By Maxwell Nkansah, Alessia Miscischia, Arianna Magno, and Rachel Nicole Smith *
For Kevin Abdallah, it was only the beginning of another battle.Kevin is a Ghanaian from the northern region of Ghana. When armed conflict erupted in his community, he lost his parents. With nowhere safe to turn and faced with the devastating reality of losing his family, he fled his homeland in search of protection, stability, and the possibility of rebuilding his life.
His journey to Europe was neither short nor easy. Kevin spent several years in Libya, working and saving whatever money he could to continue his journey. Life there was marked by uncertainty, hardship, and fear. Yet he continued moving forward, driven by the hope that somewhere beyond the Mediterranean, he would finally find safety.
Eventually, Kevin made the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea and arrived in Italy. He had survived the journey. But survival, he would soon discover, was not the same as finding security.
Upon arrival, Kevin was taken to a reception centre. But the institutional environment became increasingly difficult for him, and he eventually decided to leave and try to build a life independently.
It was during this period that he met Ivana Locco, a lawyer who would become one of the most important people in his struggle to remain in Italy.
Kevin told Ivana about his past, the violence he had experienced, the loss of his parents, his flight from Ghana, and the years of hardship that followed. She agreed to help him navigate the complicated legal process surrounding his asylum claim.
But the journey through Italy’s immigration system exposed another reality faced by many asylum seekers: a bureaucratic maze in which every document, appointment, and decision can determine the course of a person’s life.
For Kevin, the paperwork became almost as exhausting as the journey that brought him to Italy. Appointments could take months to obtain. Procedures were complicated. Documents had to be collected, submitted, checked, and sometimes resubmitted. Delays created new uncertainty, while the possibility of deportation remained a constant source of anxiety.
For someone already carrying the psychological scars of conflict, displacement, and a dangerous migration journey, navigating an unfamiliar administrative system in a foreign language created another formidable obstacle.
The problem was not simply waiting.Every delay had consequences. Without the right documentation, access to employment, accommodation, and other aspects of ordinary life could become more difficult. Every unanswered question and postponed appointment could leave an asylum seeker wondering whether the future they had travelled so far to find was slipping away.
Kevin also had to finance his legal battle from extremely limited resources. Paying for legal assistance placed additional pressure on someone who was already struggling to establish himself in a new country.
Then came the devastating decision: his asylum application was refused. For Kevin, the refusal did not end the story. It triggered another chapter, the appeal process.
Once again, he had to gather documents, wait for procedures, seek legal advice, and continue fighting his case. The process demanded something he had already spent years giving: patience, money, resilience, and hope. And yet he continued.
Kevin’s story is not simply about migration. It is about what happens after a person survives displacement. It raises a difficult question: when someone escapes violence and reaches a country they believe can offer protection, how much additional hardship should they be expected to endure before they can finally feel safe?
Italy’s immigration and asylum procedures exist for important legal reasons, and authorities must carefully examine claims. But for people navigating those procedures, bureaucracy can become overwhelming. A system built around forms, appointments, evidence, and deadlines can feel almost impossible to navigate for someone who has arrived with little money, limited language skills, and the psychological burden of displacement.
Kevin’s experience illustrates the human face behind those administrative procedures.
Behind every application number is a person.
Behind every delayed appointment is someone’s life waiting to move forward.
Behind every rejected application is a human being forced to confront the possibility of returning to uncertainty.
And behind every appeal is the determination of someone who refuses to give up.
*This story was researched and developed as a collaborative project by Maxwell Nkansah, a Ghanaian journalist, together with Alessia Miscischia, Arianna Magno, and Rachel Nicole Smith, students at Roma Business School.
Drawing on their journalistic and academic perspectives, the team sought to look beyond statistics and immigration debates and focus on the individual experience of displacement, the trauma, the uncertainty, the bureaucracy, and, ultimately, the resilience required to keep going.
Kevin Abdallah’s story is therefore more than the story of one asylum seeker.It is a story about what it means to lose everything, cross borders in search of safety, and then confront a system that can make rebuilding a life painfully slow. It is a story of displacement. A story of resilience. And a story about the long, uncertain fight to be heard.
