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.