During-the-journalistic-workshop-june-2022-Photo-credit-Anastasia-Papadopoulos

The courage to tell your own story and the courage to write it...

In the following pages, we tell you a piece of an unfinished peaceful battle…

The 15 articles that we present to you are written by 5 students from the university of Political Sciences Paris, Nancy's campus, as part of their civic service at Secours Catholique Caritas Hauts de Lorraine. They participated in a journalistic workshop for almost 2 months, in pairs with 5 exiled women and girls, as part of the project "Coming together, telling together, getting mobilized" in collaboration with the multilingual PRO IDE platform www.pro-ide.fr, dedicated to exiles living in France.

The workshop was designed and functioned as a space for raising awareness and freeing up speech, a mission dear to the heart of SCCF. We had very intense days of painful emotions, full of tears. We tried to balance them with activities that brought us joy: together we cooked, ate, cried, and laughed. Everything was moving too: one of the migrant women, "sans papiers" during the workshop, obtained her first staying permit in France a few weeks later. She had been waiting for it since 2017, as you will discover a little later…

The stories are very different.

The writing styles too.

They tell of so many human faces of immigration and how we interact with this complex issue.

I hope that as you read, you will feel the strong emotions I felt while leading this workshop, getting to know these 10 courageous, spirited girls and women better. Coming from different countries. Walking on such different paths. But what a resemblance as human beings, as women! The same irresistible love for life. The same unbearable pain in the face of injustice, coupled with resistance. Each had its own weapons to fight: some dared to speak. The others dared to write.

Each of these 5 girls and 5 immigrant women was, or still is, accompanied for months, even years, by SCCF Hauts de Lorraine volunteers. These articles, these human stories, would not have been possible without their support and that of fellow employees. Today, we present you a part of this joint result…

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