Travelling in a world of refugees

Reconciling the contrasting journeys of travellers and the migrant.

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

Migrants on a freight train reach for food bags held aloft by people on the track side.

Migrants on La Bestia being passed bags of food and water.

Pequeño Mar, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

I’ll never forget the sight, 10 years ago this month, as I hitchhiked north through Mexico, of dozens of migrants hanging off the side of a goods train as they made their own journeys towards their Promised Land.

Like me, these migrants - of whom there must have been at least 30 - were heading for the United States. Unlike me, they were doing so not for fun but for their futures.

“Come with us!” some shouted, as my wife and I lugged our backpacks towards what we hoped would be our next successful hitchhiking post, having begun our journey seven months prior at the southern tip of Argentina.

We declined the offer, but I wondered then - and still do - whether they had known we were in a different position to them, or had simply assumed us to be in the same metaphorical boat.

Around the same time, a new wave of refugees were making their way westward across Turkey and Europe, in a reversal of my first hitchhiking adventure, which took me eastward from the UK to Malaysia. And again, I found the contrast between the respective circumstances of our two journeys confronting.

There I had been, a post-university thrill-seeker, taking to the road with my best mate to open my eyes to the big wide world beyond these shores, and now six years later, these poor souls were moving in the opposite direction - again, not for fun, but through sheer desperation.

Many were fleeing ISIS, who took control of Mosul while I was hitchhiking through Brazil at the time of the 2014 Football World Cup. My chief concern during those days were the occasions hitchhiking proved less straightforward. On some days, we had to wait hours for a ride. Sometimes, night would set in as we waited, and we were forced to call it a day.

There were times, too, when we fell foul of the law, such as in the States, where a policeman told us off for hitchhiking on the freeway. But undoubtedly the most challenging moment of that trip was the time we ended up back in the same hotel we had been in two days prior, having done a 1,000km round trip only to find ourselves right back where we started.

This came about in Prince George, Canada, after we had been encouraged by a trucker on the so-called “Highway of Tears” to take a different route to our final destination: Alaska. I can still remember the feeling, as I woke up early the next morning, in the very same room of the very same hotel, of such a lot of effort wasted and a deep desire to get moving again as swiftly as possible, if only to enjoy a sense of progress.

No doubt, there have been many refugees who have experienced the same emotions - only, one imagines, with much greater intensity. Perhaps they have been deported back to where they began their journey, or simply sent back to the last country from which they arrived, in the process undoing in their minds and hearts all of the efforts that went in to getting them there.

No doubt, many of these refugees will also have fallen foul of the authorities. Some, will have been detained; others deported. Perhaps some will also have been told off for walking on a highway, or illegally crossing a border, as I myself tried to do between Bangladesh and Myanmar back in 2008 - only to be picked up by a border patrol and taken back to where I’d started again.

Yet, unlike me, I doubt many refugees were offered helping hands by strangers along their way, or at least not so frequently, and I expect many more of them experienced harsh words from passersby than the few jokey thumbs-downs or shouts of “gringos!” that I received on my own journeys.

And while I, with my Great British passport, was able finally to arrive at my goals and to feel the joy of that completion, many refugees will not have been so fortunate. And while I was able eventually to return home and continue my life - in whatever way I saw fit - for many refugees, their own journeys will still be ongoing, and there will still be a lack of clarity regarding what the future may hold.

I always used to say, standing beside the side of the road, that if only we knew how long it would be until the next ride, we needn’t worry. If someone could tell us that in four hours we’d be picked up, or that although we wouldn’t get another ride that day, that on the very next we’d be adopted by a lovely family who would end up taking us with them for 10 days (as happened in northern Argentina), then all our worries would melt away.

I felt the same way during the years in which my wife and I struggled to conceive, post-adventure. Were someone to have told us then that in a few years, we’d have three beautiful boys, we need never have suffered such heartache.

So too for refugees: if only someone was able to tell them when, where and how their journeys would end, they would be able to come to terms with what lay ahead, and to stop feeling so anxious about the many unknowns.

But of course that’s not how life works - whether you’re lucky enough to have been born with a British passport that enables you to see all the world has to offer without a second thought, or whether you’ve had the misfortune of being born in a country within which you find yourself unable to remain.

I have long wrestled with the question of whether my travels were simply a selfish waste of time. Not that they didn’t bring me great joy and truly opened my eyes to the big wide world - they most surely did - but whether I might instead have used that time in some nobler endeavour.

I find encouragement today in knowing that my love of people of different countries - and especially Iran - was birthed during those travels, and that I probably would not be doing the job I am now, had it not been for those experiences. But it doesn’t make it any easier to reconcile the contrasting journeys of travellers and refugees, which although they may share many parallels, also exhibit some stark differences.

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Development

4 April 2023

5 min read

Don't patronise: what the R20 means for development

The R20 meeting at the G20 global summit sheds light on development. Christopher Wadibia makes the case for a change in perception.

Chris Wadibia

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development.

Swami Govinda Dev Giri Maharaj, Dr. Valeria Martano, and Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, are greeted by R20 founder Yahya Cholil Staquf.

G20religion.org

God is dead,' wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882, in an effort to argue that every European imagination, community, and enterprise developed by faith in the Christian God would inevitably degenerate relative to Europe's dwindling commitment to belief in the former. Nietzsche's argument preceded the once popular secularisation thesis. The view that societies would increasingly adopt non-religious values and institutions as they modernise influenced global development discourse in the 20th century following World War II.

However, in 2023, a year that marks more than 140 years since Nietzsche first popularised the atheistical three-word phrase ‘God is dead’, anyone familiar with the mechanics and forces driving the modern global development project would point out that faith-aligned actors play a pivotal, and even in some cases, unrivalled role. These actors promote growth, progress, and development globally, especially in the Global South.

Albeit, Nietzsche once argued that Europe's declining belief in the Christian God signaled God's death, the fact that at least 85% of the world's over eight billion people claim some form of faith. Couple that with the reality that faith actors deliver the majority of local development services in many regions across the globe, and the suggestions is that God has risen from the grave and traded European burial clothes for globalised vocational attire. Far from being dead, God is alive and more engaged in developing the earth than ever before.

Aside from state and private-sector investment, since the second half of the 20th century, the faith sector, comprised of thousands of actors, has become increasingly responsible for developing the modern world. A recent study on faith-aligned impact investment, completed by researchers at Oxford University's Said Business School, showed that four of the world's most influential religious groups (Christianity, Islam, Dharmic, and Judaism) collectively hold at least $5 trillion in net assets. The study linked this $5 trillion in assets to faith-aligned investment in addressing social and climate-oriented challenges globally.

The study, which analysed over 360 distinctive organisations, attributed over $260 billion to Christian-aligned capital. Given the difficulty of securing accurate data on the total assets and capital held by the world's many thousands of churches and Christian organisations, it should be acknowledged that this estimate sits far below the real net assets in Christendom that have been invested into global development. However, a key takeaway from this study is that Christian-aligned capital remains a game-changing force in the global development sector. After all, those organisations serve the approximately 2.4bn Christians alive today.

'The R20's mission was grand but straightforward: fill the gap in world leadership that stresses politics and economics rather than faith and spirituality.'

In November 2022, two weeks before the G20 summit in Bali which brought together the leaders of the 20 countries with the world's biggest economies, another gathering took place in Indonesia that attracted less publicity. For the first time ever, the R20 (the G20 Religious Forum) united leaders from the major religions of the G20 countries whose heads of state would flock to Bali a few weeks later. The R20's mission was grand but straightforward: fill the gap in world leadership that stresses politics and economics rather than faith and spirituality as resources to provide solutions to pressing global challenges.

One of the R20's more high profile speakers was Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, who currently serves as Anglican Primate for the Church of Nigeria. In his speech, Ndukuba cited the violent persecution of Christians and liberal Muslims in the majority Muslim region of Northern Nigeria. The R20's goal of elevating faith and spirituality in the hierarchy of resources that can be enlisted to engage with global issues should be viewed as noble. However, in practice, the concept of the world's major faith communities petitioning global peace and development stakeholders to be recognised as legitimate contributors to the sacred project of redeeming the brokenness of the world reeks of obsequious servility.

Moreover, this unequal power relation fatefully overlooks the substantial contributions to peace and development made every day across the world by faith actors. Many of the world's major faith traditions share the vision of developing the world into a place devoid of disease, poverty, and suffering. The global faith and spirituality sector is truly not without its imperfections, but for centuries this multi-faith comity has invested immense resources into making earth look more like heaven. It does so by leveraging faith as a conduit to gather assets that aid in the deeply holy process of chiseling away at the degenerative evils and satanic forces plaguing the world until all that remains is the latter's Edenic base.

The time has come for the world's faith actors to stop begging secular state actors to recognise them as stakeholders committed to promoting global peace and development. Getting on with the heavenly work of building God's cosmos, in anticipation of the New Creation, requires faith that God will provide the right people, ideas, and resources and that secular state actors should be viewed as partners instead of patrons in this divine enterprise.

'The work we do in the present, then, gains its full significance from the eventual design in which it is meant to belong.'

N.T. Wright

Secular state actors should better understand what is driving those faith actors and the desire to balance the partnership. In his influential book Surprised by Hope, NT Wright argues that continuities will exist between Christian work completed in service to God in the present age and the eternal life that God's people will enjoy in the New Creation. Wright reasons,

'The work we do in the present, then, gains its full significance from the eventual design in which it is meant to belong. Applied to the mission of the church, this means that we must work in the present for the advance signs of that eventual state of affairs when God is ‘all in all’, when his kingdom has come and his will is done ‘on earth as in heaven’.'

Every day a faith actor funds a school, hospital, or social development project somewhere in the world. They see these projects function in God's ongoing programme of redeeming the world by means of the intellects and imaginations of themselves and those who benefit. In their eyes, all are made in God's own image. In a world where they see sin's footprints manifest by way of suffering, violence, and destruction, every actor inspired by the faith in their heart to challenge the existence of the former should recognise that the impulse to build a better world is a nudge from heaven foreshadowing the New Eden to come.