Bray-sur-Seine (France) (AFP)

An anxiety has hugged Sophie Mangoyo-Malonda for several days. The 70-year-old Congolese woman, who must leave the Bray-sur-Seine refugee center, will gain her autonomy but fears that she will be "totally abandoned" in this town, where the migration issue is agitating the municipal campaign.

In this poor rural commune of 2,300 people on the borders of Seine-et-Marne, Yonne and Aube, a temporary accommodation center (CPH) was installed at the end of 2018 in a three-story three-color building of the city Briolle, to welcome 130 refugees from nine to twelve months each.

A choice of the mayor LREM Emmanuel Marcadet who, aware of the risk of tensions on a breeding ground of the National Rally - Marine Le Pen arrived here at the head of the two presidential towers -, created a "fraternal Lab", structure he directs and which offers the same services to migrants as to the local population.

Arrived in January 2019 in the CPH, Sophie Mangoyo-Malonda thinks that she needs to be integrated into the Lab. "There are people who greet you, others who ignore it. There are racists but, overall, I was very well received," she told AFP during a budget management workshop.

- Paris and "the bush" -

"We started by submarine," recognizes Alexandra Lorion, interim director during the municipal elections. "Because when you bring a foreign population back to rural areas, it creaks a little bit. Mixity begins to take hold, but you have to go slowly."

With this center, attached to the local post office, his team boasts the advantages of rurality. "It is very difficult, for them there is the capital and the bush. They often prefer to go back to the streets in Paris rather than stay here," she underlines.

The project, designed by the France Fraternités association and unique in France, is managed by twenty employees with an annual budget of 1.5 million euros. It offers many services: computer courses, French, CV writing, workshops for children ...

The mixture of populations remains in its infancy, however, after a year of activity.

Like the workshop offered by Gynecology Without Borders (GSF), in which a dozen African women and adolescent girls participated, seated in a "U" shape in an apartment in the city which serves as a room for the "Lab".

"Yet this is not a subject only for refugees," laments Rose Zinguerlet, the only Braytoise present that day.

Thought in particular to bring a listening to women victims of sexual violence on the migratory route, these interventions also benefit the French because "people living in the village and the refugees sometimes have the same problems unfortunately", explains Manon Lobet, volunteer for GSF, referring to domestic violence.

But for the moment, she regrets, the local population "prefers individual interviews" and avoids group workshops.

In Bray-sur-Seine, the outcry of 2016, when the mayor had chosen to welcome some 80 migrants against the advice of residents, has left its mark.

- "Our mayor is badly crossed" -

"There has been no raped girl, no grandmother has been attacked ... But in silence, there is a little music that says + He brought refugees, we will send them away with him +", s strangles mayor Emmanuel Marcadet, sunglasses on his hair.

However, he is "convinced", the Lab, "it's the right formula": "When we are at the bottom of the hole and we see people who are supposed to be more at the bottom of the hole than we are going out, we say to ourselves, maybe I can get out too. It creates electroshock ".

Above all, suggests the councilor, "when the Lab tells you + We can help you too +".

Opposition candidate Alain Carrasco (AGIR), boss of the local driving school, believes that Mr. Marcadet has made refugees "his business". "When people settle in, have an apartment right away with household appliances and everything, it is sure that we hear things not nice," he relayed.

Elisabeth Longé, like many local residents interviewed by AFP, is more direct: "It creates tensions in the city. Our mayor is in trouble, precisely because he has attracted refugees".

Whatever the outcome of the election, welcomes the mayor-director, the renovation of the Briolle city has started. Before the election, Sophie Mangoyo-Malonda will have left the center: she will then have become the eighth refugee to become Braytoise.

© 2020 AFP