Showing posts with label letter. Show all posts
Last month my penfriend detainee disappeared
He was lost, perhaps deported. I was at a loss, someone I had come to know through the post had disappeared without my ever knowing the end or indeed the beginning of his story. As a pen befriender one is not permitted to ask about the detainee’s case or background and it would be irresponsible to ask after family, education or occupation when these lifelines have been severed. I had lost someone I would never know, yet whom I had come to cherish in my life.
My responses were those of bereavement - anger, sadness, bewilderment but also an urge to pray. My prayers were for my friend and for those who had befriended him, not least the art teacher of the detention centre who had encouraged him to create wonderful, exuberant cards, who had brought colour and life into his life. Prayers too for his future that he would be held in those arms of the Loving God we can none of us fall through.
What joy it was then to hear from the JRS intelligence network that he had been found, transferred to another unit in this country. Joy mixed with anger when I reflected on how someone could be disappeared by a people management system that needs to keep its statistics in good order.
And then a greater joy that dissolved all anger and created only compassion and thanks. A letter, or rather another exuberant card arrived from my friend addressed from his new detention centre, together with a printed message that someone, somewhere had helped him to write. His courage and love of life shine through, but can this story of one man contribute anything to the stories of unknown thousands displaced across the world?
I am reminded that there are many people out there involved in managing refugees, some, like the unknown art teacher are evidently good people helping detainees to be individuals not numbers, and it is not only the captives, but also all the captors who need our prayer.
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Not Just Another Statistic
Thirty seven years, or so we are told, is the time it will take to clear the backlog of immigration cases. Thirty seven years if we continue work at the current rate and if no new cases are filed.
This is just the sort of statistic that both shocks me as a reader and numbs me. How can I take on this statistic when so many others about other dreadful issues follow in its wake? What can I possibly do about a 37 year waiting list?
Writing a letter each week to a man I know nothing about, in a detention centre I can hardly imagine, is a seemingly negligible response, and yet through the pen-friend service that JRS operates, I am able to reach out, to touch and be touched in a way that makes a statistic come alive.
No discussion of politics, religion or individual cases is permitted and every letter is scrutinised by staff at the centre so each week I write about life in rural England, MOR TV, festivals and celebrations. I write in faith that my commentary will be accepted by a stranger. Every month or so I am humbled to know, through the medium of an exuberant, greetings card made in the art class at the detention centre, that my gesture has been graciously received.
Because of this one to one contact, I've found myself reading, thinking and praying about refugees, those who serve them in the host country, those they leave behind in their home countries. I've found myself getting a sense of the scale of the problem, but rather than being overwhelmed as by dry statistics, I discover greater depths of compassion and am moved to immerse myself more fully. Let us hope that by the Grace of God another thirty seven years of letter writing for this particular cause will not be needed.
