by David Markay

The Rev. Kristin Markay(far left), her son Aiden(second from left), and daughter Hannah(far right) participate in an outdoor worship service in Luranga-Marino, Italy, that reflects the cultural diversity of Chiesa Metodista de Milano congregation members. Image by: David Markay Source: New World Outlook A member of Banco Alimentare, a volunteer food-distribution program of the Methodist Church of Milan, unloads food picked up from a city food bank. The food will be distributed to people in the community. Image by: David Markay Source: New World Outlook

New World Outlook, March/April 2006

An Ecuadorian teenager sporting a Denver Nuggets cap shares a Turkish kebab with his Italian girlfriend. Technicians from India operate the service center for a German cell-phone company based in Italy. These are some of the faces of economic globalization in Milan, Italy. But globalization has other faces here, too: a young Filipino woman carrying two heavy bags of groceries in one hand while supporting an elderly Italian woman with the other; a Congolese woman resting her head against the back of the seat on the subway after a 12-hour day of removing hotel sheets from industrial dryers. In this city of 1.3 million inhabitants, the faces of globalization can be as audacious as its famous designer storefronts or as obscure as the tiny courtyards tucked behind imposing financial buildings.

The Immigration Boom
According to the Migrant Foundation of Caritas Italiana, the number of immigrants in Italy grew from roughly 144,000 in 1970 to nearly 2.8 million in 2005. Milan itself has an estimated population of 228,000 immigrants. What Caritas describes as a national “period of curiosity or indifference” toward foreigners in the 1970s was followed by a “period of emergency” in the late 1980s. According to economist Maurizio Binelli, a Protestant Christian, the sharp increase in immigration coincided with a boom in the Italian economy in the late 1980s. While international social, political, and economic factors were causing people to leave their homelands, the Italian economy needed a larger labor force. These two trends have had a large impact on the globalization of Italy over the past 20 years.

In March 1989, the Italian Methodist Church in Milan decided that its missional priority was to offer hospitality to the stranger. As part of the Italian Waldensian-Methodist initiative to essere la chiesa insieme (“to be the church together”), the congregation in Milan initiated a small English-language ministry. Beginning with a small core of people from Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, the Philippines, Korea, the United States, and Japan, the group now has more than 200 members and includes people from 18 countries. The foreign and Italian communities are part of one congregation, offering both Italian and bilingual worship, Christian education, and other ministries and activities together.

“Permission to Stay”
Part of life as an extra-comunitario (the Italian word to describe “those from outside the community”) is the tenuous relationship with the immigration authorities. Against the backdrop of increasing fears of unlimited immigration, laws such as the Bossi-Fini Act in July 2002 made the immigration process much more stringent. Bossi-Fini states that, without official permission to stay, foreigners cannot work and cannot receive room and board from a charitable organization. Thus, not only is the Permesso di Soggiorno (“permission to stay”) and its yearly renewal increasingly difficult to obtain, but life without one is virtually impossible. Each day, hundreds of people line up outside Milan’s immigration office, clutching folders with visas, pay stubs, marriage certificates, and passports. All these documents had to be translated into Italian at considerable cost to each applicant. The long-awaited encounter with an immigration official occurs through a glass window, where an entire family’s future may lie in the hands of an overworked civil servant.

Supporting those pursuing their Permesso di Soggiorno has become an unofficial ministry among members of the congregation that we serve as missionaries. After church, over couscous and rice noodles, it is not uncommon to hear people saying, “Don’t forget to have that form stamped before you go” or “You should talk with Sammy—he knows how to do that.” A cheer goes up from one corner celebrating someone’s extension. Everything depends on these papers—job, health care, marriage, safety. Immigrants of certain ethnic backgrounds know that to be caught without them in a random police check can mean detention or even deportation.

One day, during the intercessory prayer at church, one quiet man went to the altar. In the Philippines, he had been an engineer with the government. Here, he works 14 hours a day as a domestic servant. He said, “I had to go to the Questura [immigration office] this week.” (Moaning and sympathetic laughter rose from the congregation.) “My wife and son and I got on that line at 3:00 a.m. and when we finally got to the window, the woman looked at all our papers and said, ‘You made a mistake. Come back in a month.’ ‘Signora,’ I said, ‘what did I do wrong? I do not understand.’ ‘Come back in a month!’ she said again. I said, ‘You should not treat me this way!’ I was so angry. My wife told me to be quiet, that I would make things worse for us. But I kept shouting, ‘I am like you! Treat me like a human being!’” He stopped telling the story and bowed his head. “Pray for me. I do not want to be so angry.”

Families Reconfigured
The journey for most of the immigrants began with the choice of staying near family but without work, or leaving family, and friends behind in search of a steady income. One middle-aged man recalled, “When I figured out that I could not make enough in Africa to support my family, I bought a ticket to Italy. That was 16 years ago.” One man took a job here solely to pay for his daughter’s surgery in El Salvador. “Sometimes I think I should just go back home,” said one church member, “like the people who complained to Moses out in the desert. But [back home] it is even harder.”

The families of globalization face daily uncertainty and instability and are often stretched and reconfigured according to the availability of work. Several parents in the congregation have left small children in their homelands with grandparents. One woman, after returning from her yearly trip back home, spoke about how her son has begun calling his grandmother “mommy.” One Sunday, a man announced the birth of his son back in Ghana. Another man, having recently returned from his wedding in the Philippines, was starting the paperwork to allow his wife to come to Italy—he hopes within the next two to three years.

Contact with family back home is crucial and bittersweet. Milan’s international phone shops are full on Sundays. On the walls an assortment of clocks show the current time in places like Cairo, Rio de Janiero, Bucharest, and Karachi. People wait for a computer terminal to free up and then pay two Euros for half-an-hour of email time with loved ones. Parents may remain in the village back home, but others are often scattered across the globe. It is not uncommon to hear about a brother in Belgium, a son in the United States, a sister in Maldives, or a husband who works as a sailor on a Pacific cargo-liner.

“When’s the last time you saw your brother’s family?” I asked one of the church members.

“Oh, he and I left [the Philippines] more than six years ago. He finally got a job in America. We talk on the phone when we can. But I haven’t seen him since then. And I haven’t met his children.”

“When I talk with my family on the phone,” one man said, “they often ask me for help. In Ghana, they think, ‘Oh, our cousin lives in Europe. He is rich!’” He lives in a one-room flat with his wife. “But we are not rich. They often ask me to help pay for someone’s hospitalization, or to help a family member who is trying to start a business. I try to help them.” Several persons in this congregation are the principal breadwinners for their families back home. In the half-hour gaps between jobs, they may wire money to relatives.

Shortly after Kristin and I began serving the congregation, we learned that the father of one of the members had recently died in Sierra Leone. The community, without any prompting, immediately circulated the offering basket for this sister. “We do this, pastor,” one member explained, “because we all know what it feels like to have your loved one die when you’re far away. We can’t give as much as we’d like, but if we put our money together, it can help our sister buy a plane ticket to attend the funeral.”

Working with Employers
For those fortunate enough to find work, the day often begins before sunrise and ends after 9 p.m. Well before the morning rush hour, and well after most of the well-dressed Italian business people have finished their commute home, people of color crowd the buses, trams, and subways. The Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) estimates that, in 2004, the largest job sectors for immigrants were domestic labor (in which 43 percent of the total immigrant community worked), the hotel and restaurant industry (9.2 percent), and construction (7.8 percent).

A person’s relationship with her or his employer becomes all important. An ideal job, some say, is with an Italian member of the congregation. Yet, all too often, people put up with conditions in which they are treated unfairly or disrespectfully. One Central Asian man, for example, trained in computer programming, earns 50 percent of what his Italian counterpart earns in the same office. Grievances are rarely, if ever, aired in any direct way. Jobs (legal ones, especially) are hard to find, and one is careful not to jeopardize a steady income. Unpredictable events, such as the downsizing of an employer’s company or the death of an elderly care receiver, could mean sudden unemployment.

According to the Book of Resolutions of the United Methodist Church 2000 (#289g), “One’s worth and dignity in [the] globalization process are measured by one’s ability to contribute to the gains of the market.” The gospel of Jesus clearly has a word to the weak and heavy laden, caught up in that process. “People here have hard lives, a lot of problems,” says Joylin Galapon, a Methodist woman from the Philippines in her final year of preparation for the ministry at the Waldensian Faculty in Rome. She is one of the first persons from the stranieri (“foreigner”) community to pursue ordination in the Italian Waldensian-Methodist Church. “When they come to church, they really need to be fed by the Word.”

The Church and Globalization
The church—which Vinoth Ramachandra, in the May 2004 issue of Sojourners Magazine, calls “the only truly global community in the world”—offers an alternative globalizing force. On any given Sunday in the church in Milan, a prayer may be offered in Portuguese or a Charles Wesley hymn given new life by the beat of a Ghanaian drum and children shaking Indonesian rattles. Some Sundays, a particular cultural group will lead the entire congregation in worship the way it is done “back home.”

Every time Italian Waldensians and Methodist Christians welcome the stranger, they are offering a bold retort to anti-immigration voices. By producing multilingual liturgical resources, offering seminars to those involved in cross-cultural ministry, and providing guidance to churches in intercultural conflict, the church is doing the hard work of building an intercultural faith community. When an intercultural team from the Chiesa Metodista di Milano distributes groceries to people who are trying to make ends meet, all feel God’s love. Members tell Bible stories in different accents to children who hear the gospel from a rich variety of perspectives. At organized discussions, perceptions and relationships go beneath the superficial, and deeper communion becomes possible. “I came to Italy without a family,” sighed one African mother in the church at one such gathering. “But you all have become like a family.”

This community of pilgrims, somewhere between Egypt and the Promised Land, are seen by some as alien or solely as a source of labor. But the church, in its counter-globalizing gospel message, can remind all children of God of their worth and entertain them as angels unawares.

The Rev. David Markay and his wife, the Rev. Kristin Markay, have been serving as pastors at the Methodist Church in Milan since August 2004. With their two children, they served as GBGM missionaries in Lithuania for six years and also as Missionaries-in-Residence in New York.

The ministry of David and Kristin Markay can be supported through the Advance. Missionary Code for David Markay: 12192Z
Kristin Markay: 12193Z

	See Also... Topic: Christian love |  Communities |  Ecumenical |  GBGM programs |  Globalization |  Hunger |  International affairs |  United Methodist Church |  Methodism |  Geographic Region: Italy |  Source: New World Outlook
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Date posted: Mar 07, 2006