by Belinda Silvestro
Belinda Silvestro is an environmental activist living in Brindisi, Southern Italy. With other women committed to taking action against the environmental pollution affecting her town and threatening the health of its inhabitants, she founded the association The Red Stroller (Il Passeggino Rosso).
The summer of my mother’s breast cancer diagnosis my father was recovering from a liver operation. I called my mother every morning to see how they were doing. It seemed like things were finally quieting down, but then my mother had a routine mammogram. Shortly after, I learned she had an aggressive breast cancer and was told that she had only one year left. I was shocked. My granddad died at 96; my grandma was 95, still alive and healthy. How could my mother die at 68? No!!!
My mother had surgery immediately. I was supposed to go to the hospital the morning after her operation, but I woke up I feeling really unwell and dizzy. I couldn’t go. After she was admitted to a hospital for chemotherapy treatments, I couldn’t visit her there either. The hospital was about 100 km away. I had two children to care for, and my husband worked in another town. Every afternoon I called my mother, and she always said everything was okay. She never mentioned her pain. Between chemo rounds she spent more time cleaning than ever, as if she wanted to leave everything in order before she died.
Over a year my mother went through six different therapies, with no good result. She couldn’t go out, so she used to tell her friends that it was because she didn’t want to leave my father alone. She spent all day sitting in an armchair and had to hold onto a wall to walk. She hadn’t hidden her illness, but she did conceal her suffering from me and her friends. When a dear friend of hers came to visit in October, my mother walked her to the elevator at the end of the evening without letting her know the gravity of the situation. I wanted to ask my mother many things, but I didn’t really know the extent to which she understood the seriousness of her disease. I didn’t know if I wanted to know how much she was aware of it either.
The previous summer, when we went to the beach, my mother wore a scarf on her head. We sat together most of the time, and as soon as she felt better she would talk to friends and swim. It was hard to imagine that she had only a few months. My mother died, as my brother – who is a medical doctor – had predicted, before Christmas.
Fifteen years have passed since my mother’s death and still, as I tell her story, I’m crying tears I wasn’t able to cry back then. I had been volunteering with an environmental association, working on environmental education with school children. Teaching them how to love and respect our environment and community helped me with my grief. But the more I studied and the more information I was exposed to, the more powerless I felt about the harmful choices local politicians had made, and were still making, when it came to the environment. I started to wonder whether there was a relationship between our environment and the people falling ill around me. I didn’t know about any study that could confirm my impressions, but I couldn’t help but see the patterns.
Brindisi is an industrial town with a host of environmental problems. Our territory is saturated with industrial installations, from coal-fired thermal, combined cycle and biomass power stations, to pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries, to hazardous industrial waste dumping, to landfills seized for contaminating ground-water. In 1986, Brandisi was included among the areas deemed “higher risk” for environmental crises and, in 1997, it figured among the areas of national interest for reclamation. Harmful substances in the air, water and soil have, both legally and illegally, have altered the natural environment posing pose threats to the health of its inhabitants, including young people, children, the unborn, and those who will be conceived in the future. Brindisi is a town in desperate need of remediation and eco-sustainable projects. For all these things to be done, it needs its community involvement.
I felt overwhelmed and isolated. I wanted to fight for my community to improve our quality of life, especially for children because they are more vulnerable to the toxins produced by industrial pollution. But how? One day some young people asked me to sign a petition to reduce the amount of coal used in the local coal-burning power plant. I felt hopeful. Maybe I wasn’t the only one in my community dreaming of a better world; maybe it was possible to change things. I met some other women who wanted to protect the health of children; we got together, and The Red Stroller was born.
As women and mothers who care about the health of our children and of future generations, we believe we can avoid being simple bystanders as harmful choices are made in our community. To let people know what is going on and help them to get them involved, The Red Stroller formed to launch public initiatives in the streets, and to organize assemblies and conferences to engage the powers that be. The red stroller symbolizes the protection of children, red because of our alarm for their health put at risk from local industries, symbolized by the smokestack.
Using social media and other communication tools, we are building a national network of associations to protect the health of our communities and the environment. We petitioned for an epidemiological survey on the health of the local population and participated in a special council meeting on energy to express concern about the health of our community and to demand change. In addition to campaigning in our local area, we support other similar groups. Last year, we participated in public rallies in Taranto and Naples where people gathered to protest damage to the local environment in these two important Southern-Italian cities and its effects on inhabitants’ health, especially children whose cancer diagnoses are on the rise. These initiatives aim to shed a light on the environmental impact on public health in Brindisi.
Studies recently published in international scholarly journals are starting to show what we already suspected. Researchers from the National Research Council and the local Healthcare Agency found that, between 2000 and 2010 the rates of congenital malformations in Brindisi were 17 percent higher than the European average, and the rates of cardiac congenital malformations are about 49 percent higher. The National Research Council also found an increase in the number of hospital admissions due to cerebrovascular, cardiac and respiratory diseases between 2000 and 2007, when the concentrations of specific atmospheric pollutants, though still within legal limits, increased in the area. Wind patterns seemed to direct the pollution straight from the industrial zones into the residential areas. Years ago, the head physician of the Division of Neonatology at Antonio Perrino Hospital in Brindisi, Dr. Giuseppe Latini and his colleagues had already found plasticizers from phthalates in breast milk and umbilical cords. Something must be done!
Like most groups, we face challenges. Many think the changes we are working toward are impossible to achieve in a society where industrial and political interests prevail. Women, too, are already busy with work and families, so it is sometimes hard to get them involved in political activities. Other problems we confront include the maintenance of productive interpersonal relationships within the group because people have their own personalities and sometimes lose sight of what really matters. Without developing stronger working relationships with other local groups, because of disagreements or a different goals or intentions, we also risk weakening the social movement overall. Rather than organizing against multinational industrial corporations as small groups, we need a united front.
Our goals are far from being achieved, but we’ve made progress. The epidemiological survey we petitioned for has been approved. For our commitment to protecting the environment and raising awareness at the national level, The Red Stroller was awarded the Wangari Maathai Women, Peace, Environment prize on May 6, 2014, which was established by the association Southwards (A Sud) in collaboration with the Women’s International House (Casa Internazionale delle Donne), and the support of the Commission of Women Elected at Rome Council. This recognition validates the importance of our work, and we hope it brings with it new opportunities for creating awareness and getting more people involved.
The red stroller banner was hung at a street party organized by local associations, providing an opportunity for concerned people of Brindisi to meet up, share information, and draw attention to the cause. Watch a video of Passeggino Rosso Brindisi on Youtube.
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