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This is just about the only thread I want to post in these days 8-[
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I have no words to add to that.
If you can read all of that and not imagine how you would feel in the same situation, if you cannot find compassion in your heart and still feel that we can’t take any more or they’re only coming here for an easy life, then I can only hope that you are in the vocal minority.
From a friend who has worked in aid organisations.
I’m getting increasingly tired and angry at the comments I see and hear.
I had a disagreement with a friend last night who was of the opinion that many walking through Europe for refuge weren’t refugees but economic migrants because they were in the vast majority men. I told her one of the fírst things I learnt when working with aid organisations.
The first waves of refugees are usually those able to travel with no responsibilities. They are those threatened with immediate physical harm. Those in danger of immediate conscription into a war they have no wish to fight. They are those helped by parents and family to escape. They are those sent ahead to prepare a place. In other words, the early waves are usually men travelling alone or in groups.
We are seeing that early wave now, but where are the women and children? But where are the vast numbers of ordinary families?
Easy.
They’re stuck in the vast refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan and the Lebanon. They’re displaced all over Syria, trying to stay ahead of the barrel bombs and religious fanatics.
They’re frightened to travel incase it hurts their children even more. They’ve used every bit of their resource to get out of Syria. They’ve used what money they have to send a male relative ahead to try to make a place for them – in the hope that they’ll send for them.
It serves no agenda other than prejudice to pass on the nonsense we read in the papers as unassailable ‘fact’.
Learn first, speak later.So that explains why so many refugees that we see are young males. By the time we see women and children it should be telling us that things are getting pretty desperate.
Europe is seen as a place of safety. It is seen as a place beyond the reach of religious fanaticism the like of IS and ISIS. But don’t believe the papers because places like Turkey, Jordan, etc have taken in millions of refugees. People will generally go to the nearest safe place initially, but once there they realise that they’re stuck………with no services, little food, no education, very often no healthcare and certainly no means by which to better themselves.
In the camps there is disease, violence, those same religious fanatics you ran away from. In the camps there is no shelter from the extremes of heat and cold…….you will burn all day and freeze all night. In the camps there are no fruit or vegetables, just an endless diet of bread and wheat and rice. In the camps you will not be able to bathe or wash in any privacy or with ease. Water is at a premium – even drinking water is not always safe.
Tell me. Would you stay there?
Safety is a relative thing.
Beyond immediate safety there is long term safety and that’s what the people trudging through Europe are looking for right now.
As for going somewhere religiously appropriate………what is appropriate when religion has contributed to what killed your community and family?
I really despair sometimes. People allow their opinions to be so defined by the newspapers they read that I can often identify the reading material from the comments made.For those wondering why refugees don’t seek safety closer to home……..even Iraq has taken in nearly 200,000 refugees from Syria despite the fact that IS is killing and marauding within their own borders. Egypt has seen similar numbers. The numbers we see in Europe are a tiny percentage of those seeking safety. People seek safety where they can.
Imagine that you live in Newcastle. The armed forces and police force open fire on the south bank of the Tyne. There is nobody to report this to as they’re all involved in the fighting. There is nobody to protect you. Do you pick up a gun and fight back? No! You look at your partner and your children who are looking at you to know what to do – for safety – and you pack a bag of necessities, lock up your house and run. Behind you a bomb lands on the local school, then the hospital and finally your neighbourhood. You try to flee north but the roads are clogged. You try to travel south by back roads but they’ve been mined, bombed and are patrolled by machine-gun toting people in black. The A19 and the A1 are full of armoured vehicles full of more guns and rockets.
So you go to the coast and give over everything you possess for places on a fishing boat and you head for Holland – after all, they’re neighbours and surely will help you – but when you get there there is too little help to allow you to stay and so you beg, barter and walk your way to the next border, relying on the gifts of bread and water provided by those you pass. But when you cross you’re greeted by armed guards in black who look just like the people you’re running from. How do you trust them? How do you know they won’t hurt you and your family more? And so you travel on over border after border. For you there is no bigger picture, all you see is what’s directly in front of you. But you still have your mobile phone and you see a fb post that says a country two borders away will welcome you. You see posts and comments from friends and family that say that they have arrived and been greeted and treated kindly, and so once more you pick up your bag and your family and travel on.
Why didn’t you stop as soon as you reached ‘safety’? Because you no longer trust exactly what safety is.
Still think they’re ‘migrants’?How many times does this have to be repeated? How dark are the blindfolds we allow ourselves to be wrapped in?
This is for those once again asking why we’re seeing so many men and boys travelling through Europe right now as we contemplate our comfortable beds………
The first waves of refugees in any crisis have always been those most readily able to travel. They are those without responsibilities. They are those escaping torture and conscription into a war they want no part of. They are those sent to safety with the only funds their mothers and fathers can scrape together. They are those sent ahead with all of their family’s funds in the hope they can make a place for the rest of the family and then send for the rest to come to them, to safety. They are those fittest and most able to travel. They are those able to take extreme risks because they have only themselves to care for on that dreadful journey.
That means that they are mostly men, traveling singly or in groups.
We are seeing those first waves right now. Amazing as it seems they are the fortunate few in an ocean of despair.
Where are the ordinary families? They are stuck in the vast refugee camps of Turkey, Jordan and the Lebanon. They are running from barrel bombs and religious fanatics within Syria, trying desperately to stay ahead of the guns and hoping against desperate hope for rescue that never seems to come.
Don’t fall for the easy rhetoric of the newspapers that convey and play on the fears of whole populations of the ‘stranger amongst us’.
In the 2WW Jews were refused asylum on the grounds that they were a deliberate attempt to spy on us or to destabilise our economies. The result was that they died in their millions in Hitler’s camps. In the 70s there were the Vietnamese ‘boat people’ who were supposed to be a wave of communist infiltrators sent to spy on us and to ruin our democracy by bringing communism to Europe. That fear never materialised.
Fear and hatred of refugees is not something new, it is a phenomenon repeated endlessly down the ages, from the middle ages to now, from Jews, Muslims, Bhuddists and Christians of every denomination to whole genders escaping persecution.
Those who feel that the Syrian, Iraqi, African and Afghan refugees desperate for safety now are coming as mere economic migrants and that they are heading only for safety because they do not stop at the first ‘safe’ country – when they cross that first border – are disregarding the 4.5 million people in the countries immediately bordering Syria. These countries are overwhelmed. Conditions in the camps are appalling. There is no such thing as safety there. Food, water, shelter and health care are all in short supply where they are available at all. People burn all day and freeze all night. The countries they are passing through demonstrate with every hour they are within their borders that they are not wanted, that they are not safe. Of course they will carry on – carry on because they no longer trust what safety is. They hear of a promised land where they will be treated like human beings and of course that is where they wish to go. When you run from armed men and the first people you see are more armed men, how easy is it to trust.
Imagine yourself in their position.
It’s not hard to see if you make the effort to look.The questioning of the status of the refugees slogging their weary way over European borders against a tide of hatred and fear continues as I write. I’ve had several conversations this morning which questioned the need of this hopeless tide because “they wear designer labels and carry iPhones” which apparently (obviously!) means they’re wealthy and happy and definitely not in any need of our empathy and help.
Consider the following :
You are a student at a medium sized university in a modern city in Syria. Your mother is a nurse, your father a doctor. Your brother is married to a French citizen and they have several children. You all live together in a nice house.
You enjoy watching Sky TV and spending time at the mall with your friends where you eat burgers and talk happily together.
You follow Facebook and Twitter. You have an instagram account. You write about your life and family and share it with the friends who follow you from all over the world. Your favourite music is American ‘pop’ and you enjoy watching Bollywood movies.
You are happy with your life.
One day you come home to find your mother in tears and your father lying on the sofa with a bloody face but nobody will tell you why. You go to bed fearful and confused.
The next day you wake hearing shouting and you run downstairs to find soldiers with guns in your hallway trying to drag your father outside while your mother screams. You try hard to stop them but they beat him bloody anyway and load him into a truck and drive away. You all huddle together and cry.
For the next few days you try to find out where he’s been taken but you have no luck and soon you get a muttered message through a friend to say that your father is dead.
Your mother is inconsolable and you are all scared and feel helpless but you try to carry on because – after all – there is no other option.
Then you come back from college to find your mother white-faced, with torn clothes, bruises and bloody thighs exposed by the tattered cloth. Your brother tells you she was taken away by those soldiers and a few hours later he found her dumped on the doorstep. She will not speak. As you stand and stare at each other in bewilderment and hurt your neighbour comes to tell you that those same soldiers are coming for you and are just a street away right now with their truck and their guns, picking up other people from their houses as they come, putting bags over their heads, tying their hands and feet and pushing them onto the truck. He thinks that some of the bodies he saw loaded were dead.
Your brother comes to life first with a rush of panicked energy, empties your school bag onto the floor and runs upstairs with it. He comes down seconds later and shoves your passport and papers into your hand, fishes in his pocket for what cash he has (and has the others do the same), hugs you hard and shouts at you to go NOW! And so, with your heart beating in your mouth and a sick feeling in your stomach, you run. You run hard and fast. You run in the shadows. You run with your bag and your papers and the contents of your pockets and you don’t stop running until you land on a foreign shore with your IPhone, your iPod and the Nike shoes and shirt you wore to school this morning.
Now your clothes are filthy and your shoes are worn through and the kind people of that country donate their unwanted clothes and shoes for you – which of course are western labels – and you accept them gratefully, discarding your own.
Now you are a stranger in a strange land, wearing the fancy labels you’ve been given and carrying your phone and music in your pocket. On your phone are all the photographs you have of your family and your home.
Now you are desperate for news of your family and have no more money and an achingly empty stomach. You are sick with fear, worry and hunger.
Are you in need?
Of course you are!
Labels and technology are part of the modern world. These refugees have not fled from a mud hut or a cave. They share the same world we live in.
Labels and technology don’t equal safety!Tonight I met an Eritrean family – a mother in her mid-teens, a baby in arms, a two year old baby girl, her four year old brother and their teenage ‘uncle’ (the brother of their father). Tonight was the first session of play therapy for the two elder children. They should have come with one family member but I was warned not to be surprised if the whole family attended. Why? Because, as the mother told me, they are too afraid not to go everywhere as a family unit incase they are forced to ‘run away’ again and lose each other in the ensuing panic. I gather that this happened many times on their way to Europe and that during one of these dreaded happenings they lost contact with another ‘uncle’ – a ten year old son of the mother’s sister (also dead). When this family started their journey there were eight of them. Two are now dead and one missing. Given the circumstances it’s hardly surprising that they arrived with several packed bags and all together. Fear forces them into permanent preparedness and intimate proximity – the children cried if they could not be close enough to touch a family member because that’s all the security they have.
Although the session I took part in was primarily aimed at the younger children it soon became obvious that the combination of the age of the ‘adults’ and the trauma that all have experienced meant that it was entirely appropriate to treat everyone as a ‘child’ and involve them all.
During the evening – hosted by a small Sikh community – the gradual revelations stunned almost everyone attending. It transpired that the father trod on a landmine and died before they could find help for him – the nearest help was over 100 miles away and the children were there as they bumped their way over dirt tracks by roadbuilder’s truck to a clinic. They saw him bleed and heard him scream and finally watched him die. All they had to remind them was a broken watch and a rubber ‘children in need’ bracelet which the eldest boy wore. The next loss to devastate them was an elder friend of the father. One night, stuck in a town at the end of a dust road, he went out to try to find transport to take them the next step on their bloody journey. They waited three days but he never came back to them. He was carrying their documents and what little money they had. They believe he was arrested by what passed for a police force there and that he was killed for what he carried, but they can’t be sure. The ten year old ‘uncle’ was separated from them in a crush at a bus station and although they searched, again, he’s still missing. They live in hope that he will one day arrive here and be reunited with them.
The mother is thin and moves constantly, her head on a permanent swivel, watching the children, admonishing the uncle when he steps outside of the magic circle of comparative contact and therefore safety. She would not sit for an hour or more, afraid to relax, afraid not to be ready to run. After the elder friend/relative went missing she was raped says the uncle, raped many times in front of the children by men at a border crossing who tore the baby from her arms and threw it out into the dark. Despite everything that had happened the first thing she did was search for – and find – it while the men who had raped her drank and watched and laughed and threatened to to rape and kill them all.
This family were stopped in Europe and corralled into a camp. Luckily they were noticed amongst the hundreds of other traumatised families and brought first to France and then to the UK. They have been granted refugee status but they are all living in one room with a private landlord. The uncle cannot find work because he’s afraid to leave them alone. The mother can’t find work because she’s not able for many reasons to leave the children.
The most constructive thing I think we did all night was to cry with them. Professional ‘distance’ was an impossibility and, honestly, wasn’t what they needed. They needed to know that people knew and cared about them. In this case that involved crying together.
Their ‘neighbours’ are of the considered opinion that they are not refugees at all – that they are here “for an easy life” on benefits. There is no polite term I can use for what I think of these ‘neighbours’.
What more does a person, a baby, a child, a family, have to endure to qualify as a refugee in honest need in the eyes of those who have never trodden the ground these people have had to drag themselves over to arrive at this point……..traumatised, bruised and grieving, here at a place where rape, murder and loss is not considered sufficient to make a person ‘worthy’ or deserving of what safety they can salvage from this immense tragedy?@sceptical guy wrote:
Jen and I have posted pics
But mine is my real pic :P
Bet I’m older than you :P
Nah you don’t trick me into singing that easily [-(
Balls on eyelashes…well that’s one place to keep them :lol:
:-$
