A low point on the Western heights June 17, 2009
Posted by Jane Matthews in acts of kindness.Tags: asylum seekers, Dover Immigration Removal Centre, Kindness, Refugee Council, Refugee Week, refugees, The Citadel, The Other Hand
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bringing it home: the story of a refugee
And I thought traffic wardens were hard to track down.
One of the things I wanted to know when I started this exercise was whether it would change me: it turns out I’m learning a lot about perseverance.
Let me explain. This week is National Refugee Week and before the news agenda got hijacked by the story about how Belfast has welcomed Romanian families to its streets, the Refugee Council and other groups were running a high profile campaign suggesting we should all do a simple act of kindness for refugees in our area.
Juliet Stevenson has been telling stories to refugees, and MPs, Sky and Guardian staff got involved in a ‘play football with a refugee’ tournament (a title that is everso slightly open to misinterpretation guys…).
I thought I might do the same. Not play football, I mean, but find some way of helping out.
drawing a blank
However, an internet search for refugees and asylum seeker services in Milton Keynes led to one blank web page after another. So I headed to the local library where they keep a list of local clubs and societies.
The librarian was a star, going through all the same online hoops that I’d tried, only with a little more muttering. She tried the phone, and got the sort of runaround I’d assumed her colleagues saved for hapless members of the public: first the ‘it’s not us but we’ll put you through’; then the ‘I’m new here but I’ll see if anyone knows’; and finally, after holding for five minutes, the news that she was going to be put through to somewhere else.
At which point she was cut off.
Slough of despond
That left the directories, but there was now a queue behind me and I really couldn’t see how it would be kind to leave folks waiting any longer. We’d been at it for half an hour and got no further than a number for a refugee support group in Slough. I suppose if you’ve travelled thousands of miles to reach the UK another 70 is neither here nor there.
Back home I tried Milton Keynes Equality Council in vain. I tried the Council of Voluntary Organisations: not a hint of anywhere asylum seekers and refugees might go for help.
They suggested the Well at Willen where there used to be a literacy class for refugees and asylum seekers and that’s where the trail went cold, in the words of the helpful lady who answered the phone “When we ceased to be a dispersal point the services dried up’.
So that was that. For now.
a little more action
You see I’m not giving up on this one. I want to come back to it – a feeling that dates from a walk I took with mother and mother-in- law on the bit of Dover’s white cliffs known as the Western Heights.
The walk started badly when we found the car park was oddly popular with single men – who seemed to find the Heights a peaceful spot for reading Saturday papers in their cars. Close by we came across some old wartime gun emplacements – and several more unaccompanied men.
The light dawned – for me, if not the mothers, who I hastily urged onwards, fearful that we were about to stumble on a rather different sort of action than the one we’d come to reminisce about.
In my haste I led us all the wrong way, through briar and bramble, until the sea view was entirely lost and we found ourselves on the town side of the cliff, prevented from climbing back up by barbed wire and a deep moat.
welcome to Britain
Half a mile and many nettle stings later all became clear. In front of us was a high fence with lookouts and cameras, and behind it the walls of an assessment and repatriation centre for refugees and asylum seekers. One of the bleakest spots I’ve ever been.
This was August and nature was at its lushest, as the scratches on our legs proved. Yet getting up close to the boundary fence was like stepping into a black hole. The air was literally silent. Nothing moved. Even the seagulls had designated it a no-go zone, as if all the pain and hopelessness contained behind those emotionless walls acted as a forcefield, repulsing any sign of normal life.
It shook me to the core to imagine the despair of those inside, having come in search of a refuge, and found the word may also mean fortress.
I don’t intend to go into the rights and wrongs of our immigration policies (though if you want to put a human face to Home Office statistics you might like to get a copy of The Other Hand - one of the most moving and powerful books I’ve read this year). Except to say that while I understand the many ways in which fear overrides positive emotions, for me it boils down to simple humanity. Doing what feels human and right.
Not criminalising people who are guilty only of wanting choice, opportunity, hope, life.
Though I haven’t yet managed to find a refugee to invite to dinner, or assembled a footie team, I have written this blog on National Refugee Week. And am about to direct you to a list of other very manageable suggestions on the campaign website.
Some of the items are as simple as finding out the meaning of ‘refuge’ or learning a few words in another language. If you do any of the simple acts on the list let us know!
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