Stew and I spent a day recently with an interesting bunch of people on a walk between Shepherdswell, an old mining village in East Kent, and Canterbury. It was a practice walk for the people who are organising the Refugee Tales, which I blogged about way back on 22nd March. They have come up with the great idea of re-enacting something along the lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but with a modern day twist. The walk will start in Dover and end in Crawley, taking nine days. It starts on Saturday 13th June, so takes in two weekends. It is possible to sign up just for the odd day, so I have signed up for the first four days, as I will be able to get home to my own bed at the end of each day. However, arrangements have been made for those doing the whole thing, with church halls to sleep in, food provided and luggage being carried. Among those walking are musicians to entertain and also experts on wildlife. There was an amazing such expert on the practice walk. Every so often he would ask us to stand quietly and listen. He could identify every bird we heard: a wren, a woodpecker, a blackcap and “an excited chaffinch” as well as many others.
At the end of each day there will be a free performance, which will include some “Tales” by some quite famous authors such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Chris Cleave, Marina Lewycka and several more. These will include the Detainee’s Tale, the Unaccompanied Minor’s Tale, the Lorry Driver’s Tale etc – reflecting the stories of modern day refugees and detainees. You can find out more about the walk here.
I owe my existence to voluntary groups working with refugees, such as those who are organising the Refugee Tales. My mother was Jewish, born in Germany in 1925. In one night – the Kristallnacht – when she was thirteen, thousands of synagogues, Jewish shops and businesses were destroyed by Nazi troops and their supporters. Jewish people were terrorised and 30,000 Jewish men were seized. Ahead lay concentration camps, torture, slave labour and death. Jewish parents were desperate to get their children to safety. Kindertransport, the Refugee Children Movement, was a rescue mission set up by volunteers in the UK to assist in bringing children out of Nazi occupied Europe to British foster homes, hostels and farms. My mother was lucky enough to be one of the 10,000 children who fled to this country on the Kindertransport trains between 1938 and 1939. It has been estimated that nearly one and a half million children died in the Holocaust: she was indeed one of the lucky ones.
When my thirteen year old mother arrived in London she was fostered by a family there who came to love her. They had two teenage sons, one of whom a few years ago told my sister Leslie (who has written a detailed memoir all about this) that their house became a much happier place, when my mother moved in. Although some of her close family did subsequently manage to escape to the UK, my mother remained living with her much loved foster family for the remainder of her childhood. Had it not been for such families, who took children in out of the goodness of their hearts and amazing volunteers who paid for and arranged for the trains, I would never have been born.
There are many people in this country who are unsympathetic towards refugees. They seem to think that they should be sent ‘home’. What they don’t seem to realise is that large groups of people never leave their homes unless forced to do so by war, famine, persecution or natural disaster. They don’t have a choice in it, if, like my mother, they want to survive.
This was brought home to me by one of the women I met on the recent walk from Shepherdswell. She had climbed up Kilimanjaro some years ago, so I was very keen to hear about her experience. She told me about two young girls – perhaps about sixteen – who had signed up as porters to carry luggage and equipment up the mountain. She told me that they had walked hundreds of miles in the hope of getting such work, and there they were in flip flops and bare legs carrying enormous burdens up a mountain in the snow. I am quite certain these girls must have been fleeing from some man made or natural disaster. I understand that still there are dozens of people standing at the gates of the Kilimanjaro National Park begging to be taken on as porters and many of them have probably fled their homelands because of humanitarian disasters.
Exodus, who are supporting the 3GKiliClimb, only use properly trained and equipped guides and porters – but they also raise money for local charities, which help to give people the skills they need to get such work. A quarter of the money we are raising by our walk up Kilimanjaro will be going to the Tanzania Porter Education Project which Jae wrote about yesterday. I can’t do much to help the many millions of people who have no choice but to flee their homes every year, whether on foot or crowded into a boat, but I hope that a few of them will be helped by your very generous donations – both through TPEP, and through the other projects we are all supporting.