9 April 2021
An immigrant worker rises at four in the morning, stuffs newspaper in his boots to keep out snow, and goes to a backbreaking job where he must ignore the names he’s called. A mother demands to know what other children said to her child at the playground; the child refuses because “those words burn my heart”. A refugee who spent 100 days at sea with the hope of breaking old chains laments that “in La Rochelle harbor I broke my dreams”. Another immigrant worker, whose papers have been stolen, works off the books and is treated “like a dog” by churchgoers who “call themselves Christian”.