I think largely boil down to the language barrier. Italy, rightly or wrongly, has a very insular feel to it, and to many Italiens we spoke to, this was an issue that they were keen to address. Very few people in Italy speak English, and although we shouldn't automatically expect this, it is true that it somewhat obstructs their ability to cooperate outside of their borders. Initially this created a problem for us, in the websites of most charities were only in Italien. Also, whenever I tried to contact nyone via the phone, or email, it was difficult to communicate. We did have one contact, and en route to Milan, we called to arrange the timings of our appointments. All seemed to be okay, and we left Chivasso (our rest place for the night) last Saturday confidant that we had at least semi overcome one of our biggest potential hurdles.

We were very lucky to be put in touch with Costanza, an old friend from London who kindly offered to put us up during our time in Milan, and without whom the entire Italy leg would have been a write off. She quickly became our offical translator, and helped us in our efforts to organise filming times, and interviews. It did still, however, despite the language barrier no longer being an issue, prove difficult. I want to see a massive thank you to Costi at this point for being so patient.

We eventually managed to meet up with Nicola Iannoccone, the head of ARCI Ragazzi's work in Milan, on the Tuesday, and had a half hour interview with him. We didn't unfortuntely, however, manage to film any of the work they do to asisst yound people, and left on Tuesday a little disappointed that despite our best efforts we had struggled to get the footage we wanted. We do, however, believe that our experiences in Italy are a key component of our project, and highlight some of the limitations of charity cooperation in a world seperated by borders, ideals, and language barriers.