This is an extract from interviews with a Karen refugee family from Burma, who came to Sheffield from a refugee camp in Thailand, as featured in the documentary film Moving to Mars.

The Say family arrived in the Darnall area of Sheffield in November 2007 and have never moved from this property. They did not have very good luck with their children; two of them died in the refugee camps and after a few months of being in the UK they got the news that their grandson, who was two years old, had died in the refugee camp. The family had experienced fighting many times, even though they were in a Thai refugee camp. None of them speak English.

Mrs Say: “When we arrived in Sheffield I was so afraid to cross the road in this big city. I did not want to go out or let my daughter to go out either, I’m really scared of being lost.”

Mr Say: “I have now learned English for two years already but it is too difficult for me. My wife and I never went to school in Burma. I learn and I forget it the next day.
I want to work but I cannot get any jobs. I hope the UK government will create non English-speaking jobs for our fellow Karen who do not speak English like me.”

Mrs Say: “I like the UK life, I do not need to pack my emergency bag any more. We are now free from the Burmese and Thai Soldiers torturing. I was scared to death when [my husband] told me about the Thai soldiers beating some of the men in the Karen refugee camp, because they went to look for vegetables in the Thai farmers’ farms.”

Mrs Say: “When we were in the camp, one night the Thai soldiers played with fireworks. We did not know that they were playing with them, we thought the Burmese soldiers were shooting into our camp. Then we grabbed our emergency basket and went to hide in the jungle. I thought that problem had stopped, but after 15 months of living in this property the troubles began. First, they threw stones at our window, pulled out our dustbin and poured out all the litter in front of our house.”

Mr Say: “I was peeking through the window and I saw many young people walking on the road. They tried to set fire to our dustbin but the fire did not start. The next day we went to collect all the litter and put it back in the bin, that night my brother-in-law who is English and my sister visited me from London. I asked him for help. I thought he might call the police, but he told me that if I called the police, the gang will do it more later. As none of us speak English he said we’d better keep it quiet.

The daughter: “I know one of them, he lives at the back of our back garden. He walks into our garden lots of times. Even though we close the garden door he still walks into it because we do not have the key for our gates.
I never play in my garden any more, I’m so scared of him. When we were in London, we were told that in this country some people try to catch children and sell them to other countries. Now I only play with my friends in my house.

The Doh family came to Sheffield two years ago from a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand. The couple has four kids. When they were in Thailand they were never allowed to leave the camp, which was guarded by the Thai border military army. The family is settled in Firth Park.

Mrs. Doh: “I like my neighbours a lot. They never give our family any problems. My children are very noisy, like the way children are, but they never complain about us. On Eid day they even brought us their food for my family.”

Mr. Doh: “We live in this property nearly two years. We do not get any dirty looks from any one. My house is in the middle, and both of them are very kind. Sometimes when I did not have time to pull out my bin they did it for me and when I see they did not take out theirs I did the same to them as well.
The other two neighbors are single. They see my kids play outside their house but never say anything.
I sometimes come home very late in the evening, I am not afraid of anything – ‘Fear will have to call me King’.” (Their own expression.)

The second daughter: “Daddy, did you remember when we first moved in, they brought us some toys, plates, spoons and their clothes?”

The little boy: “They were too big, they fit you but none of their clothes fit me.”

The elder daughter: “Mum cooked for that Aunty’s birthday meal last year. She likes my mum’s cooking.”

Mrs. Doh: “I do not want to move out from here. I know my neighbors and it’s very easy for me to get all my food from the Pakistanis shops, we can get everything from the shops.”

A new series starts on BBC4 on Wednesday (February 10th, 9pm) chronicling the lives of youngsters in an Arab school. Directed by Sarah Hamilton, who recently made a DVD about City of Sanctuary, it focuses on four schools in the Syrian city of Damascus.

Sarah says she was given unique access to film the youngsters over the course of a year to explore what it’s like to grow up in the heart of the Arab world. “Using the prism of school life,” she says, “the series takes us beyond politics and media cliches to the stories of ordinary people.”

These include boys who dream of playing for Manchester United, girls who write poetry, and refugees who tell their stories through rap.

What does the word “home” mean to you?

“Home is not just four walls or the country we were born in.
It is not a locked door, an investment, a legal address,
or a nation with rigid borders. Home is where the heart is:
a yearning for a precious past, a dream of something that has never been, or a present reality. Home is in relationship – with our
families, in community, and with the whole of creation.
The qualities of home are reflected in the circle (O),
an ancient symbol for safety, equality, inclusiveness, and eternity.
But we will never be at home unless we are at home to ourselves.
Home is where we all want to be.”

This is from my recently published book, The O of Home. There is, of course, a great deal about borders and belonging – and displacement and detention – as well as a mention of City of Sanctuary. I’m doing a number of events, including today at Eastside Books, Brick Lane, East London. The format is one that might work elsewhere: a panel of refugees and,in this case, migrants, discussing what home means to them. I’m happy to facilitate such events elsewhere, if fares are paid. See the website for details of more UK events etc.

I hope you will feel able to circulate details of the book. I am happy to send flyers to display, if requested.

www.o-of-home.co.uk

www.o-books.com

Jennifer Kavanagh,
London City of Sanctuary

A reflection for the Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony in Sheffield, 27th January

Last year I was at a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the Kindertransport, a voluntary effort that rescued thousands of Jewish children from the Holocaust by offering them sanctuary in the homes of British people.

For me it was an overwhelming experience to meet so many elderly people, some of them still with German accents, who had come to Britain as small children, saved from the concentration camps by ordinary British people.

Several of the survivors on that day spoke about their sorrow at having to leave their parents behind, because the British government had refused to accept them, so most of them were murdered. Because at that time there was no international agreement to offer protection to people in need of sanctuary, and no country would offer to take them in.

The United Nations Refugee Convention was created in 1951, to make sure that the world would never shut its doors again. The Refugee Convention gave people facing persecution the legal right to claim sanctuary in a safe country. It is part of the legacy of hope from the Holocaust and it is a precious achievement.

But the right to sanctuary is now under threat. Over the last decade in this country people seeking sanctuary have been scapegoated and demonised. Our newspapers have stirred up hatred and resentment against them. Our politicians have created laws specifically to target them, so that people seeking sanctuary are routinely made destitute without the right to work, refused health care, arrested at dawn and detained indefinitely without charge, including over 1000 children held in British detention centres every year.

I’ve just been reading ‘The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations’, which is a ‘business’ book that contains some interesting lessons for the City of Sanctuary movement. The basic argument is that decentralised, non-hierarchical and non-bureaucratic organisations (‘starfish’) can have significant advantages over traditional institutional forms, in which power and resources are concentrated at the centre of the organisation (‘spiders’).

City of Sanctuary immediately struck me as a clear example of a ‘starfish’ model, which includes the following features:

It is decentralised – each local City of Sanctuary group is independent and free to make its own decisions, plan its own activities, and have control over its own resources. Groups are mutually accountable, so that key decisions affecting the whole movement are made by local group representatives at national network meetings, rather than a separate managing body.

It is based on a shared vision – City of Sanctuary groups share a vision of building and celebrating a culture of hospitality for people seeking sanctuary. It is this shared vision and ethos (summed up in our core principles) that gives the movement its identity, rather than a legal or administrative structure.

It is flexible and adaptive – there is no single, centrally administered ‘plan’ for the City of Sanctuary movement as a whole. Instead, each group is free to experiment, to develop new ideas, and to explore new directions. This means that the movement is in constant ‘research & development’, and can respond quickly to changing circumstances or opportunities.

The term “Asylum Seeker” should be dropped. Don’t use it. It is better to recognise instead that there are people seeking or taking Sanctuary. There is an urgent need for a new and alternative vocabulary in the whole Immigration debate which will again become a hot topic in the weeks leading up to the General Election.

The term asylum has a historical use and connotation. It has been used to refer to institutions giving shelter and support to people suffering from mental illness who were considered to be a threat to society. Such places, where people were placed and forgotten about, belong to a bygone era. Such a use of the term is discontinued. It smacks of degradation and indignity. Why use such a term to refer to people desperate for the protection of their lives?

“Asylum Seeker” is a term that has come to be synonymous with economic or illegal immigrants, benefit cheats and criminality, rather than as referring to people seeking safety from persecution and torture.

I welcome the report by The Independent Asylum Commission [March 2008] which uses the term “those seeking sanctuary” to refer to those fleeing persecution and looking for protection.

The law should safeguard human rights and provide protection for the most vulnerable. Alongside the law, there is a moral and spiritual obligation on us all to provide sanctuary for those whose lives are in danger. There are sanctuaries for Donkeys, Seals, Whales, and so on. Why not Sanctuary for human beings?

When I first shared the idea of Sheffield as a City of Sanctuary at a meeting in September 2005, I expected us to work four or five years to realise our objective. But after just two years we’d become a national movement and had the support the Refugee Council. We have held two national conferences in Sheffield. The idea of Sanctuary is catching the imagination of people.

I want to share the story of our achievement.

The objective of City of Sanctuary movement in Sheffield is to create a culture of welcome and hospitality for those seeking sanctuary, Refugees and other vulnerable migrants among us.

This work is urgent and important in our times of open hostility and hatred towards people who come here seeking protection and security – fleeing the torture of persecution or poverty.

I came to UK with my family as a refugee in 1964.

Over the last 40 years I have observed, and often challenged oppressive developments in our Immigration and Asylum laws and procedures.

About 30 years ago, I became part of a movement of churchy and not so churchy people to challenge these developments by protesting against unjust deportations. Sometimes this protest involved people taking sanctuary in Churches or Mosques…..not to avoid or evade law but to challenge it publicly, and to seek a response from Government. For a while [mid 1980’s] I chaired the Sanctuary Working Group of the British Council of Churches’ Committee for Race Relations. We prepared guidelines for Churches on the whole theme of Sanctuary.

I have continued to seek a fair deal for “Asylum Seekers” particularly. In 1997 I walked all the way from the steps of Sheffield Town Hall to 10 Downing Street with a letter to the Prime Minister asking that “Asylum Seekers” should not be detained in conventional prisons as they are not criminals.

As President of the British Methodist Conference [2000 – 2001], I visited UK’s largest Detention Centres [such as Rochester Prison, Campsfield, Haslar, Tinsley, Harmondsworth, Lindholme and Maghaberry Prison in Lisburn, Northern Ireland]. I shared what I observed in articles for the Methodist Recorder [12th April 2001 and 26th April 2001] and also in a Book entitled “Unlocking the Doors” [Penistone Publications 2001].

What I saw and heard strengthened my resolve to seek the welfare of Asylum Seekers.

Recently I came across a fascinating essay by Bill Drayton, CEO of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public“—the global association of ‘social entrepreneurs’. ‘Everyone a Changemaker: Social Entrepreneurship’s Ultimate Goal’ (PDF download here) describes the important role of innovators in tackling social problems. It struck me that City of Sanctuary groups around the country are taking just this ‘entrepreneurial’ approach to social change—by taking initiative in our own communities and encouraging other people and organisations to join us. Drayton argues that this process of accepting personal responsibility for initiating social change, and developing and sharing the skills we need to do it effectively, is in itself a hugely important contribution to our society’s future well-being:

‘The most important contribution any of us can make now is not to solve any particular problem, no matter how urgent energy or environment or financial regulation is. What we must do now is increase the proportion of humans who know that they can cause change. And who, like smart white blood cells coursing through society, will stop with pleasure whenever they see that something is stuck or that an opportunity is ripe to be seized. Multiplying society’s capacity to adapt and change intelligently and constructively and building the necessary underlying collaborative architecture, is the world’s most critical opportunity right now. Pattern-changing leading social entrepreneurs are the most critical single factor in catalyzing and engineering this transformation.’

Drayton describes successful social entrepreneurship as a process that multiplies the number of people who are confident to become ‘changemakers’ in their communities. The role of a social entrepreneur is to inspire and encourage people to adopt a new approach to social needs, and to take responsibility for action in their community. By becoming active in their communities they acquire new experience and confidence as changemakers, and they are able to pass these skills on to others.

‘Consequently, the entrepreneur presents his or her idea to the local community in the most enticing, safe, understandable, and user-friendly ways possible.’

City of Sanctuary initiatives are a good example of this process at work, it seems to me. The challenge for all of us is encouraging local people to take responsibility for welcoming people seeking sanctuary in their own communities and workplaces. By inspiring, motivating and supporting people to take the initiative in this way, and gaining skills and confidence to become changemakers in our communities we are also contributing to a healthier, more resilient society.

My daughter made this Christmas card and sent it to Immigration Minister Phil Woolas this week, as part of the Children's Society's campaign to end the immigration detention of children.

Britain locks up over 1000 children every year in immigration removal centres, with severe impacts on their mental and physical health. The Children's Society are asking people to send one extra Christmas card this year, asking Phil Woolas to put a stop to this horrifying practice - full details here.