Walking along with suffering
I’ve been volunteering for a couple of years with the Jesuit Refugee Service, which aims to support refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. The JRS, and support for refugees and immigrants in general, is one of the activities that our conference of the SVP focuses on.
I’m one of three people in our group who volunteer as “social visitors.” Before the lockdown, that meant regularly travelling out to the Immigration Detention Centres near Heathrow, Europe’s largest. There are two centres, called Harmondsworth and Colnbrook, where several hundred young men (and a very small number of women) are held indefinitely, often for several weeks or months, pending deportation or granting of asylum. They are usually alone, with no family or friends to visit them. My job is mostly to just talk with them and treat them as people, not as cases to be adjudicated.