Ted: Welcome back to another episode of Babbel News – English Only.

I’m Ted, English expert here at Babbel. As usual, I’ll introduce you to the news story and go over the key vocabulary you should listen for while listening to the clip.

We’ve got one story for you today – sourced directly from Reuters – that tells how the Canary Islands are not properly registering migrants’ ages, resulting in children being sent to relocation centers for adults.

So, wherever you’re listening from – at home or on the go – let’s get started!

Ok, time to take a closer look at the important words and phrases from the story. We’ll start with the adjective “treacherous”, which means very dangerous, especially because of bad weather conditions. After that, there’s “to betray”, which means to break someone’s trust and hurt them by, for example, lying or by not keeping a promise. And the verb “to class somebody as something” means to consider a person part of a certain group. Next, we have “to fend for oneself”, or to take care of yourself, without support from anyone else. Following that, there’s “a minor”, or someone who is not an adult. When something is “costly”, it is expensive. The next word is “overwhelmed”. In the context of the story, if someone or something is overwhelmed, it means that the current situation is too much to handle. Next, “to blame” someone is to say or think that they did something wrong and that their actions caused something bad to happen. And finally, the idiom “to wash one’s hands of something” means to refuse to accept responsibility for that thing. Imagine getting your hands dirty and washing them in the sink to make them clean again.
 
All right, let’s play the news clip.

Reuters: Fifteen-year-old Guinean Moussa Camara is one of a record 32,000 migrants who have arrived in the Canary Islands this year via a treacherous journey by sea from Africa. But when he finally arrived, famished and exhausted, he and a friend were sent to an old military base, having been registered by police as adults, and given the same date of birth.

“At the center that sent us here, we said we were 15 years old, but it wasn't written there, they took us as if we were adults. But we are children first, we are children, but they sent us here. They brought our papers, they betrayed us.”

Being classed as an adult means instead of receiving extra support to find residency and education until age 18, he will be required to fend for himself almost immediately.

Global rights organization Amnesty International said in a report this month that 12 out of 29 migrants it interviewed at adult centers in the Canaries were actually minors. But to prove their age requires a costly bone test which can take months.

Canary Islands President Fernando Clavijo told Reuters the mix-up shows just how overwhelmed the Spanish archipelago finds itself, blaming police for processing errors as about 100 minors a day poured in. And, he says, Spain's national government is washing its hands of the issue, having only offered to relocate 347 minors to other regions until December.

“They have left us with 4,700 minors, with NGOs and resources saturated, with difficulties because the screening of who is a minor and who is not a minor is not being done, it is taking at least three, four months, and you have adults in centers for minors and minors in centers for adults, so we have this difficulty.”

The Ministries of the Interior and Migration directed questions to the public prosecutor's office. It told Reuters it had looked into 48 cases of suspected minors at Tenerife's adult migrants' center, of which four were confirmed, 30 sent to a children's facility pending age tests, and the other 14 still in assessment.

Ted: And that’s all for now! How did it go? Are there still some words or information you feel like you didn’t quite get?

Listening to the episode twice, the first time without and the second time with the transcript, can be a good strategy to both test and improve your listening skills. You can find the transcript by following the link in the episode description. There’s also always the additional option of replaying the audio at a slower pace.

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Anyway, thanks for tuning in today. See you back here for next week’s episode. Bye!