JRS-UK Community Blog

Kate shares her most recent experience of offering hospitality for friends of JRS in the UK

How do you know an evening event has gone well? When you spend all night doing the washing up and everyone brings their plates in saying how delicious the food was! Last week, we were pleased to welcome here a mixture of people to a meal cooked by one of our JRS refugee partners. It was our way of saying thank you to those who help sustain the work of JRS in various ways: as donors, supporters, advisors, volunteers...

Eating together is not unusual at JRS, we do it most lunchtimes: simple bread, cheese, salad, fruit... but this meal was special with tchep rice, spicy harissa chicken, chocolate mousse. All prepared by one of our refugee friends who is completing his training as a chef at a college in London. The occasion gave him a chance to articulate the importance of being accompanied by JRS in his chosen course and for us to appreciate how we all grow together, here in community.

One guest said: "It was a delicious meal and so beautifully presented; it was great to see so many people who love and support our JRS; and it was good to have the chance to have deeper conversations with the people we were sitting near... I know that many people have been enabled to find their dignity and to give them hope through the continuous presence of JRS in their lives."

So here's to many more occasions to celebrate our journeys together, to sit around the table sharing joy in life and to taste delicious food - cheers!

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Wednesday 12th, June – a few minutes past 6 on a drizzly evening at the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) offices in London. On the agenda: creating a blog for JRS-UK where refugees can share their views and experience.

The Jesuit Refugee Service’s role is to accompany, serve and advocate for refugees and forced migrants. In the UK, our particular concern is for asylum seekers in detention centres or those who have been made destitute by the asylum-seeking process.

In 2012, JRS-UK, in our role as companion, worked with refugees on a series of creative writing workshops run by English PEN as well as a photography project run by Fotosynthesis Community. Uplifting work was produced. In the words of writer and broadcaster Bidisha, the sessions of ‘Big Writing for A Small World’ (where some poems the refugees wrote were published) were “hilarious, heartbreaking, inspiring and baffling”.

We want to share these poems, these pictures and other points of view, experience and stories. But what is the common thread? What words would go in the title of a JRS-UK blog? So, we all chipped in with a word each: volunteers, staff at JRS-UK, the refugees whose blog this is, even the lady who cleans our office; we all participated.

The JRS Voice? Liked then discarded because we didn’t want to sound earnest. Bound Together? This got dropped very fast although it did generate some laughter for its wedding-y undertone. Our intention was to find a name that encompassed that sense of being together for a time in each other’s lives (like our newsletter, called Together) but Bound Together? No, as asylum seekers do move forward in their lives and volunteers come, learn and also move on to new things.
In the end, we settled on The JRS-UK Community Blog – because that is who we are: a community connecting people and building hope.

We hope you enjoy our blog!