Showing posts with label wapping. Show all posts
A simple mind and heart to reciprocate
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Paul Anthony, a Jesuit scholastic and member of the Hurtado Jesuit Community that lives with JRS UK, reflects on a recent conversation about migration.
I was fortunate to attend the session on ‘Migration Conversation’ by Br Stephen Power SJ at the Hurtado Jesuit Centre. It was very informative and the statistics presented were an eye opener. Later, we had a discussion in different groups and I was very much drawn to their sharings. Some of the participants were migrants themselves. Many shared their feelings of sentiments, and what they did with migrants and refugees. What they said was inspiring and heart touching and came from deep down themselves.
When I was in Andhra Province (one of the South Asian Provinces of Society of Jesus), I used to share more often about JRS and its mission to the novice candidates, and in my Vocation Promotion talks to them. The little knowledge I was gleamed from books and newsletters of our congregation I never had met any refugee or volunteer working in JRS. Now I am fortunate enough to be placed in the Hurtado Jesuit Community, in London, as a part of my theology studies. JRS is part of Hurtado Jesuit community’s mission, now I can meet people involved in refugee works as well as asylum seekers and refugees as well. My interaction with refugees is short but it has created a huge impact on me. Simple ‘smiles’, ‘hellos’ and ‘goodbyes’ produce ripples of happiness and joy in their faces. I am not able to advise them on legal matters but simply present myself and share the rapport of a mutual smile. My experience has been similar to that of all those who shared during the discussions, though their sharing has enriched my understanding and feelings towards refugees and migrants.
It is not qualification and experience which matter to have but a simple mind and heart to reciprocate ‘Hi’, ‘Hello’ to those who are in need. ‘When I was hungry, you gave me to eat and when I was thirsty, you gave me to drink’. People not merely long for the satisfaction of physical needs but also for emotional and relational needs. They are hungry for the food of communication and communion and thirsty to receive the water of compassion and acceptance. They desire a space to share their feelings.
The sharing was a great breakthrough and showed me how I need to respond and grow spiritually. It made me realise that the best present I could give to the refugees is my pleasure at our presence together. I have discovered ways to make others happy and to be happy myself.
God Has Blessed Me Since I Arrived in This Country
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| Diluckshun in front of JRS centre |
Diluckshun, staff member at JRS-UK, writes of his own journey and what JRS means to him.
I am Sri Lankan. I claimed asylum when I arrived in the UK on the 18th of September 1999.
My first interview for my asylum claim took place in Liverpool on 19th January 2001. After attending the interview I received a refusal letter from the Home Office. I appealed. There was no reply and my solicitor advised me to leave the matter to one side and continue my studies. My solicitor wrote several letters to the Home Office to grant me permission to work; all were refused without any explanation. After November 2004 I was reporting monthly to the immigration authorities.
My aunt, who has been my guardian since I arrived in the UK, helped me to continue my studies, including a BA in Business and Finance and Level 3 Accountancy (AAT).
I first met JRS in November 2007.
My first contact was to attend the JRS founder’s anniversary celebration. I visited the JRS office and was offered voluntary work. I worked once a week on a Thursday and managed to continue my studies.
My contacts with other asylum seekers like me have been very rewarding. I came to know a lot of their problems and we comforted each other by listening and sharing our problems. This experience made me to be a happier and a stronger person inside. I welcomed each and every individual that I met at JRS and this enabled me not to bother about my asylum status. I became very busy by getting involved with my studies, voluntary work, and other social commitments. In November 2008, I visited my solicitor and asked him to make a fresh appeal. He advised me that he will make a phone call and will find out the present work on my file, which he did. He phoned me to make an appointment to see him and bring three passport size photographs. Soon after that, when I went to report on the 11th December 2008 as usual, the officer at the desk at the reporting centre informed me that I had been granted leave to remain. When I heard the news I was so happy and praised the Lord in silence.
God has blessed me since I arrived in this country and I am really grateful to all who have helped me in many ways. I remember and pray for all asylum seekers whose cases are still pending.
I express my sincere thanks to all of at JRS for offering me a part time paid job as an assistant administrator at JRS in Feb 2009.
Finally, I got married in 2010 and now I am a father of a child.
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wapping,
Three Types of Listening
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Photo by Steven Shorrock, from Flickr.com
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Jesuit Refugee
Service UK is based at the Hurtado Jesuit Centre in East London. The Centre has
just completed a “listening exercise” in
the local neighbourhood. Kate, who works with JRS and at the Centre reflects on
the importance of listening when we are building relationships with other
members of our community.
What does listening
mean to you? What does the dictionary tell us it might mean? Here are three
meanings I found: “to give one’s attention to a sound” i.e. to be attentive, to
give ear to, to concentrate. Another
meaning: “to take notice and act on what someone says” i.e. follow what they
say, bear it in mind, take it into consideration, an active response to a request or some advice shared. And finally:
“make an effort to hear something, be alert and ready to hear” i.e. a sense of
listening out for something that might be missed, trying to catch something at
a deeper level or from a place
beyond where we already are.
Over the last six
months, at the Hurtado Jesuit Centre, we have set time aside to build
relationships with our neighbours and community partners in Wapping and across Tower
Hamlets. This meant us concentrating our attention on those around us, being
curious about their work, caring enough to find out what their needs are and
enjoy getting to know them. Sometimes it meant easy connections, otherwise it
was about popping by, building trust and creating space to listen.
Now we are at the
stage of reflecting on what we have heard: it is about taking notice of what
people were generous enough to share with us. Now we have gained the privilege
of being welcomed into other people’s projects and priorities, we need to
follow up on what they have said, to consider it carefully and explore with them
how we can act on what they have said matters to them. This is less about us
reaching out to offer something to others, but a process of getting to know
another and developing something jointly.
And as we search for
a sense of what is beyond where we are now, in terms of our programme, we hope
that we will be alert to the unexpected, open to fresh wisdom and willing to
respond to surprises. Community engagement is never boring, but hopefully we might
avoid being so busy that our imaginations get tired or that we get pressured
into taking the easy option. So we trust that as our Centre grows in maturity,
we continue to have time to welcome people each week, be responsive to real problems
and get involved in creative, challenging activities.
I wonder if these three types of
listening are ones that we can all bear in mind as we go about our busy
community work in our neighbourhood and local borough? To listen to one another
with respect as we share different perspectives and learn something new. To
listen with a view to putting what we have learnt into action, to really make a
difference in practical ways. And to listen out for that deeper wisdom or clues
for future community needs, changing trends and creative opportunities to work
together over the months ahead.
Read the
report of our findings “Welcome to Wapping: The Value of Community in a Tower
Hamlets Village” . One of the themes emerging from the report is Migration and
Immigration which will be developed with JRS-UK.
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How many people can you fit around one table?
Greetings in different languages!
Kate, a member of staff, shares one of her favourite things about JRS
How many people can you fit around one table? At JRS today we had 20 people sat around our lunch table. This is one of my favourite things about JRS – we eat together every weekday. Each day, whoever is at the office or community centre sits down together. And then we clear up, wash up and tidy up. It is an important time in our working day and there is usually laughter and news to catch up on.
Mostly we have simple food: bread, cheese, cold meats, houmous, salad and a piece of fruit each. Sometimes if it is someone’s birthday, we share cake. Other times if we have had an event the day before there is leftover pasta or a pudding to eat up. If we are few, we always set an extra place for a late comer or a guest arriving in time for an appointment or meeting. Some days, one of our refugee friends comes to have their only meal for the day. On other days, visitors are caught up in the hubbub of chatting together.
We share stories, we try to learn each others languages and talk very little about work. It is a special time to deepen our relationships, appreciate each others’ culture and feel like a community together. It helps us see people outside of their roles and learn different perspectives in an open and relaxed way. Today we were from 15 countries from across 4 continents: interns, refugee friends, Jesuits, volunteers, members of staff… each one welcome in their own right and appreciated for who they are.
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Reflection: volunteering with JRS
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| "…the beggar stretches out his hand not to ask but to give you the Kingdom of heaven and yet you do not see..." Elder Arsenie (photo: JRS malta) |
In certain respects the Spiritual Wisdom of a Romanian Monk who lived through some of the most turbulent and unhappy periods of world history in the 20th Century might well seem to be far away from 21st Century Wapping. However, the teaching which Elder Arsenie gives was proven to be correct – in my own experience – over the past year when I worked as a volunteer with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS).
I was not, on one level, working with beggars but I was working with destitute Asylum Seekers – among the poorest and most misunderstood members of British Society. In the current debate on Asylum and Immigration – fuelled by the wish of all political parties to appear ‘tough’ – it is fashionable only to talk about how much Sanctuary Seekers cost: how much money might be ‘lost’ from the NHS or the DSS (despite many Sanctuary Seekers being denied any basic support at all); how much pressure is being placed on the education system; the transport infrastructure; the housing stock etc etc What is not talked about – and what needs to be talked about – is how much is contributed by those who come – through no fault of their own – to claim Sanctuary in the UK.
The Government forbids our refugee friends to work and from that point of view their financial contribution is minimal. Spiritually, however, their contribution is immense. During my time in Wapping I have met some of the most remarkable, kind and loving human beings I have ever encountered and it has been my privilege and joy to serve them and to accept their immense giftedness. That this has become clear to me is largely due to the Ignatian ethos of the JRS which encourages the volunteers to simply ‘be’ with the person in front of them, seeing them as neither a problem nor a cause but a Brother and Sister in Christ; a human being who, like all humanity, reflects something of the wonder of God. I have now left London and am living in a very different setting in Northumbria but I can safely say that I will take from my experience in JRS some truly wonderful lessons. I will take all that our friends have given me and I will also carry with me the example set by those who work ‘full time’ with JRS – both volunteers and staff.
I looked at the person opposite me; the person who had been tortured; deprived of their basic human dignity not only by the regime they were fleeing but our own Government and I saw Christ in them and in seeing him I saw the Kingdom of Heaven.
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The Hurtado Jesuit Centre, but who was Alberto Hurtado SJ?
Jesuit Refugee Service UK is based at the Hurtado Centre in
London. Why is the Centre named for him and what relevance does this Jesuit
have for JRS-UK’s work?
“I hold that every
poor man, every vagrant, every beggar is Christ carrying his cross. And as Christ, we must love and help
him. We must treat him as a brother, a
human being like ourselves. If we were
to start a campaign of love for the poor and homeless, we would, in a short
time, do away with depressing scenes of begging, children sleeping in doorways
and women with babies in their arms fainting in our streets.” St Alberto
Hurtado SJ
“I hold that every
poor man, every vagrant, every beggar is Christ carrying his cross. And as Christ, we must love and help
him. We must treat him as a brother, a
human being like ourselves. If we were
to start a campaign of love for the poor and homeless, we would, in a short
time, do away with depressing scenes of begging, children sleeping in doorways
and women with babies in their arms fainting in our streets.” St Alberto
Hurtado SJ
Canonized in October 2005 by Pope Benedict XVI, Alberto
Hurtado Cruchaga was born on 22nd, January 1901 in Chile. The death of his father when he was four
years old meant that the family – his brother and his mother – knew great
hardship with Alberto and his brother moving from relative to relative.
This experience caused his heart to want to tackle social issues. He studies labour law but rather than pursue
a career in law, he enters the Jesuit novitiate in 1925. This leads to further studies: humanities,
philosophy, theology. He obtains a
doctorate in pedagogy and psychology in 1935, two years after his ordination as
a priest.
His heart’s desire to tackle social inequality not far from
his mind, he sets up the first Hogar de Cristo (Home of Christ) shelter to take
in children in need of food and shelter.
More shelters are opened around the country and it is estimated that
between 1945 and 1951, more than 850,000 children were helped by them.
Hurtado dies in Santiago of pancreatic cancer in 1952, a
much loved man. Still popular in Chile,
his desire to treat every human being as “a human being like ourselves”
underpins the ethos of every organisation bearing his name.
Here in Wapping, JRS at the Hurtado Centre seeks to just do
that: be a refuge for our fellow human-beings fed up with the bureaucracy of
the asylum-seeking process or fed up with surviving instead of living and
fulfilling their ambitions and plans.
Every Thursday, we get together, talk, have coffee and just
be. Why don’t you join us one Thursday
morning and help keep the legacy of Alberto Hurtado alive?
The feast day of St Alberto Hurtado SJ is 18th
August. To find out more about the
Hurtado Jesuit Centre: www.hurtadocentre.org.uk
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