‘If I am loved, I love in return, which opens me to other humans, who also are loved.’ Photo: by Austin Kehmeier on Unsplash
All work and no pay? Anne M Jones reflects on her volunteering journey
‘Unless one is a prophet or a mystic, none of us can act alone.’
It was collecting empty jam jars from neighbours that introduced me to the fun and adrenalin of volunteering. I was nine years old, helping with a summer fayre run by Brownies ‘in aid of poor children in Africa’. Fast forward many decades, and, like so many retired people, volunteering has given meaning to my life. This statement reveals needs on both sides of the equation – an equation that is usually very unequal. This became painfully clear during the pandemic; everyone is familiar with the aching gaps that emerged in societies everywhere.
During the paralysis of the early days of the lockdown, a small group of Friends at Euston Meeting continued to meet as ‘Sanctuary Group’, wondering how to be helpful within all the restrictions. From this emerged a determination to work on the Community Sponsorship scheme. This was set up in 2015 in conjunction with the UN Refugee Agency and the Home Office, to assist refugees fleeing from the war in Syria. Like all good initiatives, it has received much criticism.
To the age-old question ‘Does one sit back and comment, or rush out to meet a need?’, I respond by rushing out. Others calmly and patiently wait for the right time and moment. Until March 2020, sitting at my rickety sewing machines in the Calais refugee camp made me feel better, and I told myself I would soon be back. At least in the cathedral pall of the warehouse there, sewing a coat or repairing a zip torn out during a police raid, I was expressing solidarity with seriously-oppressed refugees. With the first lockdown came other opportunities, such as making scrubs, thanks to cheerful young people delivering materials.
But the words of one of my tutors at university have been going through my head: ‘What would happen to do-gooders like you if there were no dispossessed people to help? You should be out there fighting against the capitalist system.’ As it turned out, volunteers like me were actually offering unpaid labour to fill holes left by a government whose shambolic planning had created lethal gaps – gaps through which far too many people fell. Does that invalidate the goodwill that maintained our own sense of purpose when the scrubs were collected? I don’t think so, and, unknown to me, deep inside, other work was happening, seeds germinating in darkness.
Quaker thinking begins with seeing ‘that of God’ in every person. It is a good starting place for a faith, but, when I was no longer seeing people in person, I began pondering its limitations. This way of thinking places the onus on the individual to see ‘that of God’ in someone else. I considered the retreats of another faith group I had encountered online. There, the opening premise was invariably, ‘God loves you’. This approach follows the line that, if I am loved, I love in return, which opens me to other humans, who also are loved.
This new dimension became a second springboard for me, helping me to express the meaning of my own life. Reading about activists such as Dorothy Day and Andrea Needham had already confirmed for me that my impulse towards service was not to be shied away from. I should continue to follow it as long as I had health and strength, two assets I am grateful to still be blessed with.
Faith is about the things unseen, as the victims of terrible oppression in El Salvador attest, or the Muslims I spoke with in the Calais ‘jungle’, who always ended a conversation with ‘God is good, In shaa Allah, things will work out’. Viktor E Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning also speaks to me about the comfort, importance and sustenance of faith.
Some Friends know all about the gentle art of patience and holding faith, when ‘there comes a time and a place’, about listening to the ‘still small voice of calm’. This is something I have had to learn.
When, after sixteen months, the prospect of returning to Calais glimmered into reality, I booked my hostel and ferry ticket, and paid for the required Covid PCR test. But a few hours before my train to the ferry, I learned that France demanded PCR tests before departure, and it dawned on me that, though I might arrive, my return was not so certain if my test in France was questionable. I would have had to remain there in quarantine. Testing alone was expensive, and quarantine in a hotel, even the cheapest, would be wasted money. So, at 6.30am, after a pleasant encounter with a very kind ticket inspector, I turned back, feeling gratitude and that somehow I had encountered something of God in the everyday.
Later, when a small window opened for return, and I determined to travel to France again and to express solidarity with the priests on hunger strike, the warehouse had temporarily closed, and then Covid struck me.
So I wait, and bide my time, with varying moods of grace or inner weeping at the injustices all around. Unless one is a prophet or a mystic (and many of those are not recognised until years after their demise) none of us can act alone. Involvement in the Community Sponsorship scheme calls for strengths of multifarious kinds, and is structured in a way that is cumbersome, time-consuming and costly. But ultimately it is as safe a way as is possible for a family to be re-housed from a refugee camp in Syria or Jordan to London. (It does not take much imagination to consider the alternatives, and the hope and despair of those involved.) It is a scheme that can reach deep into a local community, with all the potential benefits inherent in mixed communities, not least the crumbling of racism and prejudice.
‘Friendly Welcome’, the name of our group engaged in the scheme, announced in March that, through it, it would be possible to settle a vulnerable refugee family into the community, with support to access education and employment (see ‘Quaker project welcomes refugees to Camden’, 24 March). All that work, over two years, for one family? Well, it takes two people to produce a baby, and a whole village to raise a child.
Maybe the family will not like it here. Maybe they will be bruised by our systems, and shocked by the sight of so many homeless people on our city streets (several refugees have mentioned this to me). That will be for them to discern. This does not alter the faith in hoping for good things to happen for a family in deepest privation.
The beauty of the scheme is the vision of a safe place for refugees. Also, that once all the bureaucracy and approval are in place, the organisation can house another family, then another (a scheme in Enfield is on its third).
But ultimately it is about faith, and a certainty that ‘all will be well, and all manner of things will be well’.
