Serve The City: Dutch people are cold

I have had the privilege of looking inside two Refugee centre’s in Brussels. Serve The City volunteers, like Kendra (pictured) are offering a number of services to refugees. The first refugee center, Foyer Selah, run by the Salvation Army, and the second, Le Petit Chateau, run by the Belgian State. Le Petit Chateau currently has around 600 people from 82 countries. Foyer Selah is a lot smaller, but here also there is a wide variety of cultures is represented.

Sophie visits a girl in a refugee centre weekly through a Teen-mom program she is involved with, but I had really never seen a refugee centre on the inside. Here is one suggestion I have: that you defer all ideas and judgments you have about such centers, until you have actually been inside one.

I was impressed with how well-run these centers were. They were clean, the staff was well-trained, and the atmosphere was good. Yet it cannot be easy to be a refugee. I talked to a number of people who have left everything and have placed themselves at the mercy of a government whose language they don’t speak, whose logic they don’t follow, and whose procedures they don’t follow. While I am sure that many of them tell a lie here and there because they think this is what the officials want to hear, most of them are well intentioned and want nothing more than just to build up a life for themselves and their kids.

I talked to Ira, a 16 year old girl from Albania. She had lived in Holland for 11 years, and then in Belgium for 2. Now she lives in one of these centers. With their first appeal overturned it only a matter of time before their second appeal is overturned and they are sent home, said one of the staff.

I witnessed a fight that erupted between two women right in front of me. Immediately there were children and other women who rushed to the aid of both women. It happened in an instant, suddenly the room was filled with shouting and screaming. Each of the women was shouting at the other in her own language, that the other didn’t speak. A staff member was there to jump in immediately. He managed to separate the women, send the others away, cool the emotion and restore peace to the room.

Serve The City is here providing dance programs for the kids, hair-dressing and make-up for woman, and colour pictures for people who want their picture taken. People wait in long lines. Bottles of nail-polish disappear miraculously. It’s mayhem.

I talk to one person after another. I talk to a woman from Iraq, there with a daughter who comes from Syria. I photograph a beautiful older lady from Sudan. No one speaks her language. She just smiles and sits there. There is a couple from Yugoslavia, with a beautiful baby.

Many of them have lived in Holland as refugees. They now live in Belgium, where people are cold and unresponsive. “But not as cold as in Holland,” they say. I hear it again and again. “Look,” they say, “we know we are refugees, and maybe we cannot stay. But you can look us in the eye and smile at us! Why do you have to be so cold?”

I am quite shocked. I know they are correct. I know, because I am part of the problem.

I wonder why we are like that? What do you think? Do we feel guilty? Do we really dislike them? Do we really think they are all ‘bad people’? Or are we just cold towards all?

Here are some pictures of the people I talked to, to remind us that they are people – and they are beautiful.