Religious education and the refugee crisis

‘Can you wait here, please.’

‘Thank you. Line up, please.’

‘A line please.’

Repeating these words, encouraging an orderly queue is part of any teacher’s work to ensure the safety of a large number of students as they wait for lunch or are about to go into assembly. But this is not crowd control of Year 7s on a Friday afternoon before registration (although one or two of those waiting look about the same age). This is a line of refugees, mainly from Sudan, waiting for second-hand coats on a sand dune in Calais.

One of them has a book. As he approaches in the line I ask him, ‘What book is that?’

He shows me the cover of a Bible. I inquire ‘Are you Christian?’

He says ‘No.’

His friend interjects ‘A man gave it to him, he has it just for information.’

The young man with a book has some black polished prayer beads with Arabic writing on them around his neck which he says, ‘Is his friend.’

Not wanting to ask him more, I ask him to move on to collect his coat (is it a memorial, a lucky charm or does it belong to his friend?). There are more than 50 others waiting.

Shivering, hungry, and possessing all but nothing, these people have escaped violence and instability to find just that, 32 miles from the UK. They face cold, hunger, crime and disease in the camp, groups of vigilantes outside it, and an ever tighter cordon of riot police who permanently populate the barbed wire- topped security fences to stop the scramble for the trucks or tunnel.

Another man in the line asks me ‘Where are you from?’

‘England’, I reply, and I see an expression in his eyes that is quite beyond words. It is a look that captures brokenness, desperation, hope, and envy.

‘It’s not as nice as France’ I say.

As he looks into my eyes incredulously, I wonder what he sees. For my part, I see a glimpse of a far crueler world, a world unimaginable.

He says, ‘England! Sudan!’ and gestures with his hand reciprocally – presumably hinting at some old colonial ties, some shared cultural connections.

A young teenager behind me shouts ‘England, go back Syria!’ My colleague, a trainee nurse on vacation, doles out coats of varying quality in an impeccably caring manner. As we walk back along the muddy track through tents and shacks she tells me she is a Seventh Day Adventist. From an immigrant family some generations ago, she explains she is here because it could have been her.

That was the day after Boxing Day. A few days later I walked straight onto the ferry. The faces of the Afghans, Sudanese, Iraqis, Eritreans and Syrians I left there haunt me still. I thought I had encountered poverty before, but these refugees must be the least regarded of all people, including the least regarded of refugees. The Calais ‘jungle’ and other camps nearby have a different status than most camps across Europe. It remains so squalid because, at the behest of the British and French governments, no NGO has been invited to deal with the situation. Across the sand dune I saw some newly painted shipping containers glint in the sunlight behind a fence, part of a new initiative which appears to put a worrying degree of permanence to this situation, which is reminiscent of something from a bad, but not too distant, European past.

‘Crisis’ is a word that indicates a short term problem. But there will be longer term challenges for both refugees and European societies. Some of these challenges have everything to do with religious education. One issue that bothers the public is that of ‘integration.’ With a million new arrivals in Europe this summer, it is clear there is a need for mutual cultural and religious understanding. I admire the Muslim refugee I saw walking with a Bible ‘for information.’ It was in a language he did not know well and despite his motivation for carrying it, he was presumably given it in attempt to convert him. I admired him because to be informed about religions, even when you have nothing else, can be so important. And in this crisis, information, and correct information at that, is difficult to obtain through political, media (and in the camp, rumour) smoke screens. That goes for greater understanding of the religious orientations and principles that are held by refugees, and refugees’ understandings of the populations in the European countries to which they have fled. What is needed is more than information, however, partly because integration is more than one sided. We need to know how it feels to encounter the other, especially when that is difficult. It is for this reason perhaps that the Calais camps attract hundreds of volunteers who, because of the trauma of news headlines, want to be in human touch with refugees, face to face and hand to hand.

Religious education can offer more than knowing how to encounter the ‘other’ and what that ‘other’ may believe, do and think. It can offer the very grounding of who we are and what we can hold on to when we cannot make sense of something. Working with volunteers at the Calais camp I met Christians, Jews and Muslims who saw what they were doing as religiously motivated. I also met atheists who saw their ethical motivation as equally powerful.

The volunteers came from all walks of life: an actor, a teacher, a model, a writer, an ex-professional sportsman, a nurse, health workers, a musician, chefs, builders and unemployed people. Like the refugees, they all had their own reasons for being there. It was one of my favourite RE lessons that had prompted me. For RE GCSE courses, and for a scheme of work on Year 8 parables, I encourage classes to act out the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25: 31-46). This can be achieved by safely sitting a Son of Man on a chair on a desk, and sending sheep and goats to him to be sorted to his left or right, following the text. There is something about the imagery of this parable that captures the imaginations of the most disinterested of students, particularly when they are told that in Jesus’ time separating sheep and goats was difficult because they looked so similar. But this parable, and other parts of the Gospel, are to be used with caution. Ideas like this are so dangerous (and they are difficult to keep non-confessional.) To the young, they can stand a political situation on its head. In Calais, and in other camps around Europe, there are real imprisoned people, real strangers, really in need of clothes, something to eat and something to drink. Asking students to abandon their preconceptions and to consider whether they are sheep or goats, may bring RE to life, but in this case it could also bring it into opposition with much of mainstream opinion.

Photographs are of a make-shift Eritrean Church in the Calais Jungle, by kind permission of J. Jason Mitchell.

Lesson Modules from the UN Refugee Agency can be found at http://www.unhcr.org/pages/4ab356d36.html