Life as a refugee support volunteer with it's occasional victories and frequent defeats.

Occasional Victories is a place for links, news, rants and raves about Refugee related issues.

If you would like to contribute just drop me an email at carigeen(a)yahoo.com

 
From the Irish Independent

Baby bleeds to death after circumcision goes wrong

It was bound to happen somewhere and it's only chance that this did not happen here.

We went close to it back in May.
Better get a meeting arranged with local hospital staff and advertise that proper circumcision facilities are available.


posted by Carigeen at Thursday, August 21, 2003

 
Dr. K. L. Chowdhury
Poems by a Hindu Refugee from Kashmir

Of Gods, Men and militants

As always the first targets are the people who dare to love across the boundaries.
And, again as always, the 'respectable' people find a reason to keep quiet.

......
But in the dead of the following night
they swooped on the house once again
and the next morning his body was found
side by side with that of a female
with signs of torture and bullet holes
and a note staked into their breasts -
‘Beware the wages of sin.’

‘It seems the righteous warriors,’
the neighbour was forced to conclude
‘must have gathered fresh evidence
of this irreligious alliance
between two persons of different faiths,
and punished them in accordance
with their scrupulous ordinance.’


posted by Carigeen at Wednesday, August 20, 2003

 
Protestants 'wiped from culture'

Frankie Gallagher of Ulster Policy Research Group speaking at Glencree Summer School in Wicklow.

NORTHERN Protestants suffer the same social and historical exclusion as refugees and asylum seekers in the Republic (reg required)

An interesting, and uncomfortable, point of view.
Northerners, and the urban business and professional classes had the numbers, in one case,
and the money, in the other case, that enabled them to survive in a Catholic world.

I remember a gentle, kind, and almost totally forgotten people, who had neither numbers or money.
These were the Protestant small farmers and craftsmen of the West.

As a child in rural Sligo, in the late '50s and early '60's, I lived just across the valley from the Protestant church.

At 4 each Sunday afternoon, a small black Anglia would creep up to the church, the bell would ring and
three elderly people would make their way to the service.
As the years went by, the three became two, and then, the bell rang no more.
Eventually the church roof fell in and now the ruins are floodlit to give that undistinguished village a focus point for passing tourists.

Later, I learned about the destruction that powerful people inflict on the powerless.
The Ne Tremere decree required that children of a mixed-marriage be brought up as Catholics.
The parish had Catholic families with Protestant names, like Broder and Powell.
Young men changed their religion because they could not afford to import a wife from Belfast.

They were outsiders, respected and admired in many ways, but still definitely outsiders.
'Our' side had won the battle and they were the last remains of the English domination that were slowly ebbing away.
Only now do I realise the loss of culture that happened then.

The Other side

Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds
a neighbour laid his shadow
on the stream, vouching

“It’s as poor as Lazarus, that ground”
and brushed away
among the shaken leafage:

I lay where his lea sloped
to meet our fallow,
nested on moss and rushes,

my ear swallowing
his fabulous, biblical dismissal,
that tongue of chosen people.

When he would stand like that
on the other side, white haired,
swinging his blackthorn

at the marsh weeds,
he prophesied above our scraggy acres,
then turned away

towards his promised furrows
on the hill, a wake of pollen
drifting to our bank, next season’s tares.

.......

Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging
mournfully on in the kitchen
we would hear his step round the gable

though not until after the litany
would the knock come to the door
and the casual whistle strike up

on the doorstep. “A right looking night,”
he might say, “I was dandering by
and says I, I might as well call.”

But now I stand behind him
in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers,
He puts a hand in a pocket

or taps a little tune with the blackthorn
shyly, as if he were party to
lovemaking or a stranger’s weeping.

Should I slip away, I wonder,
or go up and touch his shoulder
and talk about the weather

or the price of grass-seed?

[Seamus Heaney]















posted by Carigeen at Tuesday, August 19, 2003

 
From Today's Guardian....
Destitute: asylum seekers pushed on to the street by an official letter


posted by Carigeen at Monday, August 18, 2003