World Radio Day: Sister Azezet tells of Sinai desert hell...

(Vatican Radio) To mark this year’s United Nations World Radio Day which falls on Thursday 13th of February Veronica Scarisbrick shares with you an encounter with a very special person. She’s Eritrean born Comboni Sister Azezet Kidane who today lives in Israel. There she makes it her mission in life to raise international awareness regarding the systematic kidnapping and torture of African refugees crossing the Sinai desert.
This charismatic sister captured her audience at Bethlehem University on the day Veronica Scarisbrick met her as she related chilling accounts of personal stories of those who survived this ordeal. Her soft voice on this occasion deeply touched those present and there seemed to be an agonizing stillness in the air while she spoke and tears welled up in the eyes of many among those listening to her as photographs of some of the tortured victims flashed across the screen she'd set up.
But while the softness and slight tremor in the voice of this woman may have betrayed emotion as Veronica Scarisbrick was soon to discover this was coupled with a steely will to do all in her power to alleviate the suffering of people who have been through so much.
That was when she granted Veronica Scarisbrick an interview and explained in detail how not only does she patiently listen and collect first- hand information from these much ignored modern slaves with her colleagues at 'Physicians for Human Rights Israel' but goes a step further by instilling hope in those who have lost all hope. Acting in a sense as a comforting mother to thousands of men and women who bear both in their minds and bodies the scars of an experience which will haunt the rest of their days. Sister Azezet Kidane's testimony touched Veronica Scarisbrick deeply and she decided to share her brief encounter.
In a special way in the course of the interview Sister Azezet Kidane explained how most of the refugees who attempt the Sinai crossing are Africans who get held for ransom by human traffickers : "In order to get this money amounting to forty or fifty thousand dollars per person ", she says, " these human traffickers torture the refugees and rape the women. It's a big international business. Everybody knows what is happening because these stories are covered by the international media, but nobody does anything about it. I feel it's like going back to the days of slavery when everyone knew about it and nobody did anything about it . This is my pain and my frustration"...
Sister Azezet Kidane said she often travels to the barbed wire fence at the border with Egypt to make contact with these asylum seekers in an effort to save them from their imminent plight. But perhaps she's best known within the African community in Israel where she befriends these refugees helping them on their path to recovery.
As Sister Azezet Kidane mentioned the media has often covered this story. In 2012 she was awarded the United States State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Heroes Award. For the record she's also an active member of the Coordination Commission for pastoral work with migrant workers and asylum seekers of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem . The recent words of Pope Francis : " A Church without nuns is unthinkable", come to mind.
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