When Jae first suggested the Kili Climb, I was very ready to agree to joining in – what a treat to be invited to spend twelve days with my lovely daughter and number one grandson Oscar, even if it did mean taking my life in my hands – but I also felt that it was an opportunity to do something more. As I have been a volunteer with Catching Lives for the last year and a half, assisting as a cook, mentor and unofficial legal advisor, it seemed right that we should do something for them. We decided that they should receive half of everything we raise, a quarter should go to the Tanzania Porter School Project Jae wrote about here, and that small charities with which Exodus regularly work in the third world should receive the rest.
Catching Lives works with homeless people. They work with folk to help them get back into accommodation and work: they are not just a soup kitchen. They carry out mental health assessments, help people to register with doctors and dentists, provide showers, laundry facilities, and computers to enable people to apply for jobs and benefits – and much more.
A few people have looked at me askance when I have said that I volunteer there. They say something along the lines “No-one I know has ever been homeless – in my family we all work and look after ourselves”. So I thought it might help people to understand how homelessness can come about, if I told a bit of the stories of a couple of people I have been involved with there:
Alin is Romanian. He is a young man who lived with his mother in a rural area, where there is very little work. He saw an advertisement in his local paper from an agency in the UK for fruit pickers and packers to work in a farm in Kent for the UK minimum wage – currently £6.50 an hour – more than twice as much as he was able to earn in his local area. He applied for work, was accepted and came to the UK to work at a farm just outside Canterbury. He had read that Kent is the Garden of England and had an idealised image of working in the sunshine, living well and earning money to send home to his mother. The reality was somewhat different. He quickly discovered that he was actually much worse off. The agency which recruited him sends about two thousand people each year to the farm in Chartham outside Canterbury. The farm does have fruit trees which need to be picked, but their main business is fruit packing. Enormous lorries arrive there from all over Europe with melons, peaches, grapes and other fruit which have to be unloaded and packed immediately, ready for distribution to supermarkets in the UK. This work involves standing in cold sheds for long periods of time – not quite what Alin had envisaged. What was worse, as far as he was concerned, was that the work was unpredictable. Some weeks he would only be called on to work for one or two days – he rarely got a full week of work. The agency want to have a captive labour force on the farm so that they can spring into action when the lorries arrive – but in between, there is no work to be had.
Alin was accommodated in a caravan in the grounds of the farm. He shared it with five other people and paid £37 a week for the privilege. It was a very old static – possibly one like my family have in Seasalter, which had been retired to the farm in its old age. He was not provided with any bedding: he had to go out and buy himself a sleeping bag. The caravan was cold and the walls ran with condensation. The only heating was metered electricity, and the meter was very hungry indeed. The cooking facilities were in a filthy communal kitchen, which was used by several hundred people and he hated going into it. Alin and many others working with him would walk the four miles into Canterbury regularly to shop for food at Morrisons on the outskirts of the city. It is a very common sight to see foreign workers walking through the country lanes with their carrier bags.
It was over a year before Alin realised that he was in a hopeless position. He was living hand to mouth in miserable conditions. He barely earned enough to eat, after paying for rent and heating. As winter approached, he was getting hardly any work at all, and felt there was no alternative but to walk away from the farm. He had no money at all and lived rough for some time, until someone pointed him in the direction of Catching Lives. He spent some of the winter nights in the rolling night shelter organised by Catching Lives in local church halls, during the worst of the weather, and by the spring he had signed up for Jobseekers Allowance and had been found accommodation in a house which accommodates about twenty men, each in their own small room. He desperately wants to get back to work, but has not found any, despite using his best endeavours. He does not have enough money to return to Romania. He is an optimist and is convinced that he will find work here, but in the meantime, he enjoys volunteering in a local charity shop repairing furniture for resale.
Unlike Alin, Ray is a Canterbury local. He is in his late forties, and has worked as a painter and decorator for more than twenty years. He is married with four children. Last year, his wife began an affair with another man, and threw Ray out. He was absolutely devastated and was too embarrassed to tell anyone what had happened or to ask for help. He decided to live in his car, but became increasingly depressed and failed to turn up on time for work. He became unkempt, didn’t eat regularly and eventually got the sack from his job. It is very fortunate that he was directed to Catching Lives. By that time he was in a miserable state and mentally quite unstable. With help from Catching Lives and proper medication, Ray has been brought back to life. He now has a room in a shared house with three other men. Recently, he was thrilled to be offered what he thought was a painting job on a building site where new student accommodation is being built. He gleefully went into the Jobcentre to tell them that he was soon going to have a job. He worked at the site for two days, but at the end of the second day, was told not to return until he heard from them. He heard nothing and did not get paid for the two days work he had done. He was very shocked a few weeks later when he got letters saying that both his Jobseekers Allowance and Housing Benefit had been stopped. It was the day he expected to collect his money. He called round to the Jobcentre twice that morning, but was told there was nothing they could do. They gave him a phone number to phone, but he had no money and no credit on his phone. Luckily for him, someone from Catching Lives was able to help him that day. A volunteer went back to the Jobcentre with him and insisted on them investigating why his money had been stopped. They said it was because he had a job. The volunteer helped Ray write a statement about what had happened, explaining that he had never been paid, and managed to get his benefits reinstated. On enquiry at the building site, the volunteer was told that Ray had had a “trial” – not a “job”! I wonder how many people do two days work for nothing there for them? Without Catching Lives’ support, Ray would have been back out on the streets again, as a result of his eagerness to work.
Bad employment practices don’t just happen here: they happen on Kilimanjaro too. There are some unscrupulous travel companies, who will take on porters to work for a week for what to us is the price of a cup of posh coffee. People are desperate enough for work to take anything that is offered to them and often they don’t even have walking boots or the necessary warm and waterproof clothing. Their lives can be put at risk: some porters die on the mountain every year.
I hope this goes some way to explain why we have chosen the charities we have, to benefit from the climb. They all do enormously valuable work with vulnerable people, who have frequently been badly exploited through no fault of their own. We are absolutely thrilled to have already raised more than £3250 for the charities and are optimistic that we will have reached our target of £5895 by August – which a wonderful donor has agreed to double. Just imagine: we might raise more than £11,000 to help these small charities. That would really make a difference.