I often have coffee with Mary, who is now in her late 80s. Last time I met her she told me about the winter boxes she had been packing at her church. It had all been so different when she was younger. Then, she says, all the wives fortunate to have husbands with well-paid jobs willingly gave their time to the church – doing the flowers and the cleaning, running the tombola for the fete, visiting the sick, preparing children’s liturgy, baking for the Cafod cake sale, and selling Traidcraft.
The backbone of the Catholic Church. There’d been the other jobs in the community. Before her sciatica made it impossible, Mary used to do life-saving work for Home Start, basket-weaving with the blind, and seats on both civil parish councils and pastoral parish councils.
This time, in the now much less well cleaned back of the church, Mary resorted to using her walking stick to create some sort of order amongst the hastily deposited packages on the floor. Once the new chairman of the Pastoral Parish Council (who’d brought along his wife and daughter to show willing) joined in they eventually managed 50 boxes for male asylum seekers between them.
“I was late for my bridge game,” she told me. “I told them I had been packing winter boxes for asylum seekers.” “Oh you don’t want to do that, Mary,” said her host. “It will only encourage them!”
Boxes
We wondered where these rather hurriedly conceived boxes might end up. Maybe some might go to the 300 men on the Bibby Stockholm barge in the middle of a bleak, abandoned naval base, Portland Harbour, on the south coast.
Ever since Napoleonic times they’ve kept prisoners there. My husband knows, he grew up there. The Bibby Stockholm is itself one vast floating wintry accommodation box repurposed in 1972 to contain 200 single little cabin-boxes.
It’s been all over Europe as some form of detention centre. The men currently on board in England have to suffer airport-style security and body searches simply to step outside for a cigarette, and the only way out of your box-within-a -box is by bus for daily exercise.
The British government’s dream is for the barge box to eventually hold 500 male asylum seekers. These men are seeking asylum. They have applied for protection as refugees and are waiting for their request to be processed. Many have been tortured.
The 1951 Geneva Convention recognises that people fleeing persecution may have to use irregular means in order to travel for the specific purpose of seeking asylum. There is no such thing as an illegal asylum seeker. The latest figures from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees for the end of 2022 – before the war in Gaza – showed 108.4 million forcibly displaced.
Some of them are being sheltered in the world’s poorest nations. Most want to stay as close as possible to their home.
Refugee
Mary had brought a book for me. Refugee for Life. She told me it was written by a man in Malawi she had got to know after he married a close friend. Innocent Magambi is now in his 40s.
He has spent almost all his life as a refugee in countries close to his own. I discovered that Innocent was born in the Congo to refugees from Burundi – a country plagued with the same Tutsi-Hutu ethnic cleansing as its neighbour Rwanda – and for good reason was given the nickname Innocent in his birth camp.
His wife, Florisa, a professional NGO worker originally from Italy, describes their first meeting in Malawi. “I saw Innocent briefly in 2004, on a visit to Dzaleka Refugee Camp. He looked like anyone else there – a match in its matchbox. I recall nothing remarkable about him apart from his hot pink windbreaker, which my mzungu (white person) eyes thought slightly odd for a man.”
But as Florisa discovered, and Innocent’s book makes plain, Innocent is no match in a matchbox. In fact, people come to him because he has always thought out the box. By the time he was 27 years old he’d lived in five different settlements or camps around Lake Tanganyika – in Congo, Tanzania, Zambia and Malawi. Teenage Innocent was ambitious for education, and every time his right to study was cancelled he would run into the woods and howl his anger at God.
But now Innocent is convinced that his ordeal was been God’s way of preparing him for his work today. Through it he’s acquired a unique set of tools to help others living in refugee camps. “The goodness that was done to me,” he writes, “if it ends with me it is a broken chain. If I touch someone I command them to touch someone else and to continue that chain.”
Mary told me that now Innocent has a degree and a passport and is the founder of two organisations in Malawi working with refugees – a not-for-profit to empower through education, and an advocacy organisation to fight for rights so that no refugee is trapped in statelessness.
The non-profit, There is Hope, was deliberately located just outside the camp so that they could offer higher education and income generating activities annually to about 250 people from both the camp and their host community in Malawi.
They assist people to develop the skills needed to help other refugees. It’s a living chain. “I often compare a refugee to a match,” Innocent says. “A match is expected to be in a matchbox. Anyone who discovers a match outside the matchbox will try to put it back in. Anyone who discovers a refugee outside the refugee camp will try to put him back in.”
Challenges
But everything has suddenly become much more difficult for Innocent and his family, Mary went on. Productive refugees, many of them given new skills by There is Hope and long-integrated in society after encouragement from the government, have now been violently forced back into the already overcrowded camp. Many of the women have been raped.
The camp was built for 12,000 and now holds over 52,000. Most recently the government has banned Innocent’s advocacy society from operating inside the camp. Once Innocent never thought he’d get out of the camp, now he’s not allowed back in. I found him on Facebook.
Two days before, he had written, “Despite the fact that we are not allowed to work in the camp, our stance has not and will not change. We will continue to demand accountability from the government and all other institutions working for the welfare of refugees in Malawi.”
The new priest in Mary’s parish happens to be from Africa. He is trying to put Mary and her fellow parishioners back into a pre-Vatican II box: pay, pray, obey. The result is that most of them are leaving. Mary never ever imagined it would come to this but is being forced out.
“I don’t like to talk about it,” she tells me, “because it bothers me.” Ever the master of under-statement. Mary is resourceful in a very different way from Innocent, but she shares his compassion. He will keep being a beacon of hope. She will find somewhere else to shine her gentle light.
But just how many Marys can the Church afford to lose, without impacting directly on human suffering?
Refugee for Life. My journey across Africa to find a place called home by Innocent Magambi with David Aeilts (2015). There is Hope – thereishopemalawi.org. INUA Malawi – inuaadvocacy.org
