Jérôme Fontana

So, here in Egypt, my work is very different than what I used to do in other countries. I used to travel a lot and go to different parts of countries where I worked and sometimes in very remote and even sometimes even dangerous areas in the countries where I worked. Now in Cairo, it’s more like some networking work, so more diplomatic work. So, I seldom go to the field. I have colleagues, Egyptian colleagues who have gone to North Sinai, but it’s still a restricted area for international organizations. So, myself, I was not allowed yet to go there. But also, we have activities; maybe we can speak about them later, in favour of migrants. You know, African migrants from Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea who are here in Cairo and there, it’s possible to really meet directly with people we support, we help because these people come to our office. So, we don’t need to go into the field so much because we are fortunate enough to have people coming to our office and we can try to support them right from our office. We help them with re-establishing contact with family members they might have lost contact with on their way to Egypt or people who basically came with them and then continued to Europe. And then they lost contact [with] these people who might already be in Europe. So, I have colleagues here who receive these migrants, these people, who collect information from them about what the situation [was] and how we can help them trace their family members and sometimes even organize family reunifications. We have two recent cases, for example, of a mother from Sudan whose children, she had four children, still young children who were basically left in Sudan, and she moved to Egypt. And we managed to bring the children from Sudan to Egypt and reunify the family. So that was a very successful activity. The second family reunion we had over the last few months was basically a Palestinian family. Part of the family was in Greece and themselves, they had come from the Gaza Strip to Cairo. So, through the ICRC, we were able to get visas for them to be able to go to Greece. And because of Covid-19, it was very difficult to get visas. So, we managed to have this contact with the Greek embassy here. Our colleagues in Athens also had a lot of contact with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and all together after, you know, years that this family had been separated, we were able to finally reunify this family.