There are many Italian tourists who would have bought the ticket for the repatriation flight announced by the Farnesina last May 1 for this Saturday, May 9, departing from Mombasa and arriving at Fiumicino.
There are certainly not 500 as waved by certain press and untruthful appeals in the media, but certainly between those who have real health problems and those who have other legitimate and sacrosanct reasons to hope to return home to Italy as soon as possible, the 190 or so seats of Alitalia's Boeing 777 300er would certainly have been filled.
For all of them and also for those who will be queuing up, there will now be another week of passion that, if probably will not create more discomfort than what has already happened (and we are not at war, we want to remember it as well as it is right to remember that the County of Kilifi, from which 90% of the repatriation applicants will leave, has not had for more than 40 days a single case of coronavirus) will certainly raise the bar of stress and discontent against this Government and its Foreign Ministry.
In recent weeks there have been overlapping parliamentary questions, more or less "politically correct" requests, testimonies of difficult situations but also mystifications of realities very different from those made to appear, often thanks to the misleading and "calderonic" power of the socialists.
There was also an international appeal with six or seven (but how, the other 493?) signatories from Kenya: "We clamor to return to Italy. To be able to do so in safety. All and all. Feeling protected by a state that thinks of protecting us. With flights at regular, normal prices," says their communiqué. Nothing absurd, we agree.
It is worth remembering that some of our fellow countrymen who have long since finished a holiday (blessed are they, they say, many, especially in the Italian regions where they counted more coffins than starfish on the beach of Watamu), for various reasons have not been able to return in time or have wanted to extend until the last minute their well-being, going further, often in the hope of optimizing between time and money.
Beyond the national sport of "shooting at the Government" on duty, and the guilty lack of timely and reassuring communication from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in view of the second return flight, everything possible has been done to repatriate our countrymen this Saturday at affordable prices with the national airline as many had hoped.
Working closely with them, we know that the efforts of our representatives of the institutions in Kenya, who have dedicated themselves day and night to this emergency, have been immense but as perhaps not everyone has understood, the final OK for a return flight is not up to them.
It is useless to cry over spilt coconut milk, by now the situation is this and we hope that the inconvenience between Farnesina and Alitalia, which seems to be the cause of the postponement to next May 17, is really the last scene of an unpublished and unexpected feature film, the one in which the famous expression "The end" appears.