Kindness in Precarious Spaces

from Issue 77, Advent 2024

A few weeks ago, I was in the Dunkirk camp, where I regularly join Art Refuge* in their work with the medical NGO Doctors for the World. The weekend before, around 1,000 people had crossed the English Channel from northern France in small boats, and four people, including a child, had lost their lives. In Dunkirk, the team informed us that early that morning the police had started ‘le démantèlement’ or the ‘clearing’ of the refugee tents and camp. We didn’t really know how the mood or atmosphere would be. Would there be tensions between the communities? Between the smugglers? Or between individuals?

On the way to the camp, with our caravan of NGO vans and the ambulance, we saw groups of refugees standing on one side of the busy dual carriageway, all looking in the same direction. They were watching, from a distance, as their last dwelling places—tents, campfires, sleeping bags, or anything else they hadn’t been able to take with them—were being removed into small waste vans. It was probably not the first time they had been exposed to this, nor was it the first time I had witnessed it, but even if people are staying in places where they aren’t supposed to be, seeing people’s improvised dwellings or shelters being dismantled and disappear is not easy. Perhaps the refugees were standing there wondering, ‘Under which blanket will I sleep tonight? Will I be able to find a dry place? My good boots were in there,’ and so on. Refugees are often people already struggling with being uprooted. This does not help.

The place where the NGOs set up the distribution was already very busy; more than 800 breakfasts had been given out by the charities. As we tried to set up alongside the others, refugees began coming to the team for medical help. With Art Refuge, we have a very long van at our disposal, with long tables. We tend to use both inside and outside spaces when it isn’t raining. One of the ‘tools’ we use is a very large map of the world, which we lay on the ground, not too far from the van. As soon as I had laid the map (which consists of three large parts) on the ground, refugee men gathered around it. Standing at the edge of the world map makes you stop and look, or, you could say, take a step back and look at where you are.

‘Where is Afghanistan?’ one of the young men asks me. I am sitting on the map in the ocean area,— you don’t want to sit on someone’s country— so I glide my finger towards Afghanistan. His friend asks, ‘Where is the UK?’ I point to that little island off the coast of Europe, more towards the middle of the map. With their fingers and mine, we start retracing the route they took to Dunkirk: Afghanistan, Iran, Tehran, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and France. On our very large world map, the distance between Dunkirk and London is about only an inch and a half.

They have travelled a long way, these young lads. They have seen different worlds and are now in a wet, cold tent camp in the dunes of northern France. Several had journeyed for a year, three years, or even longer. Only a handful had been ‘on route’ for a few months. The map and some of the other materials we use make people ‘time travel,’ as my colleague Miriam Usiskin likes to call it. In their minds, people travel back to where they came from (often home), they look at where they are going, and at where they are now. I think the map helps put things in perspective—what they have been through. All the materials and the setup we use have been selected over many years and have their ‘art-therapeutic’ significance, but that is for the art therapists to explain, not me.

Now, a young South Sudanese Christian and his friends show me proudly where they are from: South Sudan (although he mentions he was born in Khartoum). The group of young men were all around 15 or 16 when they left South Sudan for Sudan, through the desert to Libya, to Tunisia, being pushed back from Tunisia into the Libyan desert, being pushed back to Tunisia, and back to Libya again. Finally, crossing the dangerous journey on the sea to Lampedusa, then onto mainland Italy, and now, last week, Dunkirk, France. Their English was good, from their school days. I began to understand that it had been a long journey; they had been on the road for six years! They had a smile on their faces, like most young people in the world. Tunisia was ‘difficult,’ Libya ‘difficult,’ ‘very difficult.’

My colleague, Bobby Lloyd, had brought me some coloured tape, and we plotted out on the map the route these five or six young men had taken. A young man from Kurdish Iraq started mapping out his route and explaining where he came from, which route he took, and why he had left Kurdistan (bombings by the Turkish army). He came by the Serbian route. He was not alone—others from Kurdish Iran and some Afghans had come through Serbia and Eastern Europe. Even some Ethiopians had come through the Belarusian-Polish border, where they were hit and pushed back over the border by the Polish border force. Some had tried to cross the border nearby in Lithuania—but that was too bad. Not only did they get hit, but some said refugees were tortured there—their fingernails were pulled out.

The map began to fill up with all different colours of tape, representing the routes our young men had taken and the stories they were sharing. One of the Ethiopian young men said to his friend, ‘Your Vietnamese friend, where did he come from?’ and I quickly showed them Vietnam on the map. ‘So far!’ ‘Yes, it is,’ I said. So much further than they had already come. That day, we only saw one Vietnamese refugee, but Dunkirk has, for a long time, had Vietnamese refugees passing through.

Sometimes people stand there silently, or tell each other—and us—parts of their stories. And of course, they look at the one-and-a-half-inch distance between Dunkirk and London. People from different continents even listen to each other’s stories. Others help translate. It gives people a different perspective, with everything they have been through, and all the hopes or hopelessness they carry with them.

Maybe plotting the routes on the map also ‘roots’ people in a certain way? But like my colleague Miriam Usiskin remarked in our debriefing after the work in the camp: ‘Kindness’—there was kindness around. Even if we were in a more-than-precarious place, in a very difficult camp, when these young men gather around the map, or the young men, women, and children gather around our community table that we had set up, there was a certain kindness, hope, and even joy. And that made me think of the Gospel reading of Emmaus, which recounts the journey of two disciples on the road to Emmaus, unaware that they are accompanied by the resurrected Jesus. Both the disciples and the refugees are on a journey, burdened with uncertainty and loss, yet yearning for hope and safety.

For refugees, their journey often feels like an endless walk, a dangerous walk to Emmaus, filled with despair and uncertainty. But sometimes, where people meet and share their hope, kindness can be born. And from that hope and kindness, healing and a sort of resurrection can come.

In someone's journey, our mutual acts of kindness can be the beginning of something much greater. Maybe standing here today doesn’t immediately change the dreadful reality or our UK and European policies—but our simple acts of kindness might save or change a person’s life.

*On a monthly basis, I try to join the Northern France team of Art Refuge in Dunkirk and Calais. The team is led by Bobby Lloyd, visual artist and art therapist, and Miriam Usiskin, art therapist and Senior Lecturer at Hertfordshire University, MA Art Psychotherapy.

Art Refuge uses art and art therapy to support the mental health and well-being of people displaced due to conflict, persecution, poverty, and climate emergency, in the UK and internationally. More info at www.artrefuge.org.uk.

Muggings

Peter Maurin’s Easy Essay on St. Francis, printed in this year’s Summer LCW newsletter, refers to Johannes Jorgensen writing that ‘St. Francis desired that men should give up superfluous possessions.’ Similar words are constantly on my mind as I go about my daily business in London. I am typical of the guilt-ridden middle classes, all too aware of our good fortunes, born in the right generation at the right time. 1941 might seem an unlikely year, but I was fortunate enough to be geographically and socially placed to escape the worst events and their aftereffects. I am daily grateful for how things have worked out for me in the eighty years since.

A daily preoccupation of mine is how to give to the poor without becoming complacent, conceited, or indifferent. Living in London over the past 18 years, I’ve become increasingly aware that dropping £1 into a beggar’s plastic cup might be repeated ten times within half an hour, which is a shocking indictment of the steady deterioration in life for some people in my city. So, like most of my friends, I now restrict my offering to one a day and focus on the small, organised charities that have sprung up in recent years to reach wider groups of marginalised people. But I’ve been ‘softly’ mugged (meaning no threats, weapons, or violence were involved) at least twice.

On the first occasion, I was withdrawing money from a cash machine when a man tapped me on the shoulder, distracting me momentarily. He then snatched my card and ran off. I immediately rang my bank to stop the card, but the thief, having memorised my PIN number, had already stopped at another cash machine a few yards away and withdrawn £200.

 An off-duty policeman had witnessed the entire incident and insisted on taking me to the local police station to report it. When I later commented, ‘What a sad way to lead a life,’ the policeman gave me a look of sheer disbelief. He had no time for ‘that sort of scum who need locking up.’ The loss was later covered by my friendly, helpful bank, so I was completely unharmed.

Then, the other day, I was walking along an unfamiliar street when a distraught woman rushed up to me and insisted that she wasn’t asking for money, but could I please exchange some cash for a ten-pound note? She claimed the hostel she needed for the night refused to accept cash. Though this explanation seemed odd to me, I wanted to be helpful. Looking into my bag, I did indeed have a ten-pound note, which I gave her. She began pouring the coins into my hand but suddenly switched to pouring them into my handbag.

I walked away, feeling smug (as I tend to after thinking I’ve been helpful), and decided to check the coins. Somehow, by sleight of hand, she had given me only £2. Over the next few hours, I cursed myself for my own stupidity. I warned other people, some of whom said this was an old trick, while others advised, ‘Call the police.’ Nonetheless, I decided to return two days later, and there she was—same place, approaching passers-by with a handful of coins, same patter. I went up to her and introduced myself, whereupon she beamed and said, ‘Thank you, darling,’ and attempted to kiss me on the cheek. I stepped back and said, ‘You short-changed me.’

‘Oh dear, did I darling? Let me repay you,’ she cheerily replied.

‘No, I wouldn’t dream of taking it, but I think you need to get your life sorted out,’ I sternly told her, at which point she turned her back and walked off. Which is what I should have done as soon as she approached me. But, as I said, the urge to be helpful is in the DNA of most of us. That ten-pound note, in any case, represented ten days of not dropping a coin into a plastic cup, so in that sense, it was superfluous to me.

The need to live on one’s wits has been around since the beginning of society, and before the Welfare State, it was probably the modus vivendi for many. But this incident has made me wonder how many of us, in fact, graft from others perceived as far stronger than ourselves. I admit, I enjoy taking home souvenir table napkins and sugar packets if ever I’m invited to posh places to eat (increasingly rare these days, sadly). The recent scandal about our Prime Minister’s wife accepting expensive clothes from a wealthy donor makes me wonder about the whole business of taking from others. I wonder why the acceptance of something we cannot get for ourselves is seen as self-enhancing.

The young man involved in my first mugging was, according to the policeman who kindly helped me, part of a large gang operating all over London for a gangmaster. Some months later, most of them were jailed for 18 months to 4 years. The cost to the state would have been hundreds of thousands, and I wonder whether these desperate men benefited from prison. The second mugging involved a very desperate woman, and it has left me wondering whether I owe her any further obligation. She is clearly in deep trouble, and I know of several places where she might turn for constructive help—should she want it. Equally, I have to recognize that she is a self-determining human, clever and skilled in her strategies to survive in a difficult life.

My social work days are well and truly over, and I am now at the stage of trying to shed as many superfluous belongings as I can bear to part with. In the process, I am discovering that much of my stuff holds deep sentimental value, so my drawers and bookshelves remain stuffed, though no longer over-stuffed. I have to restrain myself from buying things that look lovely in the shop (charity shops, these days). In pondering these things, I discover—not without a wry smile—that I am facing my own deep flaws: greed and covetousness. It’s an interesting revelation. While I am no longer of the self-flagellation mindset, at times it remains irresistible, and I conclude: ‘Must try harder.’

I wonder what St. Francis would say?

Advent Reflection

The Second Sunday of Advent adds a new word, a message about man’s authenticity. Someone who encounters the Ultimate, who knows about the end, must let go of every compromise. In the presence of the Ultimate the only thing that survives is what is authentic. All compromise shatters there. All cheap negotiating shatters there. All half-truths, and all double-meanings, and all masks, and all poses shatter there. The only thing that stands the test is what is authentic. It has evolved into what it was intended to become. Reality is ordered according to the authentic and healthy, to that which is true in being, and true in words, and true in deeds. Try removing from our lives—from our presence—everything that is inauthentic in being. Remove all cramps, all poses, all arrogance and hubris, and all human rebelliousness. How much of our lives disappears with these things? How much space would be freed up—and for what purpose? Really, for man, for God, and for life itself—think how much room would become free for life that is suffocating now! Now take from our lives all that is inauthentic in our speech. Take the lies away. How different relationships would be, if no one needed to figure on the other person speaking with a double meaning, or guardedly, or camouflaged—let alone deliberately lying! If a word were a word again, and a sentence were a sentence again, and a fact counted as a fact, how very different life would be!

In the Gospel for the Second Sunday of Advent, the figure of John the Baptist appears. Our Lord says of him: ‘What did you go out into the desert to see? A reed driven to and fro by the wind? Or what did you go out to see? A man in soft clothing? Look, those wearing soft clothing are in the palaces of kings. Or why did you go out? What did you want to see? A prophet? Yes, I say to you, and more than a prophet. This is the one of whom it is written, ‘See, I send My messenger before You to prepare the way for You’ ’ (Mt 11:7-10). This figure of John stands before us, solitary, austere, and weathered by the storms and lonelinesses of the desert and weathered by the storms and lonelinesses of the prison—but authentic.

The figure of John demonstrates two laws about authentic people and shatters two dangers to which man’s authenticity generally succumbs. He shatters two situations in which an authentic man so very often suffocates and drowns. The first law and the first danger: the prophet stands before the king. And the first point: do not permit regard for private security or personal existence to make you into an inauthentic person. So very often throughout history, whenever prophet and king have encountered one another, the king is always in the superior position. What is easier, what is simpler, than to muzzle a prophet! Yet, indeed, hasn’t it been—not the voices of those who went into the palaces and were welcome there—but rather the voices calling in the wilderness who filled the cosmos, who prepared the way, who directed people toward Advent, and who arranged for the proper meeting with the end and the Ultimate?

Prophet and king! The prophet must have known that the king’s power and force and majesty would fall upon him and crush him if he said, ‘Non licit: That is wrong because it is inauthentic and is not in accordance with the divine order.’ And John said it, and he was crushed, and he was brutalised, and—for all time and eternity—he stands as the witness within history, as the witness before the face of the Lord, as authenticity itself. And he was right!

Along with that are the second law and the second danger. Futility or ineffectiveness do not dispense one from speaking the truth, declaring what is wrong, and standing up for what is right and just. How could this prophet think he could interfere in the family history and family scandals of the king, and be successful? Whoever considers success, or makes his decisions or attitudes dependent upon whether something is futile or certain of success, is already corrupt. Then authenticity no longer means his personal encounter with what is real; it is rather his personal dependence upon success, upon being heard, on popularity and applause, and on the roar of the great throngs. He is already corrupt. And woe, if the prophets are mute out of fear that their word might not be heeded.

You must let people notice that you know about the end and have grasped that one of the essential features of life is called Advent. And that means encounter with an Ultimate and Absolute. And that means being impressed, being forged in this loneliness with the Absolute, and therefore, whenever it is time to give testimony, being untouched and untouchable when faced with compromise, half-measures, silence, anxiety, or cowardice. May God grant that we have people, that we have prophets, who unseal the actual meaning of Advent to us, and who are authentic, and who offer an authentic witness!