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The city church that’s a lifeboat keeping people afloat
A hug greeted Aria when he walked into the Liverpool church described as a lifeboat keeping people above water.
It was a long journey to Liverpool, walking for seven months, running from police and a bear, crossing borders and the Mediterranean. The 31-year-old spent 13 hours drifting in a small boat in the English Channel, thinking he’d die until the crew of a navy vessel reached down and scooped up the 35 passengers trying to reach safety.
Even then, he was sceptical, worried they’d cut his hand off if he held the helping hand – a mental scar from being shot after joining protests in Iran. But he made it onboard, ashore, and eventually, in the middle of the night, to a hotel on the outskirts of Liverpool with other people seeking asylum. He’s called this home since January.
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Asylum seekers living in hotels can’t cook for themselves, they’re not allowed to work, and they have just £9.10 to spend on travel or activities. Aria said: “For people staying all the time in the hotel, that’s horrible. I can see some of my friends become quiet and quiet and quiet.
“I can see some of them sitting in the corner of the hotel’s yard, not talking at all. For 10 hours, they sit in the corner of the yard. Especially the ones who left their families, their wives, their children, they become anxious, and they easily fight over nothing. Really simple matters make them angry. It’s hard.”
Aria took his roommate to the gym to give him something to do. Now he goes every morning at 8am. He took another man, missing his wife and baby girl, to the Red Cross to give him a home and a chance to volunteer. Now he sees a smile on his face.
For Aria, his own lifeline has been Asylum Link, a charity based in St Anne’s Church on Overbury Street, Edge Hill, offered by its priest who hosts asylum seekers in his own home. Its director, Ewan Roberts, said: “We’re one of the only places in Liverpool where asylum seekers can say, ‘This is mine, this is our place’.”
Aria told the ECHO: “The first time I came, the first person I saw was Rory, with the biggest smile on his face. He hugged me and welcomed me. I felt like I was home. It makes me think I can be part of these people. It’s very inspiring when I see these people, especially Ewan. He’s a very amazing person, as a friend, even like a father. You can belong.”
Rory Goldring, who leads the charity’s volunteering project, Action Asylum, was running around making sure things ran smoothly for the charity’s 20th anniversary celebrations in Ullet Road Church near Sefton Park. The Unitarian church was so full the doors were closed to new arrivals hoping to hear a mix of cultures, languages and styles in music, speech and film by asylum seekers.
Aria sang in a choir, along with the charity’s director Ewan Roberts and people who travelled from Crosby and Kirkby and over the water. Living his dream of singing on stage was a beautiful moment for Aria. He said: “It let me express my emotions, and even forget my old pain and learnt to live in the moment.
“When you see other people around you laughing, with smiles on their faces, that gives you lots of joy, and you learnt to let things go and share the moment with them.”
Ewan, a former primary school teacher, started teaching English to people seeking asylum in 2002. The Labour government had just introduced a dispersal system, where asylum seekers are sent across the country to live in various forms of accommodation in places where, often, they know no one.
Liverpool and the North West have been major destinations for dispersal ever since. Asylum Link Merseyside was formed in 2002 to support people going through that system. At that time, asylum seekers could work, or sign on at the job centre while they looked for work.
But things started to change after the Iraq War brought a surge in people seeking sanctuary in Britain, and with it came a change in the asylum system. People were no longer allowed to work while they waited for the Home Office to decide on their claim.
Ewan said: “[The government] decided they wanted a different system. Asylum seekers were housed separately, they weren’t allowed to work, they got different benefits. Everything’s gone downhill since then, and so we’ve arrived at this horrible point today where they’re going to start putting people into camps and barges.
“It’s awful, it’s grinding. The people we’ve seen here tonight are the resilient ones, the ones who have managed to grab hold of the lifeboat that is Asylum Link and keep themselves above water. But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people out there who will never ever make it to our door.
“It feels so unfair, because you can see people have a lot to give, whether it’s through art, whether it’s through volunteering. There’s a whole raft of people out there who we’ll never ever meet, who’ll never have something constructive to do – surgeons, nurses, doctors, dentists.”
Asylum Link’s services expanded and evolved to meet the changing needs of a growing number of people moving through the changed asylum system. Now it has 100 volunteers and occupies more than 20 rooms, including a kitchen and hall, across three floors.
It serves hot meals to roughly 100 people per day, it runs an LGBT+ rock climbing group, a cycling group, and a gardening club. It distributes clothes and emergency food packages. Its caseworkers help people navigate a complicated and isolating system. There’s even a volunteering scheme, Action Asylum, with beach clean-ups and litter picks, funded by the Big Lottery Fund and involving groups in other cities like Cardiff, Leeds and Sheffield
Teeman is a Christian pastor who fled Pakistan when extremist groups tried to kill him after he baptised people. He said: “I’ve found Asylum Link very helpful. It’s helped people a lot with clothes and food. The environment is awesome and the food is so good. All the staff are very kind. I highly appreciate the caseworkers as well. There’s a music class, and I love music – music is my life.”
Ashkan, from Iran, sang at the anniversary event at Ullet Road Church. He uses his Farsi and English to help other asylum seekers as a translator. If it wasn’t for Asylum Link, he’d have nothing to do. He said: “If I stay at home, I’d be depressed. It’s a very hard situation when you’re in a country and your family aren’t with you, so I try to improve my English, communicate with others, and be a helpful and useful person in the community.”
The charity offers people hope while their lives are in limbo. But the situation looks set to get worse for asylum seekers in the UK. Decision-making stalled around 2018, dropping off long before claims for asylum surged, leaving thousands waiting months or years for decisions on their fate.
Now the Conservative government is making it harder for people who arrive the “wrong” way, people like Aria who arrive on small boats they’re forced to board by the closure of safe routes to the UK.
The government is determined to send thousands of people 4,000 miles away to Rwanda – a country whose government is accused of torture, kidnap and other human rights abuses – instead of processing their asylum claims here in Britain.
It plans to house 1,800 people on a barge moored on the Wirral, and another 500 on a 222-room barge owned by a Liverpool-based company, Bibby Marine. This Liverpool-owned barge was linked with reports of rape and abuse on board, and at least one death, when it was used to detain asylum seekers in the Netherlands.
A spokesperson for the company said: “Bibby Marine is a provider of practical, safe, and comfortable accommodation solutions for a wide range of clients across the globe. Due to legal agreements, we cannot provide any details on individual charter agreements.”
Ewan said: “People are going to be kettled on there. They’re not going to have anything to do stuck on a metal hulk, disconnected from what’s around them. What the government seems to rely on is us charities all going, ‘We’ll help’, because we’re nice and we’ve got good hearts. But that makes the system function, and it shouldn’t.”
He described the asylum system as “utterly dysfunctional”, a mess he blames on the government. Ewan said: “We can only do this to asylum seekers and refugees if we think they are lesser than ourselves, if they are somehow not worthy of the care and attention that everybody else is entitled to. On a human level, that feels just morally wrong.”
Behind the scenes, the work of Asylum Link and other charities continues. They take the small victories where they find them. Ewan said: “One of the best things that happened to us was we had our best table tennis player poached by another team in the league.
“At the time I was so angry, ‘How dare they entice him to Maghull’, but then I realised that’s perfect because they don’t see him as an asylum seeker anymore, he’s a table tennis player.
“Once you’ve met an asylum seeker, you realise there’s nothing particularly scary about them. The images you get in the media and on television are these shadowy figures sneaking across borders, and that’s part of it, but it’s also somebody’s mum, their dad, sister, brother.
“Once you realise it’s a human being you’re talking about – not this weird, abstract figure – it’s easy to relate, it’s easy to talk to and cook for a table tennis player.”
That’s what the event at Ullet Road Church was all about – celebrating people’s talents and achievements, introducing people to others from different communities, and showing they stand together and aren’t alone.
Emma Leaper, a social worker who volunteers at Asylum Link, said: “There was an incredibly outpouring of love. It was very emotional because some of the people I’ve seen performing have had really difficult times.
“We’ve come into contact with them at Asylum Link because they’ve needed help with something, so to see them being themselves, expressing themselves, and having the crowd respond, was just magical. It was so empowering for people.”
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