Travelling in a world of refugees

Reconciling the contrasting journeys of travellers and the migrant.

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

Migrants on a freight train reach for food bags held aloft by people on the track side.

Migrants on La Bestia being passed bags of food and water.

Pequeño Mar, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

I’ll never forget the sight, 10 years ago this month, as I hitchhiked north through Mexico, of dozens of migrants hanging off the side of a goods train as they made their own journeys towards their Promised Land.

Like me, these migrants - of whom there must have been at least 30 - were heading for the United States. Unlike me, they were doing so not for fun but for their futures.

“Come with us!” some shouted, as my wife and I lugged our backpacks towards what we hoped would be our next successful hitchhiking post, having begun our journey seven months prior at the southern tip of Argentina.

We declined the offer, but I wondered then - and still do - whether they had known we were in a different position to them, or had simply assumed us to be in the same metaphorical boat.

Around the same time, a new wave of refugees were making their way westward across Turkey and Europe, in a reversal of my first hitchhiking adventure, which took me eastward from the UK to Malaysia. And again, I found the contrast between the respective circumstances of our two journeys confronting.

There I had been, a post-university thrill-seeker, taking to the road with my best mate to open my eyes to the big wide world beyond these shores, and now six years later, these poor souls were moving in the opposite direction - again, not for fun, but through sheer desperation.

Many were fleeing ISIS, who took control of Mosul while I was hitchhiking through Brazil at the time of the 2014 Football World Cup. My chief concern during those days were the occasions hitchhiking proved less straightforward. On some days, we had to wait hours for a ride. Sometimes, night would set in as we waited, and we were forced to call it a day.

There were times, too, when we fell foul of the law, such as in the States, where a policeman told us off for hitchhiking on the freeway. But undoubtedly the most challenging moment of that trip was the time we ended up back in the same hotel we had been in two days prior, having done a 1,000km round trip only to find ourselves right back where we started.

This came about in Prince George, Canada, after we had been encouraged by a trucker on the so-called “Highway of Tears” to take a different route to our final destination: Alaska. I can still remember the feeling, as I woke up early the next morning, in the very same room of the very same hotel, of such a lot of effort wasted and a deep desire to get moving again as swiftly as possible, if only to enjoy a sense of progress.

No doubt, there have been many refugees who have experienced the same emotions - only, one imagines, with much greater intensity. Perhaps they have been deported back to where they began their journey, or simply sent back to the last country from which they arrived, in the process undoing in their minds and hearts all of the efforts that went in to getting them there.

No doubt, many of these refugees will also have fallen foul of the authorities. Some, will have been detained; others deported. Perhaps some will also have been told off for walking on a highway, or illegally crossing a border, as I myself tried to do between Bangladesh and Myanmar back in 2008 - only to be picked up by a border patrol and taken back to where I’d started again.

Yet, unlike me, I doubt many refugees were offered helping hands by strangers along their way, or at least not so frequently, and I expect many more of them experienced harsh words from passersby than the few jokey thumbs-downs or shouts of “gringos!” that I received on my own journeys.

And while I, with my Great British passport, was able finally to arrive at my goals and to feel the joy of that completion, many refugees will not have been so fortunate. And while I was able eventually to return home and continue my life - in whatever way I saw fit - for many refugees, their own journeys will still be ongoing, and there will still be a lack of clarity regarding what the future may hold.

I always used to say, standing beside the side of the road, that if only we knew how long it would be until the next ride, we needn’t worry. If someone could tell us that in four hours we’d be picked up, or that although we wouldn’t get another ride that day, that on the very next we’d be adopted by a lovely family who would end up taking us with them for 10 days (as happened in northern Argentina), then all our worries would melt away.

I felt the same way during the years in which my wife and I struggled to conceive, post-adventure. Were someone to have told us then that in a few years, we’d have three beautiful boys, we need never have suffered such heartache.

So too for refugees: if only someone was able to tell them when, where and how their journeys would end, they would be able to come to terms with what lay ahead, and to stop feeling so anxious about the many unknowns.

But of course that’s not how life works - whether you’re lucky enough to have been born with a British passport that enables you to see all the world has to offer without a second thought, or whether you’ve had the misfortune of being born in a country within which you find yourself unable to remain.

I have long wrestled with the question of whether my travels were simply a selfish waste of time. Not that they didn’t bring me great joy and truly opened my eyes to the big wide world - they most surely did - but whether I might instead have used that time in some nobler endeavour.

I find encouragement today in knowing that my love of people of different countries - and especially Iran - was birthed during those travels, and that I probably would not be doing the job I am now, had it not been for those experiences. But it doesn’t make it any easier to reconcile the contrasting journeys of travellers and refugees, which although they may share many parallels, also exhibit some stark differences.

Snippet

America

Change

Politics

5 November 2024

3 min read

The utter miracle of disliking an election result

Voting is a profound act of love, argues Luke Bretherton, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Crowd barrier surround empty space at a night time political rally.

After the Harris rally at Georgetown University.

Well, there we have it. It’s done. Donald Trump has won. History has been made.

Today, and for the days to come, there will be celebrations on the streets. There will be weeping on them, too. And that is somewhat of a miracle.

Earlier in the year, I interviewed a political theologian, Professor Luke Bretherton. It was, and still is, the most enlightening conversation about politics I have ever had. It was for an episode of our Re-enchanting podcast, which is apt, because that’s exactly what it did for me. Luke was able to scoop me up out of political disenchantment and remind me just how miraculous of a thing true democracy is – even if, no, especially if, it doesn’t go the way we hoped.

What should you do if you’re feeling bereft about the result of this almighty election?

Well, I should imagine there are a number of things – but one of them could be to acknowledge the imperfect, rare, paradoxical, beauty of such a feeling.

I’ll let Luke explain a little better, shall I? Here’s a snippet from the Re-Enchanting episode (recorded months before this American election), you can find the full episode here.

But, for now, if you should need it, allow Luke’s wise perspective to be a balm for your sad soul.

Politics is really the name for the formation of a common life. We can't survive, let alone, thrive as humans without others, and so, to have any kind of life - let alone a flourishing life – you’ve got to form a common life with others. As soon as you do that, as soon as you try to navigate and negotiate some form of common life, you’re going to come up against people that you dislike and disagree with.

At that point, you have a choice of one of four things: you can either kill them, which of course, appears to be the solution throughout a lot of history. You can make life so difficult that you cause them to flee, you can create a system to coerce them – to get them to do what you want without having to listen to them, without having to negotiate a common life with them. Or you can do politics; you can negotiate some form of common life without killing, coercing or causing to flee. And those really are the only options. We make it very complicated, but that’s really what’s going on.

Are you going to form a common life with people? Or are you going to kill them, coerce them, or cause them to flee? I think Christians should be pretty invested, both for theological reasons and for practical reasons, in the option of doing politics. Part of that politics is what we might call statecraft – laws, bureaucracies, parliaments – but politics is wider, simpler, and more important than that. It’s a social practice through which we form a common life.

And our commonalities may not outweigh our differences… we can have very real differences. As we know from a Christmas dinner, or a thanksgiving meal, the uncle who drives you bonkers is also the person who passes you the Brussels sprouts. So, it’s learning that we can hold tension, that life is complex, that people have multiple loyalties and that politics is the negotiation in the midst of multiple loyalties, ambiguities and tensions. Otherwise, politics dehumanises others and ourselves.

And so, the act of voting is, in itself, an act of loving your neighbour. Because, if you’ve voted, you’re not looking to bomb, torture, or kill in order to get your way.

And this is beautiful.

It’s an extraordinary paradox, it’s called the loyal opposition: if you lose the election, you’re prepared to stand on the opposite benches. You don’t take to the hills because you don’t like the results.

It’s the water we swim in, and so we don’t see the miracle of that, the miracle of agitational solidarity. The notion that I can be utterly opposed to your view on tax deferential policies but I won’t kill you.

That’s a rare thing in human history.

Let’s just take a moment to realise the miracle of that.