Little Amal is not so little! She is 3.5 metres tall and represents the 32 MILLION children who have been forced to leave their homes – 32 million child refugees. She has been walking across Europe to tell their story, and she walked through part of Canterbury today – but she didn’t come past our house. Her entourage did.
This link is to the children’s activity pack on Amal’s website, which is a good introduction to the issues she is drawing to our attention.
I cannot help but remember the refugees in my class at primary school: fleeing from oppression in Poland, Hungary, Ukraine. It seems to me that they were accepted as one with us. They have contributed to this country since the 1950’s. A contrast to the view Mrs Turnstone heard this afternoon, that events such as Amal merely serve to encourage more migrants to make for our shores in small boats.
The neighbour clearly had never been near an open boat in a storm. The one I was in we beached and found it stove in the next morning, when the lake had risen much higher than we expected after abandoning ship.
People do not do this to their children to free-load on our country.
At least spare some sympathy for the traumatised children.
Oh hear us when we cry to thee For those in peril on the sea.
The Empire builders drew a straight line in the sand dividing Syria and Iraq, and all those similarly ruled boundaries in Canada and Australia. Was anyone asked would they rather be in Manitoba or Saskatchewan? Thank God those boundaries cause little friction.
