One year on

Fence surrounding a temporary housing site for migrant workers (April 2020)

I’m sprawled on my bed typing this, in almost exactly the same position as I was on 5th April last year: barely two days after schools and workplaces were shut, and the country hunkered down for an indefinite wait.

It was strangely silent – a Sunday afternoon drained of its regular cheer, families and children absent from the pool downstairs. I’d just gotten off the phone with K, who, like me, was closely following the news from the dormitories where many of our friends (migrants from Bangladesh, primarily, but also from China, Nepal, India, and elsewhere) lived. With rising COVID-19 transmissions, two dorms were soon to be declared isolation areas. No-one knew how far the virus had already spread among the wider migrant community, or how long the movement restrictions would apply, but we worried about how those we knew would cope as the situation evolved.

Just two months before that, we’d rung in the Lunar New Year with a dumpling party for migrant brothers far from their families. We’d tossed a noisy round of yusheng with our Chinese friends. T, who’d just returned from a short trip home, came straight from the airport with sweets from Bangladesh to share with everyone.

Now everything was different. We weren’t gripped so much by a desire to help, exactly, as a sense of helplessness in the face of what was unfolding. There was so much information we didn’t have, and so much personal uncertainty, too, about how much any of us could possibly do. All we had was the vaguest sense that there were others, like us, who were also looking for ways to pitch in.

And pitch in they did. As I wrote later in an essay for The London Magazine –

“By [5th April], a Google Sheet had been set up with a list of new and ongoing initiatives. […] The Sheet included a column with specific calls for public donations or in-kind contributions, as well as a section where volunteers could leave their details. Within a day of being posted on Facebook, it had been shared more than three hundred times.

Donations began to pour in, from deep-pocketed corporations as well as individuals anxious to do what they could. […] Someone emailed me to offer two hundred reusable masks, hand-sewn, and completed the first fifty in a matter of days. Someone else texted me an address to pick up several thousand disposable masks for distribution; I found out later that she had taken a voluntary pay-cut to give what she could. Hotel managers offered rooms to re-house dorm residents, and restaurants reached out to provide meals.

As far as possible, we channelled these givers through the NGOs already delivering supplies to the dorms. Others, we linked up directly with migrant friends living in smaller facilities (such as worksites or rented spaces), where piecemeal donations could meet more specific needs. NGOs worked together, too, to pool resources and coordinate supply-lines. […] The tide, it appeared, was shifting.”

It would be impossible to list here everyone who stepped forward in the ensuing, hectic weeks. That said, each time I revisit that moment on 5th April, I remain awed by how many others shared my frustration and powerlessness that Sunday afternoon, and yet responded nonetheless when a friend or acquaintance nudged them towards a simple action they could take.

We know now, in hindsight, that all their actions – every mask donated, every packet of food delivered – made a real and significant difference. The sum of those actions, too, showed us something important about ourselves.

***

It being Easter today, I’d also like to reflect (in quite general terms) on what all this has meant to me personally.

I’m often asked about the role of my faith in everything else that I do, and I can’t say I’ve figured out all the answers. But the Easter story is one of sacrifice and restoration; of ultimate love shown to the ultimate stranger. Regardless of the communities we serve or the roads we take, I think there’s often an unseen path by which we can try and mirror that, albeit in our own unsure and powerless ways.

I don’t think there’s anything heroic about this. My faith tells me that someone made a sacrifice to mend a bridge with me, and it’s on that basis that I try and choose to live in a way that starts to mend the broken bridges out there. I’m not under any illusions that what I can do will be enough to restore all that’s broken, or even that I’ll always know what to do when things appear irreparable. But I guess my faith is what gives me reason to believe that each action that makes someone else’s situation a little less precarious, or starts to heal a rift between two communities, is worth doing in itself.

I’ve had the privilege of serving alongside friends and colleagues of different faiths, and I know we may all set out from different convictions about what makes any of this worth the effort. Still, the fact that we grapple together with what we don’t know (and yet, that we set out at all!) – now, that feels like a kind of restoration.