Blog

19/01/2018

Don't miss this week's blog, in it Betty Gillick of the Motherwell Justice and Peace Group tracks the events which lead her to welcoming and supporting refugees from Syria into her community. A truly inspiring read.

How can it be that such a tragedy in Syria could end up bringing me such joy?

I ask myself this question often as I get to know the Syrian people who have come to Airdrie.

Rewind.

September 2014 Motherwell Diocesan Justice and Peace group. Meeting with Bishop Toal.

We are overwhelmed as the tragedy of refugees fleeing SYRIA unfolds.

We feel helpless.

March 2015 Diocesan Justice and Peace meeting.

I say I will email my local North Lanarkshire councillors and ask NLC to consider taking 50 Syrian refugees.

April 2015 Councillors respond favourably. Matter referred to the chief executive.

May 2015 A meeting is arranged with a housing official.

June 2015 Meeting takes place and includes the council official dealing with the Congolese resettlement.

We are given a positive reception. They don't say yes but they don't say no. The matter will be put to all of the councillors.

September 2nd 2015 A dead Syrian baby is washed up on a beach.

September 7th 2015 David Cameron declares Britain will take 20,000 refugees from Syria over 5 years.

NLC decide to take 120 refugees. 42 will be resettled in Airdrie and Coatbridge.

The local community mobilises to welcome the Syrian families.

November 2015 12 families arrive in Airdrie and Coatbridge.

December 2015 The Syrian Ladies in Airdrie join the Culture Cafe.

It is not a cafe in the usual sense. It is a place where women of different cultures can come together, get to know each other, share their cultures and learn different skills.

This was to be place where I started to get to know the Syrian ladies.

It was brought to my attention that one of the ladies’ teenage son had not yet been placed in school due to his additional needs. His parents were becoming very distressed as the long confinement at home was seriously affecting his behaviour.

I suggested that I could take him along to the Coatbridge ALMA club (a diocesan club for adults with additional needs). His mum was agreeable. This was the start of a friendship with the whole family, whom I now visit regularly.

Eventually a befriender group was established. Each family was assigned 1 or 2 befrienders. I became a regular visitor to the local Mosque where befrienders would meet to support each other.

The Holy Spirit moved through our community, inspiring and guiding our faith groups and people of goodwill to support NLC in the resettlement and integration of our Syrian neighbours. People helped in all manner of ways from organising social occasions to practical help like transport, donating nappies and any extras they might need.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my involvement with the Syrian people. I have found it humbling, fascinating and uplifting. However I can never forget the terror that has been visited on these people. They are still processing the horrors of war.

Only after you have built up trust with them will they confide in you.
It can be difficult to be the keeper of such confidences.

Some of the Syrians living in Coatbridge chose to speak publicly about their experiences. They spoke of constant bombing, gas attacks, torture and imprisonment.

Their testimonies were harrowing.

Two years on and the Syrians are doing their best to settle into life in Airdrie and Coatbridge.

Syrian weans sound like Scottish weans.

Mums and dads are improving their English at college.

Some of the young men have found employment.

Some have their British driving licence and are driving.

The Jasmine Syrian Scott’s Association has been established.

NLC have resettled more Syrian families in Bellshill, Motherwell and Cumbernauld.

However these Syrians have heavy hearts full of fear for those left behind in Syria and in Refugee camps.

Listen to their Voices

The international community must find a peaceful solution to this crisis.

Britain must resettle more Syrian refugees (the promise to resettle 20,000 has not yet been reached).

It must be made simpler for refugees to register with the UNHCR.

A Call to Peace Makers

Get informed.

Get active

Pray for peace

Ask your local council to get involved in the resettlement scheme.

Don't let the government off the hook.

Welcome the stranger.

Betty Gillick. Motherwell Diocesan Justice Peace Group

12/01/2018

Signs of Hope

Sr Isabel Smyth writes our latest blog and reflects on the signs of hope that are all around should we choose to see them.

As we start the New Year it’s good to consider beginnings, to take stock of our lives and look back with gratitude and maybe even regret while facing the future with hope and perhaps even courage.

It’s good to look back and give thanks for the good things that have happened to us and please God there have been good things. In spite of much of the negativity that we hear in the news there’s much to be grateful for in our world today.

Iain Macwhirter, the political editor of the Scottish newspaper, The Herald, recently acknowledged that many good news stories never get attention in the press. He set out some of the good things that have happened and perhaps been missed:

extreme poverty has fallen by 70% and the UN has announced that extreme poverty should be eradicated within the next decade; the number of terrorist atrocities has fallen massively in the past forty years and is in decline across the world; the UN has adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, a great result for the Nobel Prize Winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICAN; the move to renewable energy rather than fossil fuels. Last year 54% of Scotland’s gross electricity consumption was produced by renewable energy. All this is good news and a sign of hope that things can and do change.

In our own small worlds there are also signs of hope. I’ve always been taken by the idea of kingdom spotting – that is looking for signs of the Kingdom of God around us – courage, determination in the face of difficulties, justice, compassion, service, love, struggle to be the best we can be. There are lots of examples of people recycling, caring for sick and aged relatives, caring for children and those with disabilities of all sorts, campaigning for justice and simply living a good, wholesome life in their families and among their friends and neighbours. There’s a lot of good out there if we have eyes to see it.

But it’s not perfect by any manner of means. There’s much still to be done on an international scale as well as a local and personal one. This, I suppose, is where New Year’s resolutions come in. I’m not too keen on them as they’re usually difficult to keep and can become a burden. What I am keen on is looking to the future and realising that we can play our part in the future of our world and our planet – not so much by setting ourselves specific goals but by changing our mind set and way of looking at life. I would want myself and all of us to realise that this world will unfold as a result of our choices and actions, that we hold in our hands the future of our race and our planet, that we can offer one another and creation the gift of loving kindness which recognises that we are all brothers and sisters and that the well-being of one affects the well-being of all. The choice is ours. Will we, as Rabbi Rami Shapiro asks in his book, The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness, “engage this moment with kindness or with cruelty, with love or with fear, with generosity or scarcity, with a joyous heart or an embittered one?”

The Rabbi tells us that this is our choice and that no one can make it for us. If we choose kindness, love, generosity, and joy, he says, then we will discover in that choice the Kingdom of God, heaven, nirvana, this-worldly salvation. If we choose cruelty, fear, scarcity, and bitterness, then we will discover in that choice the hellish states of which so many religions speak …...Heaven and hell are both inside of us.

It is our choice that determines just where we and our world will reside.

originally published in interfaith journeys http://www.interfaithjourneys.net/

05/01/2018

Lonely

In this weeks blog Justice and Peace Scotland’s vice chair Marian Pallister reflects on the poor and lonely who are always with us - and not just a conscience-salving ‘project’ for Christmas.

Back in the 1980s, when Mrs Thatcher’s government and hard winters were making it tough, the statistics relating to deaths due to hypothermia rose dramatically. I was a journalist in Glasgow at the time and to provide some background to the reasons for this statistical spike I asked the Meals on Wheels teams to take me into the homes of the elderly.

One lady I visited sticks in my mind. She was typical of those on the Meals on Wheels circuit, but I visited her on December 18 – my birthday and hers. As we chatted and this shared birthday emerged, we did a bit of bonding. Her circumstances took me back to the many elderly relatives I had visited with my mother in my childhood. Like theirs, this lady’s home was an icebox. In the post war years, such conditions were ‘normal’, but this was the 1980s and my new friend told me that she got up in the morning and put on a small gas fire for a couple of hours. Her lunch was delivered around 11.30am by the WRVS team. She ate it while it was hot, put the fire out and went to bed – she couldn’t afford to burn the fire any longer than that and bed was the warmest place. For the rest of her lonely day and night.

Our readers were very generous and food parcels piled up over Christmas in response to the articles I’d written. In the early new year, I asked if I could take something to this lady and have another chat with her. I was devastated when the Meals on Wheels people told me she had died. I was convinced that the loneliness, as well as the cold, had added her to that winter’s cruel statistics.

Fast forward to 2017. Our Justice and Peace group at St Margaret’s in Lochgilphead had suggested a range of actions our parish could take in response to Pope Francis’ designation of November 19 2017 as the first World Day of the Poor. He made it clear this was to be interaction, not simply a matter of a second collection after Mass.

One of our suggestions was to volunteer with a local organisation called Grub’s Up, which provides Christmas lunch in a local hall as well as delivering lunch boxes and gifts to people who can’t get out. I was one of a small army of volunteers (of all faiths and none) who spent a couple of hours each day over the long Christmas weekend making this event work. The Grub’s Up people masterminded the operation and we decorated the hall, wrapped gifts, set out tables, delivered lunch boxes, cooked, washed up, cleaned up – and enjoyed the company of people who wouldn’t otherwise have spoken to a soul over Christmas.

One of my tasks on Christmas Day was to go with a ‘buddy’ to deliver a lunch box to a gentleman living in an isolated rural spot. Invited into his home I had a flashback to that winter in the 1980s. The house was icy and the gentleman explained that he lit the fire after lunch then went to bed around 8pm when the heat had risen through to his bedroom upstairs. He has a good neighbour, but was alone over Christmas.

The 45 minutes we spent talking revealed an interesting and complex character who’d be good to share time with. It’s up to me to make the effort. Will my ‘interaction’ with the poor and lonely be a one-off conscience salver, or the start of a rewarding friendship? As always, Pope Francis has set us a challenge. Donations of money or baked beans to food banks keep the ‘poor and lonely’ at arm’s length, marginalised and isolated from society. But they are our brothers and sisters and that challenging word ‘interaction’ is one I’m thinking about very seriously as we start a new year.

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