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Esme Allen
Esme Allen

'A Future Without Fear'

Wednesday September 7 2016

Kathy Galloway reflects on a visit to refugee camps in Greece

 

Recently, I was looking after my four-year old granddaughter, and over ice-cream in Glasgow Botanic Gardens, I started to explain to her why I had been in an aeroplane the previous week.

‘I was in a country called Greece,’ I said, ‘visiting some people who had to run away from their homes in a war.’ ‘What’s a war, Granny?’ she said – and suddenly, I was stricken to the heart, and didn’t know how to go on.

How could I speak to her about the children screaming as bombs rained down on their homes, about their streets in shattered ruins, about crying from hunger because there was no food available anywhere?

Or about why the mummies and daddies finally decided that they couldn’t stay in their houses any longer, and why they had to leave their toys, their friends, their schools and perhaps even their grannies, behind, and set out on a very long and horrible journey when they didn’t even know where they were going to end up?

Could I tell her about staying in lots of different places with strangers who spoke many different languages that you couldn’t understand, about sleeping in tents if they were lucky but in disused factories, or army camps surrounded with barbed wire, or even in the street, if they were not lucky? Would I tell her about walking for mile after mile, in the heat, in the rain, even in the snow; of being wet and cold and hungry and feeling sick? Could I tell her about going in the boats that had far too many people on board, and about the people who went in the water and never came out?

I am someone who is usually considered good with words. But I was silenced. ‘What’s a war, Granny?’

In my silence, several strands of thought ran side by side through my mind. One of them was focused on all the children, many of them younger than four, whom I had seen the previous week, in Samos, in Thessaloniki, in Athens, and all the millions I hadn’t seen but knew existed. Their innocence had been destroyed, their childhoods devastated. Did I have the right to protect my grandchild when so many mothers and grandmothers had been unable to? Was this just another kind of western privilege?

Simultaneously, I remembered my own mother who, at the age of seven, had been evacuated from Edinburgh along with her five sisters during the Second World War. Looking back, the evacuation of children during the war was quite extraordinary. Of course, this was a different crisis. But what is remarkable is that at a time when Britain was poorer, weaker and infinitely more at risk than it is today, a massive logistical operation, involving cultural upheaval for the entire population, was undertaken with almost the sole purpose of keeping children safe.

We should as a nation be better at understanding what drives people to the truly horrendous path of the refugee and the asylum-seeker. For at its heart, despite its abuses and its cultural, economic and political challenges, the vast majority of refugees are simply seeking what all of us want - safety, the necessities of life and a future without fear for our children.

For me, one of the most important values that people of faith can offer in the context of war and displacement is the belief that care, justice and compassion are not confined by state boundaries. From a Christian perspective, our country is the whole world. That is not to say that we can solve all problems. The challenge is not for us to do what we can’t - but it is for us to do everything that we can do.

On my visit to Greece, I was struck by the efforts of Greek citizens, and of faith communities and organisations, even in the midst of their own economic crisis. Local people everywhere have responded with generosity and compassion, recognising that being ‘illegal’ does not make people less than human.

Thankfully, my granddaughter was diverted from her question by ice-cream. When the question comes again, as it surely will, I want to be able to say to her that there are also many people who are kind and help in the most immediate practical ways, who treat refugees with respect and dignity, welcome them into their homes, speak up against vile rhetoric and cowardly ‘othering’, lobby their politicians and support principled leadership. I will tell her that there are many people in every country in the world who do care. I want to change the story, to be able to tell her a different story, one that is more hopeful, more just.

And I want to tell her that Scotland is a part of that story.

 

Kathy Galloway visited refugee camps in Greece with a group of 12 women from different Christian denominations of the four nations of the UK, on behalf of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland.

Christian Aid's 'Change the Story' campaign seeks to challenge and change the portrayal of refugees. More information here.

This is an abridged version of a feature in September's Life and Work. Subscribe here.