Romina Vinci

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Ranum, north of Jutland: a group of friends is spending one of the first spring days at the beach. They come from Africa, and the harsh Danish winter has really taken a toll on them. They call each other brother and sister. Sometimes the events of life are stronger than blood ties. Markus, 21 years old, is originally from Eritrea but he lived in Ethiopia for 19 years. He arrived here six months ago. “When I look at the sea, in my mind I relive again the nightmare in the Mediterranean Sea. We were three hundred people in a little boat, after two days it was broken and the water was inside. Most of us couldn’t swim, I thought that I was going to die over there. But when everything seemed lost, the Italian Navy came and saved us”. Markus is one of the 100.000 people that were saved in the first ten months of 2014 but , ac- cording Frontex (European Agency for the Ex- ternal Borders) more than 3.400 people died trying to arrive in Italy crossing the sea last year. Now he lives far away from the Italian coast, but also here, in a little and quiet town in the north of Jutland, it’s difficult to forget the fears. He doesn’t feel safe yet, because he doesn’t know what the future holds. In Ranum, a town of less than a thousand inhabitants situated in Vesthimmerland Municipality, four hundred people are waiting to know if they can build a new life here. They are asylum seek- ers now: they dream about becoming refugees. If they can not, they risk being sent back to their country of origin.

I focused my project on the feeling of waiting, because these people can stay in this center for one month or two years, nobody knows, it depends on the Immigrations Services in Copenhagen. They feel like they are far away from their home countries and from their families, near for a promised Land that they are always dreamed, but now it looks so empty.