Sunglasses

When Ardit was about to turn 18, and leave the community for unaccompanied foreign minors where he had lived for the previous two years, he decided to give me this pair of sunglasses.

“So you’ll remember me, zemra,” he said. Zemra means “heart” in Albanian.

I spent a year with him and seven other minors on the outskirts of Bologna. For Ardit, Xhoni, Arber, Rapo, Idris, Makumba, Zak, Mohamed, me and the other community workers, we had become a kind of surrogate family. We ate, studied, slept, argued, joked, laughed, and cried together under the same roof for a whole year.

It definitely wasn’t the life they had imagined when they left their homes and families behind: stuck in a facility, unable to work, unable to send money home, unable to understand the language and with nobody really understanding them either.

And yet, for those young guys, Italy had always been a dream: football, nice cars, beautiful girls, stylish clothes, everything a teenager could want at that age. So, as soon as his weekly allowance came in, Ardit bought himself this nice pair of sunglasses.

On Saturday afternoons they used to all go hang out together in Bologna downtown: Ardit wearing his sunglasses, fixing his hair with gel, spraying on good perfume, lacing up his spotless white shoes. They usually took selfies next to expensive cars and sent them back home to relatives, reassuring them that everything was going well in Italy, that the dream had finally come true. Of course they were lying, and they knew it. But what mattered most was making sure nobody worried about them at home.