Each year around 4,000 refugee children arrive alone in Britain. Without friends or family, and unable to speak English, they face a frightening future. Sarfraz Manzoor reports on a project that lets them use photography to tell their own stories
Monday November 26, 2007
The Guardian
When Amir arrived in Britain last December he was 16, fleeing Iraq on a false passport after the kidnap and murder of his father. He landed at Heathrow with nothing except a scrap of paper on which his name was scribbled in English. “I did not know where I was; I could not speak English,” Amir recalls, his hands fidgeting nervously. “I was scared - I had no family, no friends. Who is going to help me? Who is going to give me support?”
In the stark terminology of Home Office bureaucracy, Amir is one of an estimated 4,000 “unaccompanied young refugees” who arrive in Britain each year from everywhere from Iraq and Afghanistan to the Congo and Rwanda. Separated from their families and far from home, many suffer from depression, insomnia and anxiety. The vast majority - 80% - settle in London and their experiences are rarely understood.
“Mainstream society only hears certain things about immigration,” says Tiffany Fairey. “They never hear direct stories from the people who are coming here or what they are dealing with.” Fairey is the co-founder of PhotoVoice, a charity that uses photography to enable marginalised groups to tell their stories. It has been working with young refugees since 2002, most recently on New Londoners, in which 15 of them have been mentored by professional photographers. The photographs can be viewed online and a book is being planned for next summer. “The biggest barrier to integration is misunderstanding,” says Fairey. New Londoners enables the young people “to tell their own stories from their own perspective”.
PhotoVoice was helped in the project by Dost, a London charity that supports young refugees. Dost is based in Trinity Centre, a converted redbrick church in East Ham in east London. On one of the afternoons that I visit the centre, a group of elderly Sikh men are playing cards while four young refugees are immersed in Connect 4. Among them is Sacha, who arrived as a 13-year-old from Ukraine five years ago. “It was like a bad dream,” he recalls, “like taking too many painkillers.” Since leaving eastern Europe, Sacha has had no contact with his parents. “It isn’t easy, it takes a lot out of you having to get by without parents,” he says sadly. “You need lots of emotional support, you need stimulation, spiritual and physical contact with people.”
“People don’t live in a vacuum,” adds Yesim Deveci, who set up Dost. “If everyone who has been part of your life does not exist any more you need to feel that someone cares about you.” For the young refugees who visit Dost, most of their interactions with mainstream society are institutional - social workers, the Home Office, their housing office and their solicitor; the New Londoners project allows the young people to transcend their refugee identity.
The recurring themes in New Londoners’ images are, perhaps unsurprisingly, being far from home, and the contradictory emotions that come from being in Britain. Mussie, a 17-year-old from Eritrea, photographed food that he had cooked. “This picture is about my new life in England,” he says. “In my country I had never cooked before.”
Amir also photographed one of his meals. “For someone here, it’s just my breakfast,” he explains. “Two eggs, some bread, tea. But if I showed this picture to someone in Iraq they wouldn’t believe it because in Iraq we imagined English breakfasts to be tables full of lots of food.” Another of Amir’s photographs shows dinner being eaten by candlelight. “They hadn’t been able to pay for electricity so it had been cut off,” he tells me. “In Iraq we don’t believe things like this happen in England.” Many of Amir’s photographs are taken in the dark; like many young refugees, he finds it hard to sleep at night. “Many of the kids are so anxious,” explains Liz Orton of PhotoVoice. “When we first gave them cameras, they came back after a week with dozens of images of each other taken during the night. You could just see the time passing.”
Rosalita is a sad-eyed 18-year-old who arrived in Britain two years ago after fleeing the Congo following the death of both her parents. Her father was Rwandan and her mother Congolese, and as a young girl Rosalita was raped by Congolese soldiers who thought she was Rwandan and Rwandan soldiers who accused her of being Congolese. Even though she is sitting less than two feet from me, I have to strain to hear her speak and her whispery voice tapers off into silence. Having arrived unable to speak English, she is now fluent in English and Spanish as well as Swahili. She says she wants to work for a charity after leaving university. I ask her to tell me about her favourite photograph from those she took. “I saw an old woman lying on the street,” she murmurs. “She was so old and no one cared about her - it was Liverpool Street, where there are lots of banks and big buildings. I don’t know if she had any children but everyone was ignoring her. It made me sad; in Congo, families live with their grandmothers and grandfathers. Not like here.”
Chen, 18, photographed another old person. “I felt the strangeness of the old man lying on the ground,” he says. “He was not Chinese but he was asleep in China Town.” Chen’s mentor was the artist and photographer Gayle Chong Kwan, who found that working with the young refugee opened her eyes to her own Chinese heritage. “It was not about me teaching, so much as having a conversation,” she says. “With photography there is none of the frustration of having a limited language. These young people can express thoughts that they could not do in English.”
It is almost impossible to imagine the journeys that have led these young refugees to Britain. Many have been orphaned by war; most of them are having to grow up without things the average Briton takes for granted. Their photographs are hopeful, but tinged with loss and uncertainty. Many of the refugees are still awaiting Home Office decisions on whether they will be allowed to remain in this country. Those who have been granted the right to remain have complicated feelings about the prospect. “I feel safe here and I have a chance to do something with my life,” says Amir, “but life here is not easy. I want to use my photographs to tell people in Iraq, ‘Don’t think that living in England is easy, don’t think this country is better than Iraq. Life here is very hard.’ I would like one day to return to Iraq, my country, and when I go I will take a camera”. Some names have been changed.
· To find out more about the New Londoners project and to view the photographs, visit www.photovoice.org and www.projectdost.org.
