Blog

14/08/2020

2020 LIFE AND DEATH AT THE BORDER

a reflection by Alex Holmes. Weekly blog.

Sunday: a police clearance day. The refugees must decamp early and cluster their tents on temporary ground or risk detention and confiscation of their possessions. Diakon Aaron, a deacon in the Eritrean Orthodox church, greets me. He calls to the only other person up and about, Demsas, to help him clean their camp.

‘We try to keep the place very clean. Gendar (gendarmes) respect us, and we respect them. They are not like CRS.’

Yet another fence has been erected by the Calais authorities, transecting the public footpath beside which the Eritreans camp. But there’s an unlocked gate and we reach the ‘fireplace’, the heart of the camp. The fire embers, sandwiched by two cracked breeze blocks, gently smoulder. The place is immaculately tidy. Beside the fire, a broom of neatly tied leafy branches. Diakon picks up final pieces of orange peel.

It is 8.15am: time to pray.

These days, just half a dozen refugees and two deacons come to Sunday tsolot (prayer). Shoes and hats off, we stand on the green plastic tarp facing east. It’s the feast of St Peter and St Paul.

The soundscape is of lorries speeding northward to the port, and the discordant music of a gull squawk, a magpie’s cackle, the clear-cut clarion of a woodpecker. Above, silent, a plane’s vapour trail. Everything around and above points to movement. But for these guys, who have crossed continents and seas to reach Calais, movement has all but ceased.

A procession of six vehicles arrives, parking 20 metres from where we are praying.

A policewoman takes photographs.. Six armed and Covid-masked Gendarmes emerge from each minibus. One detachment marches towards the Eritrean campsite. The second stands guard beside the vehicles. The truck drives to where the Eritreans have neatly piled their rubbish. Prayer continues. This dark ritual is enacted every two days.

Tsolot ends. A ferry has arrived; the traffic flows south: cars, caravans, campervans. Always lorries. Diakon picks up a plastic flagon of water and blesses us, a handful of water thrown at the face, a second rubbed into the head, and a final pouring into our cupped hands to drink.

We walk back to the ‘fireplace’. I am invited to eat.

At the Eritrean camp in the ‘Jungle’, Mesfin has received sad news of his father’s death in Eritrea. We go to pay our respects, joining a circle of some 20 Eritreans sitting in a circle. With a few words of English and Tigrinya, communication opens. There are smiles and laughter. We are brought orange juice, and coffee. Later, Hagos explains ‘When someone dies we gather and sit with the family, and talk and remember and laugh together.’

A week later, the authorities destroy that camp, ‘home’ to around 100 Eritreans. A relentless hostility towards the displaced person; the exile at the border. Zero tolerance.

In November 2019, Gog Sain, a young Nigerian exile died on a cold night from the fumes of a makeshift heater. The Calais authorities denied his friends the chance to mourn. Heartless. Zero tolerance. Now, the wooden cross marking his grave is split. A rosary swaying in the persistent Calais wind is inscribed ‘Bethlehem’ - another border city; a place of violent deaths. But perhaps also the tiniest glimmer of hope: Bethlehem was also a place of birth. A very particular birth.

07/08/2020

Hopes for a new way of living post Covid-19

Kenneth Sadler Coordinator, St Mary’s Cathedral Justice and Peace Group, Aberdeen, Reflects on the effects of the coronavirus. Weekly blog.

It is hardly a controversial insight to observe that we have experienced an astonishing period of change, disorientation, and disruption in these months of coronavirus pandemic.

The gradual development of Covid-19 from a distant news story to a society-dominating concern for people in Scotland, the UK, Europe, and across the globe has been stunning. When did we last experience such swift and comprehensive change?

The virus spread first in China, then Asia, and beyond to diverse populations. Societies globally were faced with a deadly new threat to life and health. For many nations, such as our own, the lockdown response designed to reduce the intensity of Covid-19 and enable their health services to cope with the emergency led to a disruption of ‘normality’ unprecedented in peacetime.

The constant activity, noise and distraction of modern life, the dismal yet frenetic cycle of working, earning, and consuming, were paused. We breathed fresh, clean air; we heard birdsong in our towns and cities, as if for the first time.

Scottish Catholics with a concern for justice and peace should be encouraged by the way countless people across our society have acted to uphold the common good. The obvious heroism and selfless dedication of health and social care staff stands out, along with that of key workers such as delivery drivers, supermarket staff, postal workers, council staff, infrastructure workers, and so many others. It is heartening that the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a greater appreciation of the men and women who perform the often ‘low status’ roles on which our society depends.

Yet the way most people adapted to the lockdown and the strange new coronavirus reality is noteworthy too: the challenging lockdown regime was observed; those who were furloughed dealt with the sudden loss of their working routine; those whose jobs allowed it became accustomed to working from home; people coped as best they could with the stresses and strains of staying home with the other members of their household, or living alone without the possibility of social interaction with other people; the challenging circumstances encouraging many to reach out and donate their time and resources to help the most vulnerable in our communities.

One of the gifts of the writer G.K. Chesterton was a capacity to recognise the ‘poetry of the commonplace’, to see the romance and beauty inherent in the everyday and the mundane. Perhaps these days of the coronavirus can be a collective ‘Chestertonian’ moment for us all: having been deprived for weeks and months of ‘ordinary’ things we previously took for granted, we can now look on them with renewed appreciation and finally see them correctly as the gifts they are.

In Scotland we are slowly emerging into the new reality that the health emergency has brought about. The radical changes to our lives in response to the threat of Covid-19, so quickly imposed, show that our old way of living is not inevitable after all. Inspired by this, may we work together with people of goodwill for a just and green recovery.

31/07/2020

Violence Against Women

Justice & Peace vice chair Marian Pallister reflects on one of COVID 19’s less expected tragic side effects.

In the ‘old normal’, one in three women experienced some form of violence during their lives. In my former existence as a journalist, I once worked on a research project with a women’s organisation and Glasgow University. My role was to invite women to share their experiences of domestic abuse, which were analysed by the experts and statistics were extrapolated.

That was decades ago, and the figures then were one in three. I had hoped that by 2020, things might have improved, so when a Church of Scotland working party gave that very same statistic, I was disheartened.

And to put the Scottish figure into context, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of the UN’s Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), reported in April of this year that in the previous 12 months, around the world, some 243 million women and girls aged between 15 and 49 had been subjected to sexual or physical violence by an intimate partner.

That was before lockdown. As the lockdown was imposed across the planet, that already shocking figure rocketed. UN Women says that in times of crisis, there is always a rise in domestic violence, and despite the fact that so many women don’t report when they are abused, the figures that have been gathered so far are heart breaking.

For example, according to UN Women, helplines in Singapore and Cyprus have registered a more than 30 per cent increase in calls. In Australia, 40 per cent of workers in this field in New South Wales reported more requests for help with violence. Domestic violence cases in France increased by 30 per cent after their lockdown on March 17. In Argentina, emergency calls for domestic violence increased by 25 per cent since the lockdown there on March 20.

A spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe said “Unfortunately, every country in the region is already all too familiar with the source of interpersonal violence.”

A Scottish Government report issued in June says that the impact and risk of domestic violence during lockdown has been magnified and victims have found it more difficult to separate from a violent partner.

Can we create a ‘new normal’ in which women and girls are not subjected to such violence? And let’s add emotional abuse – equally as devastating as physical and sexual violence.

During lockdown, Pope Francis has urged us to pray that the Lord would give strength to victims of domestic violence, ‘and that our communities can support them together with their families’.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has already asked that all governments make the prevention and redress of violence against women a key part of their national response plans for COVID-19.

I pray that world leaders everywhere listen to Mr Guterres. Women and girls deserve to be safe in their own homes. As he says, ‘Women’s rights and freedoms are essential to strong, resilient societies.’ Violence is learned, and in the ‘new normal’ let’s speak out for victims and start rebuilding the basic structures of a nonviolent society.

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