Open Arms has invited Vox this Friday to have its representatives come aboard their ship during one of its stopovers in Gran Canaria, Tenerife, and Lanzarote in October to learn about their work, which has saved more than 70,000 lives at sea, and to begin to banish "their hatred." At the beginning of the open house that the NGO has organized in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, its pedagogical coordinator, Ángeles Schjaer, referred to the two Vox deputies, Nicasio Galván and Alberto Rodríguez, who on the day of the ship's arrival at the port of La Luz recorded a video in front of it to ask again on social networks that it be "confiscated and sunk." Schjaer stressed that Open Arms' mission these days in the islands, agreed with the Government of the Canary Islands, focuses on providing tools that promote critical thinking among young people, a social stratum where the call to hatred against poor immigrants "is taking root." This spokesperson for the NGO has acknowledged that they are concerned about such messages because of their potential social impact, although they believe that they are "few," that they are often spread artificially by 'bots' (robotized accounts on social networks), not by real people, and that they are always fewer than the messages of encouragement. In the opinion of Open Arms, it is such an "indecent" discourse that they have even led the Navy to remind its political promoters "that the moral and legal obligation at sea" of its ships and any other is to rescue shipwrecked people. "These are messages that attack anyone, not just us. It amuses me that they are so brave and stand behind a fence to record a video and do not come here to talk to us. I think what they are doing is absolutely ridiculous. I believe that what is being built is a campaign of hatred to win votes because they believe that they will have more followers," she asserted. For this reason, the representative of the NGO has invited the Vox parliamentarians in the islands to visit the ship and talk to them: "Let them come and we will sit down for a coffee and talk. And then, surely, we will reach common ground." According to Ángeles Schjaer, "people are not so bad nor do they have that mentality." "What happens is that we are in a moment in which it sells more to have a fascist discourse and with certain tendencies than to be a good person. The absurd thing is that being a bad person has become fashionable. We have to reverse that," she added. The NGO is pleased that the response they are receiving from the schoolchildren who visit the ship is very different, because "they do not make the difference that adults do," whom she has blamed for sending young people "very distorted information" far from reality, which incites hatred. During their visit to the ship, a group of students from the Guanarteme Institute and the Iberia School, both from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, learned how Open Arms works during a mission and were also informed about the legal framework and the socio-political context related to migration. The NGO officials have specified, however, that during their stay in the Canary Islands they do not plan to participate in rescues, unless the Maritime Rescue requested their support or an emergency occurred. The head of Open Arms in Senegal, Carmen Torres, who also collaborates with these training days, has explained what the 'Origen' program consists of, which the NGO has been developing in that sub-Saharan country since 2019 and whose real impact will be seen in the long term. However, they have already noticed that in local communities with which they have worked, many young people have ruled out undertaking the dangerous journey by canoe to Europe. This initiative provides local communities with information on the reality of migration through unsafe routes and accompanies them in the search for development alternatives through digital training and entrepreneurship, instruments with which more than 4,000 people have been trained so far, she explained. In these community talks, the NGO, with the help of volunteers who it considers "captains of information," catalyzes debates in which they talk "about how they imagine Europe and what Europe is really like," in addition to warning its participants of the main risks associated with unsafe migration routes. "What we are pursuing with this program in Senegal is to avoid suffering and death," she said.
