From 2016
In May 2016 I went to volunteer for a week with an organisation based in Calais called Help Refugees who work in partnership with a French organisation called L’Auberge des Migrants. Why did I go and what relevance has the trip to my work as CEO at Leeds Gypsy and Traveller Exchange? This is me wondering, in a personal capacity, about the answer to that question.
Like probably most people I know, I have been (some adjective) concerned about the plight of people in our world who are forced to migrate. I have to be honest and say that this concern in me is quite recent although obviously people have been obliged by circumstance to migrate for 100s, indeed 1000s of years. I have had some information about refugee camps around the world slowly drip fed into my consciousness for most of my life. Additionally ‘immigrants’ have long featured (usually as folk demon) in public discourse in the UK. I can’t pretend that I was completely unaware of the issue. So of course it is the news about migration to, and within, ‘Europe’, that has really demanded of me that I respond. I increasingly feel that – much like World War II has been for previous generations – the fact of so many people being forced to migrate and the poor response to their needs across Europe, is fast becoming the defining feature of my era. Now is when I am alive. Now is when the crisis is happening, and it is horrific, shameful and very confusing.
I decided in March 2016, quite suddenly, that I needed to go to Calais to see and experience myself what was happening there. I felt shame about my own lack of response to the desperation that I was aware of and I was also prompted by hearing of people I knew, or had known earlier in my life, who were doing heroic (as I see it) things to try to offer comfort to refugee people. I only chose Calais particularly, rather than Lesvos (the Greek Island on which many refugees land after a perilous sea crossing from Turkey), or the camp that existed very recently at Idomeni in Greece, because it is so near. I wanted to be sure that my trip was more than just ‘desperation tourism’ and so I collected donations from friends, family and work colleagues as well as buying goods myself to take (and also funding the costs of the trip) and arranged to volunteer with L’Auberge/Help Refugees at whatever was helpful for the week. I was very keen not to be just ‘gawping’ at people and was content that my volunteering may not require me to actually go to the camp(s). I also decided that I wasn’t going to take any photographs (hence no lovely snap to go with this blog) as I didn’t feel it was appropriate.
Although I told my colleagues at Leeds GATE what I was planning, including what type of goods I wanted to donate, I hope that no-one felt obliged to support me, not least because the trip was, I thought, entirely unrelated to Leeds GATE. I was amazed at the positive reaction from community members, fellow staff members and Executive Board members, as well as from my friends at home and via social media. Overall I estimate that I took over £500 worth of clothes and shoes, mostly new and including a lot of new underwear, as well as spending a further £200 directly on the leisurefayre website which delivers straight to Help Refugees warehouse for rapid distribution, and handing over a further £200 to Help Refugees in cash. The diesel and ferry tickets for the trip cost roughly another £400. We slept at the L’Auberge/Help Refugees warehouse in my van, so didn’t incur any accommodation costs.
The trip was not motivated by anything especially connected with my job as CEO at Leeds GATE. The legal status and circumstances of the refugees living in Calais are very dissimilar to those of Leeds GATE’s members who are mostly UK resident Romany Gypsy, Irish Traveller, and Scottish Gypsy Traveller people. In which case, does the trip have any relevance at all to my job? Well, I think it does and here is why.
Gypsy and Traveller people are sometimes depicted (by well-meaning groups and individuals) as powerless – unable to have control over where they live, what education they have, and what work they do. Contrarily, and in common with many other individuals, individual Gypsy and Traveller people sometimes express negativity about immigrants to me. I am fairly regularly, although not frequently, told by one or another GATE member that asylum seekers get free houses and free mobile phones in the UK. These beliefs can be pretty intractable when one tries to challenge and are often based on a second hand tale of contact with ‘an immigrant’ who told the (first party) person that this is the case. I have tried to challenge these beliefs but, to be frank, who am I? What do I know? Well not much actually, even if my gut instinct tells me these statements are unlikely to be true. So, is it a fact or a stereotype?
According to the BBC’s CBBC Newsround – “New asylum seekers in the UK get vouchers for food and essentials. A young, single person gets £19 a week, a couple gets £47 per week and extra for children. They also get £10 cash a week. The total amount of money and vouchers asylum seekers can get is 70 per cent of what someone on income support would receive”. The UK Government’s website says that asylum seekers may be offered hostel, b&b, or a house or flat but will not have a choice which area in the country that offer will be made and that other (voucher) payments will be withdrawn if the housing offer made is not accepted (for example that might be because it is far away from relatives or other support). I can’t find any evidence of people being provided with mobile phones, although these are a vital lifeline to families for refugee people.
For me stereotypes about refugees are very resonant of the type of untruths and exaggerations often repeated about Gypsy and Traveller people, such as “Gypsies don’t pay tax”. I know that is incorrect but of course how do you prove it? Find one Gypsy person not paying income tax and you have apparently lost your argument. You can make your own mind up about how generous these benefits for refugees are, just as you can figure out for yourself whether you are qualified to state that Gypsies don’t pay tax.
Another, less negative, strand of relevance to my work at GATE is to do with ideas of ‘community’ and ‘community cohesion’ which are common themes within GATE. What makes a community? How, or why, any group is regarded as a distinct community, or regards itself as a distinct community? Does having a shared ethnicity or circumstance necessarily make you and the people around you into a community? How do communities that view themselves as distinct live together well, and live well with communities around them?
To Calais and Dunkirk
With these sorts of considerations in mind I set off with my Companion and no little trepidation, to Calais. You can find some blogs about what we did there on my wordpress page – Hxnell. Volunteers and donators are only informed of the location of the warehouse after having booked in formally before the trip with L’Auberge/Help Refugees. The warehouse is in an industrial area some distance from the Jungle camp. Volunteers are warned strictly not to reveal the warehouse location. This is ostensibly due to the risks of ‘fascist’ vigilantes resentful of the work of the volunteers but one also forms the impression that it might be unhelpful if refugees were aware of the location also. We parked up my van for the week alongside the meagre caravans outside the warehouse which are home, or temporary accommodation, to some of the volunteers.
After presenting as volunteers, and offloading the donations we had brought with us, at the warehouse, we were sent first with a small group to the Dunkirk camp where we helped to carry out ‘distribution’ on two consecutive days, of shoes, and t-shirts. The Dunkirk camp is a semi-official and not too bad arrangement sanctioned by the Mayor of Dunkirk, unlike Calais which is not semi-official, not sanctioned by the Mayor of Calais, and is too bad. Dunkirk camp, known as Grande-Synthe, is row upon row of tiny chip-board cabins on a harsh hard-core stone surface.
After two days in Dunkirk, my Companion spent the rest of the week with the Calais Kitchen which makes and distributes up to 2500 meals a day to refugees at Dunkirk and Calais as well as the people volunteering with L’Auberge/Help Refugees. The Kitchen team of volunteers also help in co-ordinating supplies of food being sent further into Europe, to Greece and other places where the crisis for refugees is being played out.
Distributing donated goods is a strange position for all involved to be in. Of course when someone is in desperate need of such basic items it is right that we should share what we have, without a second thought as to whether it is the right thing to do or not, of course it is. When men, women and children arrive, cold, hungry, desperate and often frightened, with everything they own dirty and damp, and without funds to buy what they need – it is right without question to help. Distribution has to be done very carefully. It’s only sensible to try to do things, and be seen to do things, fairly. Refugees are just like everyone else of course, and although the resilience and good humour I saw is frankly incredible in the circumstances, one can do great harm by pressing people’s patience too far. At one point during shoe distribution at Grande-Synthe more experienced volunteers closed the distribution windows briefly but decisively when they felt the queue was in danger of becoming dis-orderly. It was done very calmly and we re-opened within minutes. The mantra of the volunteer groups is the commitment to maintaining everyone’s dignity, especially the refugees. This felt like a safe line being drawn to guide and inform how things were to be done. The week after we left a dispute in a badly organised distribution (by state authorities apparently) led to a fight in which people were hurt and a fire started accidentally which destroyed 40 shack homes making 500 people instantly without shelter at all. So one cannot be naïve.
At Leeds GATE we have spent a lot of time and effort considering issues of ‘asset based community development’ or ABCD, and co-production, where services are co-designed and often co-delivered by professionals and intended beneficiaries of services. Wikipedia describes ABCD as ‘a methodology for the sustainable development of communities based on their strengths and potentials’. The ideas and concepts that this work has placed in my head jangled continually, and to be honest quite painfully, whilst I was in Dunkirk or on the bus in the ‘Jungle’. I couldn’t see evidence that the ‘strengths and potentials’ of the refugees were able to be considered, let alone utilised in any meaningful or substantial way. Indeed I thought that I saw many instances, unintended by any individual, where strength or potential that a refugee person could bring to their circumstances was blocked (think of the sort of rules that stop refugees being able to be employed).
Whilst there were, of course, ethnic and other minority people among the volunteers and contributing many of the donations, it was impossible not to form an impression of rich (at least relatively) white people doling out largesse to poor (at least circumstantially) brown people. I couldn’t see much of anything that was going to fundamentally change the status quo.
On the bus
Before I had been to the Calais camp itself, I enjoyed a visit from a friend of mine, Liz Clegg, who with her team has voluntarily set up a centre for Women and Children. The centre now operates in a donated double decker bus since the first facility built out of scrap wood and tarpaulins was destroyed by the French police during the eviction of the ‘South Side’ of the camp in February/March 2016. My friend’s team took up the offer of my time for the rest of the week and so I volunteered on the bus, helping to create a welcome and friendly environment where women could relax for a while. We would also daily collect from the warehouse personal items and toiletry supplies for distribution on the bus to women and their children who have come to Calais from places including Afghanistan, South Sudan and Eritrea.
The upstairs of the Women and Children’s bus is used as a nursery where amazing volunteers, mostly from the UK, provide a nursery school for younger children. How they manage to do this with so little is a great testament to their skill and commitment. I was also incredibly humbled by the efforts of the teachers, and especially of the parents and even children themselves, to create a normal life, with normal activities such as schooling, and normal routines. Incredible how important this is to keep the shreds of mental health together.
Downstairs the bus was divided halfway with a seating area at the front and the goods for distribution kept at the back. I followed the lead of a warm, thoughtful and conscientious young woman who had been volunteering on the bus for a couple of months. In one way it was helpful that the bus layout obliged people to queue in a narrow line down the aisle, so one was not too overwhelmed by too many different people asking for different items at the same time. On the other hand 20 women and their children pressing into this narrow space could be very difficult and certainly did rely on patience all around to work smoothly. The barriers of language also required patience and humour to overcome. There was a chain that one could (and I did occasionally) place across the aisle if one felt that things were getting at all heated. It was no real barrier but I suppose it helped to draw a ‘boundary’.
So, the volunteer cannot simply hand over the box of underwear and invite people to choose their own, it would quickly create discord and competition. One is obliged to make a selection of three pairs of knickers, or bra’s or socks, and ask the lady to choose (the same practice is used in distributing shoes, trousers, t-shirts etc ie a choice of one of three items is offered). When there is only one bottle of baby oil and fifteen people who all would need it, one is obliged to ‘play the white man’ and hide it away so that no-one can have it. “Baby oil is finished, finished”.
White
Wikipedia says this about the expression ‘play the white man’ –
“Play the white man is a term used in parts of Britain meaning to be decent and trustworthy in one’s actions. The similar American expression is “that’s mighty white of you” with the meaning of “thank you for being fair”. The origin of the phrase is obscure. The colour white has long been associated with purity and virtue in English culture, but the racial sense of the expression may refer more explicitly to the administrators and soldiers of the 18th, 19th and 20th-century British Empire.
..In the 1960s or before, the phrase “mighty white of you” was used by black Americans to patronise white people, without them knowing any better. The phrase was targeted at white people who wished to appear charitable towards black people, but whose actions did very little to alleviate the terrible conditions in black communities. As such, the insult is doubly cutting, sarcastic and meant to insult white people deemed as self-righteous. The phrase is similar to “bless your heart”- it’s not a positive statement because it conveys pity for the recipient”.
I’m particularly interested in the parallel here to refugees and volunteers. I was very lucky on my first day to meet an English/Iranian volunteer called Mojgan, or Moj as she introduced herself. Because she could understand some of the languages around us, Moj was helpful in interpreting and sharing what the people around us were saying. On our very first day in Dunkirk, whilst we were queueing alongside camp residents for our Calais Kitchen lunch, a young Kurdish man struck up conversation with Moj which she later told us about. I feel that this conversation captures the fundamental dilemma that I was wrestling with.
“Why are you here?”
The young man asked.
Mojgan explained that she wanted to understand more about what was happening to refugees and that (much like myself) volunteering to help seemed a good way to do that.
The man replied.
“Yes, but why do you give us shoes, and clothes, and food? We could get that for ourselves if we weren’t stuck here in the camp. What we want is to be able to leave the camps and live as other people do, why don’t you help with that?”
In fairness, many many UK people are doing whatever they can to influence change in the overall situation, especially the treatment by governments, of refugee people. Nearly every week sees a small demonstration of one sort or another in protest at various aspects of the whole shoddy situation. People regularly sing and shout outside asylum detention centres such as Campsfield House, to protest and be heard protesting by people trapped inside. Just this last weekend there was a demonstration in Newcastle against the treatment of refugees, but it, in common with other actions, received no national media attention. Liz Clegg, as an example, has also done a fantastic job of raising the profile of unaccompanied minors among the camp residents at Calais, assisting Lord Dubs and others in trying to persuade the UK government to take these minors in. That we don’t have change isn’t for a lack of people trying.
So what for GATE
So my question, several pages ago, was what relevance does this trip have to my role as Leeds GATE CEO? The answer is, I think, about power. Who has power and how do they use that power, I guess I mean ‘social power’ which Wikipedia defines as the ability to influence people or events. But I think is also about being able to control and influence your own life.
Leeds GATE is a civil society membership organisation which, according to its own values, ‘belongs’ to Gypsy and Traveller people. From the outset the governing document that we created stated that the membership, and governing committee, must be at least 55% Gypsy or Traveller. By We I mean myself, as first employee with job title ‘community development worker’, two professional (non-Travellers) workers from other Community organisations who had initiated the funding and recruitment, and a small number of Gypsy and Traveller women, probably about ten, who got involved in the early meetings (albeit for some, whilst expressing considerable cynicism about what could be achieved).
Gypsy Traveller people were involved in much of the activity that led to the formation of GATE, however the wherewithal [defined online as a noun meaning the money or other means needed for a particular purpose] to create the organisation, came in no small part from non-Gypsy Traveller people. The employment of a non-Gypsy Traveller person, myself, kicked things into action (although that momentum was as much about enabling a suitable person to dedicate time to the project, as about the ethnicity of the employee). Therefore GATE has been a collaboration between Gypsy/Travellers and non-Gypsy/Traveller people from the outset, albeit with an explicit commitment to community ‘ownership’.
Here we are in 2016, over decade later, with over 700 members, an Executive Board of 10, of whom 7 are Gypsy Traveller people; a mixed staff team of about 10 employees, regular volunteers and placements; a clear social mission (to improve quality of life for Gypsies and Travellers in West Yorkshire); measureable objectives relating to homes, health, education/employment and citizenship/social inclusion, and guiding ‘values’ statements which you can find on our website and include the above – that Leeds GATE belongs to Gypsy and Traveller people – as well as encouraging us to be welcoming and to be brave and creative.
I love Leeds GATE. I make no bones about how proud I am of what a group of us have achieved. However, too often our communications with funders and other stakeholders have trapped us into conversations that focus on what is ‘wrong’ or deficit, without opportunity to discuss what is ‘right’. Development of our current ‘ABCD’ project came about as a reaction to combat presentations of our membership as ill-educated, needy people, in poor health and lacking in capacity. Our experience in the office easily gives the lie to this perception. Our members, despite having to overcome incredible structural obstacles not usually faced by the majority, are funny, clever, self-reliant, expert care-givers, skilful and perceptive.
It isn’t perfect. Still sometimes a Board member might respond to my request for an opinion about something saying ‘Whatever you think yourself Helen’. Though many of our members understand that the organisation is led by an Executive Board of whom a majority of Gypsy/Travellers, some do not and might still respond to us as if we are a council service, bringing techniques of learned helplessness to their efforts to get what they need. We have long struggled with the perception of Gypsy/Traveller people as in some way either wilful folk devils, or as poor, inept and needy. We ponder how much this is a mainstream construction alone, or, to what extent is presenting one-self as needy, the only way to make an unresponsive, excluding, system, provide some of what it should?
The ABCD project has taught us firstly that Leeds GATE is already an organisation which relies on people’s strengths and potentials. Although many members seek support with things they struggle to manage (often without literacy for example), they contribute hugely to our ‘development’ and strategic work and are also happy that we try not to ‘over-help’ by doing things that we don’t need to that members can manage for themselves.
How White are we?
To be honest I would die of shame to think that I might stand in front of our members and ‘play the white man’. It is so clearly a) bad mannered and b) unnecessary. What did I just say about our members? That they are ‘funny, clever, self-reliant, expert care-givers, skilful and perceptive’. This is no different to the people living in the Calais Jungle. In fact, perhaps more so than our members, many Jungle residents also have good education, professional and trade qualifications.
A colleague of ours once commented, in respect of doing outreach to Gypsy Traveller people, “If you are funded by the state, you work for the state. Don’t expect people to respond to you as if you don’t”. Some, though not all of our funding does indeed come from the ‘State’, via grants or contracts. Sometimes this will lead to us being requested to ‘raise awareness’ of something amongst our members. I remember clearly when we weren’t funded to ‘raise awareness’ of cancer because we wouldn’t focus on bowel cancer when our members were most in need of information and clarity about breast cancer due to a recent death of a community member from this type of the disease. We wouldn’t do what they believed was the priority, regardless of what was a priority to community members, so they didn’t fund us. You need pants but should be grateful for socks.
Does the existence and activities of Leeds GATE really work to the benefit of mostly a) the State or b) Gypsy and Traveller people? Do we hold our members in a passive, powerless, position, or do we provide power to their own efforts to empower themselves? Is providing urgent assistance as a volunteer to refugees in Calais a necessary act of solidarity, or an inevitable mechanism to maintain the State’s status quo?
Leeds GATE team invariably express pleasure at working or volunteering at Leeds GATE. We are a happy team, being impassioned and inspired by our work and by the relationships our employment involves us in. The people volunteering to assist refugees obviously have reason to feel, if not exactly good about themselves, at least reassured that they have not ignored the plight of refugees. Some people, perhaps me included, have dedicated themselves, at least for a time, to trying to make life better for other people. We get a good feeling about this and we inevitably build our sense of our own identity around it.
What happens then when our work is successful, especially if we explicitly aim to be ‘asset based’ in the sense of working towards individuals having power and capacity to solve their own problems. All the Gypsy/Traveller people have fantastic quality of life and all the refugees have either gone home or integrated in their new homes such that they have as much power and agency over their lives as anyone else? Are we as workers or volunteers truly invested in the end of any sort of dependency? Is there an alternative paradigm?
Our work on asset based principles of community development has helped us to understand concepts of ‘bonding social capital’, in which members of families and communities identify or generate assets of mutual support and power within their communities, and, ‘bridging social capital’ in which communities enjoy access to assets outside of their own families and community. What we have learned is that Gypsy and Traveller people experience a high degree of bonded social capital; identifying strongly as a group and taking care of each other, sharing assets, within their families and community. This makes some of the traditional ABCD type of activities seem less relevant. Gypsy and Traveller people need no assistance from anyone to identify together as one community sharing assets of resources, culture, identity and mutual support. Attempting to do so would be very reminiscent of teaching granny to suck eggs. However a strongly bonded social community can also constrict members and oblige them to conform to group norms. Individual identities which appear to contradict the group identity (such as non-hetero sexuality, aspirations towards higher education, or types of employment not commonplace within the community) can present an unwelcome challenge to the group identity, and fears (often rational) for individual safety outside the security of the community. Additionally what communities can be entirely self-sufficient from the benefits of mainstream society? Bridging social capital forms a vital link to ‘the outside world’ where needs fall outside of what the immediate community can provide, or where individual identities need to find recognition and validation outwith the bonded community.
Are residents of the camps at Grande-Synthe, Calais and elsewhere ‘communities’. Do individuals identify all the people who live on the camp, and further afield perhaps, as one community? Do they sometimes feel themselves to be within their ethnic community and at other times as part of a wider community on the camp, of refugees? What does bonded social capital look like in the Jungle? Is there any need for outsiders to ‘manage’ the way that people on the camp live together, or at least the way they access the distribution services together? Even if they don’t need to be ‘managed’, what potential and actual bridging social capital comes via the presence of volunteers? What benefit is there to applying asset based thinking in responding to the circumstances of refugees?
ABCD is there in the Jungle
The Jungle Books library runs a ‘conversation session’ every day at 5pm where volunteers and camp residents come together to talk. The volunteers get to put the crazy things they are seeing and hearing into the context of the stories of individual people’s lives. They get to find common ground with humans whose experience can seem so unimaginable. Refugees get to find common ground with humans whose experience can seem so unimaginable (!), to practice speaking European languages and learning more about the places they hope to go to. This is people sharing their strengths and potentials and building bridging social capital.
In another project recording equipment is being used by musicians living in the jungle to make recordings for fundraising to support projects.
What can community development, asset based community development, mean for families and individuals, in circumstances where no-one wants to remain even another day, and for the people moved to help there? How can ABCD – enabling people’s strengths and potentials – be appropriate or useful in a crisis that everyone agrees should, somehow, stop? Is the immediate crisis exactly the time when we should be most mindful of each other’s assets, or do we have to decide that it’s better all-around if I chose your pants for you?
Here are some links for further reading:-
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/welcome-to-our-jungle-refugee-voices–2#/
https://www.irinnews.org/feature/2016/06/13/refugees-greece-take-first-steps-towards-self-reliance
