You might be forgiven for thinking that the refugee crisis is a thing of the past. When was the last time it came up in a conversation with a friend or family member? After all, we’re a long way from those days of September 2015, when the terrible images of Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on the beach filled our TV screens, newsfeeds and hearts, and dominated our conversations. We’re even further away from the advent of the crisis, more than a decade ago in March 2011, when the Syrian civil war began. And how often do we think of the Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar en masse in the summer of 2017? After the newspapers and TV stations had had their f ill of their stories, their trauma, their heartbreak – how often do we hear of them?
The truth is, the crisis continues. Peer behind the curtain of current media indifference, and you will see that across the world, refugees and those who have been forcibly displaced continue to face unimaginably difficult circumstances. There are now an estimated 26 million refugees globally, and around half of those are children.1 These numbers defy our understanding – the scale of loss is unimaginable. But thankfully, the desire to welcome remains strong too. One need only look to the cities and towns up and down the country who have recently played host to Amal – a 12-foot tall handcrafted puppet of a refugee child, who travelled 5000 miles from the Turkish/Syrian border to Manchester – to see that communities still have the potential to be kind, open-hearted places, and inherently welcoming to the stranger in their midst.
Methodist support
All We Can, the Methodist relief and development charity, has its roots in welcoming and supporting refugees. On 6 October 1938, the Methodist Recorder published a letter written by Rev Henry Carter calling on ‘Methodists whose hearts are moved by thanksgiving for peace’ to support an appeal to aid refugees escaping Nazi persecution. In June 1939, the response to this appeal enabled 70 boys from Austria with Jewish heritage to be brought to England – providing them with the opportunity to enjoy a safer childhood, and freedom from the imminent danger they would have faced if they remained following the Anschluss (the Nazi annexation of Austria).
