JRS-UK Community Blog

Today is Friday and I am at a loose end. There’s no letter for me to write today as ‘my’ detainee has disappeared and this time it isn’t simply a transfer between detention centres.   Once again I have been touched by the kindness of one of the detention centre staff who bothered to return my last letter.  It is because of this that we know he really has been sent back to his country, and I would rather know what has happened to him than feel he has been lost somewhere in the system. So it’s Friday and there’s an empty space in my day; time to reflect a little more on befriending.

His deportation has set me thinking about my own family. I wonder just how many of us have refugees, economic migrants asylum seekers in our own family histories?  My first known ancestor here in Norfolk was a refugee. He came from the Low Countries in part of what is today Belgium, but as a Protestant in a Catholic country sought asylum in England.  His memorial stone in a Norwich city church simply bears his name and the fact that he was born ‘beyond the seas in 1581’.  These Dutch and French speaking incomers formed a strong community in the city and through their skills in horticulture and weaving, brought it great wealth. (Note for the football minded - it was the Dutch ‘Strangers’ who first brought canaries to this country - hence the popular name of the Norwich Football Club.)

Immigrants from the Low Countries to Norfolk are known as the Strangers and it is this word that takes me straight to the Gospel; ‘I was a stranger and you took me in.’*  My detainee has gone to Africa to a life I cannot imagine. Just as he was a stranger here, he will after these years away from his country and people be a stranger now in his own home land.  I am thankful that my ancestor was made welcome here in England - else where would I be now!? Thankful too that I have had the opportunity via JRS to exchange letters with a stranger here in England.  I sincerely hope and pray that my penfriend is taken in and made welcome, given food, shelter and especially safety wherever he is now.

* Matthew 25:35

Pat W


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Last month my penfriend detainee disappeared. Regular JRS visitors to his detention centre in London could not find him and no official at the centre was able to answer a question about his whereabouts.

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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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.
Patricia, a JRS-UK penbefriender