"She was very sad and crying all the time. Now she is very, very happy"
By Umberto Bacchi
ROME, March 24 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A four-year-old migrant girl who arrived in Italy alone from northern Africa is to be reunited with her mother on Monday, months after a stroke of luck allowed authorities to trace the woman, Italian police said.
Police had initially hoped the two could be reunited last Christmas but bureaucracy delayed the reunion, said police inspector Maria Volpe who heads operations involving unaccompanied migrant children arriving in Sicily.
"It has been like giving birth," Volpe told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Friday, referring to the lengthy procedure to sort out the woman's travel papers.
The girl, identified only as Oumoh, was one of 25,000 unaccompanied minors who reached Italy in 2016.
Her mother had taken the girl from their family home in Ivory Coast to save her from female genital mutilation but the two got separated on the way to Europe, police said.
Upon arriving in Tunisia, Oumoh's mother entrusted the child to a friend and headed back home to fetch some belongings.
Before she returned the friend left for Italy with the girl, but the two got also separated before arriving in the country, police said.
The coastguard rescued Oumoh from a rickety boat in the Mediterranean last November and brought her to the southern Italian island of Lampedusa.
Oumoh's identity remained a mystery for a few days until another girl recognised a photo of her while playing with the phone of the head of Lampedusa's reception centre.
Authorities were then able to trace the mother who had returned to Tunisia, where she has remained since, hosted by Catholic charity Caritas Internationalis.
Volpe said the cooperation between Italian, Tunisian and Ivorian authorities took longer than expected to get the 31-year-old woman a new passport, visa and travel documents.
Charity workers persuaded the mother not to try her luck with smugglers as she grew frustrated at the delay.
"She was very sad and crying all the time," added Irene Tuebou of Caritas Tunisia. "(Now) she is very, very happy."
Caritas has covered the travel expenses for the mother, who is due arrive in Palermo on Monday.
A DNA test to confirm the woman's identity will be carried out upon arrival, said Volpe.
So far this year 21,909 migrants have arrived in Italy, up from 14,492 in the same period last year. The number includes 2,293 unaccompanied minors, but lone children as young as Oumoh are a rare sight, said Volpe.
(Reporting by Umberto Bacchi @UmbertoBacchi, Editing by Astrid Zweynert.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)
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