Our Story: Two Decades in the Making

In 2007, I was living at Cornerstone, a Housing Co-operative for activists and people who want to change the world. Our house signed up for the Short Stop scheme, hosting destitute asylum seekers for a few nights at a time. Our guests were people of all ages, genders and situations who had risked everything to come over to England and ask for protection. Some people opened up about where they had come from, with harrowing tales of persecution and violence. Others were more reserved. Every one of them was polite, thoughtful and gracious, even though they were all suffering the immense burden of being alone in a strange, cold, wet country, where their data was collected but no help offered. They were told they would have to wait for their claims to be processed – no indication of when – and turned out onto the streets to fend for themselves. They had to sign in at the Immigrations Reporting Centre every week, where there was always the chance they would be seized and taken off to a detention centre or deported.

As a person who has had the privilege of safety and security in my home country, and on top of that the freedom to travel and be welcomed in other places outside my home country, I found the situation they were in shocking and unfair. I became involved with a group called No Borders, which campaigned for the rights of migrants. No Borders had set up a camp in Calais, where they were delivering humanitarian aid to the migrants who had made their way from war-torn countries to seek refuge in the Commonwealth. England, the land of dreams, whose language had been drummed into their alongside their own languages from school age. “When I get there, I will have a home, a job, a wife…” said a young Sudanese man wistfully, holding onto the vision that kept him going through the hungry days and freezing nights near the truck stops.

I was doing a massage course at the time, and was eager to use my new skills to help people. I set up a camping bed and someone made a sort of sort of cubicle with sheets stretched between tents, and offered massages to people who were coming to the counsellors and first aiders. As word got round, people started to bring friends who had injured themselves on or before their journeys, and I soon felt out of my depth. I did my best with what I had, but I knew I needed to do more.

Back home in England, I finished my massage diploma and took a course in Clinical and Remedial Massage Therapy. I started massaging neighbours, shopkeepers, anyone I spoke to, but I was having to bring them all up to my room in the co-op, and it wasn’t the right set-up. At the same time, I started to research how I could offer massage therapy to asylum seekers and refugees here in the UK. I volunteered at the drop-in centre at PAFRAS, in a small back room, but it was not very conducive to safe space or relaxation. I went to the business advice centre that used to be on Chapeltown Road and asked them how I could access funding to rent a space and get the equipment and so on. There was an advisor there, Karim, who is dead now, unfortunately. Karim told me I had to set up a Community Interest Company, and I could get help from Unltd...