Deolinda Pita traveled to the United Kingdom in the first half of March, where she intended to stay just two weeks. The 65-year-old Madeiran is desperate because she is unable to return to the Region, as the flights are successively canceled due to the limitations imposed by the Regional Government.
“I have been trapped in the United Kingdom for over a month and unable to return to Madeira, with several scheduled flights being successively cancelled”, she tells DIÁRIO, regretting having been “abandoned and ignored by the country”.
Deolinda Pita reveals that she has already contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Covid-19 line, but “they refused to help”. Now, she asks the Regional Government for “urgent help” to return home.
The Madeiran woman is afraid of “ending up living on the street, without money to eat and without shelter” and deeply regrets that the competent authorities have left “a senior citizen to their own luck”.
“I’m desperate. I’m 65, vulnerable and I don’t know what to do. I need to leave London and get to my home in Madeira. I see that there have been repatriation flights, including one from Venezuela and me that is so close, no one helps me, I feel like I’m not Portuguese, without the right to any support from my own state in a time of distress ”, she says.
Deolinda Pita has already tried to return to Madeira through several airlines, but all of them without effect, including, I managed a flight on May 5th through TAP, having also been cancelled.
“I managed to book a flight by TAP to Madeira with a stopover in Porto that was available for the 5th of May. To my surprise, I learned, when entering the reservation management, that the flight was cancelled. I didn’t receive any kind of notification via email or phone ”, she laments.
Bit strange as there were many flights through the last half of March getting people to and from the island, and then she could have got a flight to Lisbon then onto Madeira after that, and this is still possible, although she will have to do the mandatory quarantine.