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Image: SEEKING NAHOM

05/07/2019

Alex Holmes has just returned to Scotland after another trip to Calais, where he volunteers at the Catholic Worker House and he updates us in this week's blog on the everyday desperate reality for those he encounters.    


9.25am: La Pass, the medical drop in centre, is still closed. Nebiyou’s ripped hand, heavily bandaged, rests limply in a sling. He spent two weeks in a specialist surgical unit in Lille after badly cutting his hand on razor wire whilst trying to run from the CRS, the French riot police. One finger was sliced in two lengthwise.
 
We wait patiently at the locked door.
 
Awate arrives. He presses his scarf to his lips. There’s blood on his white hoodie and the sleeves of his denim coat. There’s livid raw skin close to his left eye.
 
 “The CRS hit me with an electric baton on my face, head and back,” he explains.
Osman, another Eritrean, joins us outside the door, pink fresh skin on his dark face.
“I’m ok now,” he reassures me.
 
I ask if they’ve seen Nahom, and describe the boy with the broken teeth. They haven’t.
 
9.30am: the sullen security guard unlocks the door. Nebiyou checks in at the desk. Awate slumps into a waiting room chair, leaning forward, head in his hands. Osman has disappeared. We wait in the plastic and chrome silence.
 
Beside the stadium, a group of young Eritreans: amongst them, Mebrahtu, his hand no longer bandaged. The scar on the ball of his thumb, a distant bird in flight, is punctuated by twelve neat stitch marks. A CRS officer had stamped on his hand, which was split open by a buried spike.
 
“It’s the same here as in Eritrea,” he says. “I’d as well be back home.” His smile belies a deep suffering.
 
There’s music, the surprising sound of Nashville in Calais: “One day at a time, sweet Jesus, that's all I'm asking from You, just give me the strength to do every day what I have to do.”
 
“My friend in Holland told me about this song,” Yoel explains. “One day I will get to UK.”
 
Ever-smiling Yoel. It’s two years since I first met him in Calais. With a haircut he looks much younger.

They’ve not seen Nahom. I move on.
 
A solitary hooded figure slowly paces the back road in the shadow of the industrial zone. At last, Nahom. He’s lost in the Orthodox chants, mezmurs, on his phone. Seeing me, he pulls out his earphones and grins broadly, baring his broken teeth. Discharged from hospital after falling from a lorry and losing his front teeth, he had stayed in the Catholic Worker house for a few days before suddenly vanishing.
 
His family home was destroyed in the war with Ethiopia. He spent three years in harsh military conscription before running away to see his family, before escaping to Ethiopia. He showed me burn marks on his feet from when he was held to ransom and tortured in Libya. Finally he reached the UK but his asylum application was refused. Under the Dublin Regulation, he was deported to Italy because he’d been fingerprinted there. Tired and hungry on the streets of Naples, he accepted the offer of bread and water only to pass out, waking to find his jacket and boots stolen.

After a big embrace and checking he is ok, we talk football, and mutual friends now in the UK. I tell him he is welcome in the house anytime.
 
“I will come, yes.”
 
Silent for a moment, perhaps registering my concern, he reassures me, “I am ok because I have God.” We part with another embrace.
 
Earphoned once more, he continues his lone path.


Image: Climate Change is taking hold in Zambia now

28/06/2019

Marian Pallister, vice chair of Justice and Peace Scotland has just returned from Zambia where she heard from school children deeply concerned at the affects climate change is having on their lives now.  Weekly blog.


It’s June and it’s cold – about the only ‘normal’ weather that Zambia has experienced for months. During the day, there’s a little warmth in the sun, but when night falls sharply with a stunning blood red sunset at 6pm, the temperature plummets to four or five degrees.
 
I was in Zambia as founder of the small Argyll charity ZamScotEd (we support the education of Zambian children facing great challenges and initiated a secondary school on the outskirts of Lusaka where there had been no previous provision). However, after chatting with old friends and some of the bright kids at the school, I put my Justice and Peace Scotland hat back on and asked the head teacher, Sr Veronica Nyoni, if I could borrow some of her pupils to record my monthly piece for Radio Alba (www.radioalba.org). The topic had to be climate change.
 
Because while a chilly June, with strong winds swirling the red dust into eyes and hair, is to be expected, the increasing droughts are not – and they are piling on the problems experienced in the poorest communities.
 
Last October’s rains didn’t come. That’s when the maize should be planted, and without rain, it can’t grow. Sadly, the story was the same when I was in Zambia last year – and that means that stocks of maize are running out. The cobs are ground into mealie meal, the corn flour that makes nsima, the fill-up food of Zambia. As shortages become more severe, the price of mealie meal is rocketing. People are going hungry.
 
The youngsters I interviewed for Radio Alba told me that the price had doubled since last year – it was 60 kwacha; now it’s K120. With the legal minimum wage at K800 a month (the current exchange rate is around 16 kwacha to the GB pound), that’s serious.
 
No rains also means that water levels in the Kariba dam, Zambia’s main source of hydro electricity, are so low that the state electricity company is operating a system of ‘outages’ that deny power for up to ten hours every day. While great swathes of Zambians don’t have electricity in their homes, lack of it means no water. You must have power to operate pumps in water tanks and wells.
 
Kids can’t study. Businesses are suffering. Some have solar installations; most can’t afford it. One of the recommendations my super-bright interviewees made was that the Zambian government should work on providing a nation-wide solar power system, and providing it now – a touch of the Greta Thunbergs.
 
Zambia is a peaceful country, but this is enough to cause unrest; enough to make people vulnerable to approaches from traffickers; enough to create a migration crisis. Climate change – imposed on the south by the industrial north – is affecting lives today. Westminster boasts of measures that will take effect by 2050.
 
Too late.
 
As my young Zambian interviewees stressed, we must demand that all governments act now to radically reduce carbon emissions – the drastic consequences of climate change are with them now.
 
NB the picture shows local boys keeping warm round charcoal cinders, jackets on, and a rush to finish homework before the sun sets. Life without electricity & water is a struggle for these Zambian youngsters.


Image: New Directions

21/06/2019

Anne Buhrmann, member of the Scottish Laity Network, reflects on the recent Open House conference on the future of the church in Scotland  in this week's blog.


A church event filled to capacity with engaged lay people, all willing to play their part, is every bishop’s dream. As Open House opened the doors of its June conference, that dream became reality. ‘New Directions’ was sold out to laity seeking to bridge the ‘gap’ we all sense in our current model of Church.
 
Priests are frustrated when the lay don’t ‘step up’. The lay are frustrated because often we don’t know how. Passive, we’ve waited for practical guidance on how to build the co-responsibility of Vatican II.

‘New Directions’ offered such guidance.
 
Facilitated by the Kinharvie Institute, we were first offered the ‘World Café’ technique, a discussion format easily replicable at parish level.  http://www.theworldcafe.com/key-concepts-resources/world-cafe-method. 
 
Asked to move both psychologically and physically towards each other, attendees were invited to ‘go for the dance’, rotating from table to table, telling our stories and allowing ourselves to be inspired by the Holy Spirit in each other.

And the Spirit was clearly at work. A year in the planning, Open House’s chosen questions echoed the ideas at the very heart of Predicate Evangelium, Pope Francis’ soon-to-appear apostolic constitution. Our speakers picked up its core themes.
 
Bishop Leahy of Limerick shared, with admirable humility, his own learning experience of synodality, describing the prayerful process of elected parish delegates labouring in God to create a concrete plan for their diocese. How, though difficult, they had learned in that process to ‘love one another’.
 
Next we were given a new lens on subsidiarity by parishioners from the Galloway diocese. They had prayed their way to a dedicated lay Pastoral Committee with actual decision-making powers. Community discernment meant laity were being trained to lead funerals, and a new hospitality centre offering skills for young people had brought new life.

The third ‘new direction’ focus was Divine Renovation, a theological and pastoral approach developed by Scots Canadian Fr. James Mallon. To begin, a priest/parishioner team from Glasgow described their hopes starting out on the Divine Renovation journey. Then the Leadership Team of South East Edinburgh inspired us with stories of Spirit-filled lay/clergy collaboration as they lived out Divine Renovation’s principles in their Cluster. https://www.divinerenovationuk.org/

After every input we listened to the Spirit, and to each other. How might we apply what we were learning in our home parishes?
 
In the cross pollination of ideas I watched emerge new energy and possibilities, recognising the ‘polyhedron’ model of church Bishop Leahy had described. In it, the hierarchical and prophetic meet, co-equal and co-essential. This was the creativity and collaboration prophesied by Vatican II.

That co-responsibility necessarily means bishops trusting us, like Brendan Leahy, as they learn to share power and authority. My take home message from ’New Directions’ came from a bright-eyed, seasoned priest. ‘You have the church you have due to passivity,’ he asserted, and not too gently. Then, with love, he went on: ‘You were given those rights by God. Don’t let the hierarchy take them away from you.’
 



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