Pope Francis received this Thursday, during the flight of his trip to Luxembourg and Belgium, a letter from the president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, in which he thanks him for his interest in going to the islands to focus on the migratory drama, along with some letters from migrants who arrived in the past to the archipelago.
Francis received the letter from the Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, after a Spanish journalist gave it to him, since on this occasion the pontiff did not greet the representatives of the media one by one due to his mobility problems.
Along with the letter, the pontiff was given a Senegalese cloth bag made by the young people of the Canarian Buen Samaritano Foundation, an initiative of the parish of Santa María de Añaza (Santa Cruz de Tenerife), inside which there were notes from immigrants narrating their arrival in a small boat to the Canary Islands.
"I'm thinking a bit about this, about going to the Canary Islands because there is the situation with migrants arriving from the sea and I would like to be close to the rulers and the people of the Canary Islands," said the Pope at the press conference upon returning from his tour of Asia and Oceania on September 13.
Although the Pope has shown interest, for the moment the visit does not seem to have materialized.
Among the letters that the Pope received this Thursday is that of Michel, a minor who arrived in the Canary Islands from Senegal and is the youngest of three brothers. His trip lasted seven days and what he remembers most is that he had no clothes because the traffickers left his backpack on land. His clothes got wet and he couldn't change and when he arrived he could barely walk.
There is also the one from Ousmane, from Senegal, who writes a poem to the Pope in which he tells him that during his trip in a small boat "the cold twisted their fingers and the hunger in their stomachs felt like wire, while the humidity and salt of the sea cracked their skin and their eyelashes turned into salt crystals.”
Other immigrants invite the Pope to the Canary Islands to show him the dock where they arrived after their odyssey.
