Connecting with the Countryside

It is not often that at half six in the morning that on the radio you can hear a programme that surprises and inspires. This Sunday morning I was up early enough to hear a broadcast of “On your Farm”. While I don't normally make a great effort to listen to this, I would not normally think of it as heart warming and inspiring.

What made this so uplifting was that this working hill farm in Hereford has connections with the Somali community in Britain, and was enabling people here escaping from the civil war to connect with the countryside.

It has long concerned me that people who are seeking refuge in Britain, are effectively dumped in deprived inner city areas. Not least because so many of the people who are escaping conflict, persecution and oppression so often come from a rural environment.

While this may well be where the housing is, normally cheap and poor quality too, and the facilities to process these asylum seekers are, it must add to the trauma of loosing your country to loose your countryside too. Further, often the location where these refuges are placed, the local indigenous populations are frequently hostile to asylum seekers and immigrants in general.

While I know that there are a few people who try and abuse the asylum system, the majority are genuinely escaping from a genuine fear. Whenever I hear of the bull that is reported about asylum seekers, I think of the reaction of Woodie Guthrie when he travelled from Oklahoma to California during the great Dust Bowl. There were signs and posts on the state border telling the Oakies to go home. Woodie Guthrie's reaction was when “I did not know I needed a passport to travel in my own country.”

Far to often the refuges face extra pressures based upon the lies and misinformation about what they receive. Like getting all the jobs, all the best houses, living off benefits etc. There is a shortage of social housing, and as I have reported here myself, the British government has adopted a racist housing policy as a result of this myth. Therefore often refuges end up living in overcrowded housing owned by private landlords who are milking the state for the rent. Further asylum seekers are not allowed to work, I know that some do but often where employers are exploiting them and illegally not paying the legal minimum wage. So asylum seekers are not taking all the jobs. One of the aspects of this that I personally find frustrating is that the people that normally are most vociferous about this are lazy benefit bandits that spend most of the day drinking in pubs and working hard avoiding work.

On two sites where I have had an Allotment Garden there have been the wish to have community gardens for refuges, the hostility has been really unpleasant. On both the sites there were vacant plots so it was not as though anyone was stopping others from getting a garden, but there really is a strongly racist mindset in the North East that is really distasteful.

Because of the way that asylum seekers are refused access to work and money, personally I would have thought that allowing refugees to grow their own food would at least have been humane. Further, it would have allowed people who have been traumatised by fleeing their home and displaced into an urban environment would have been able to make that connection with the land and the soil.

This is what I found so uplifting about the programme I heard, the people from Somalia were making a connection with the countryside. It was helping people to come alive.

Here is a link to the programme and I hope that my overseas reader can listen if they wish.