(Originally published here on openDemocracy) In the past 5 years, over 500 young people who migrated as lone children have been removed after spending their formative years in the UK. We have a responsibility for their long term safety and flourishing, says Emily Bowerman. A couple of weeks ago, a 19 year old girl called Yashika…
I am now officially older than Jesus. Well, of sorts. I’ve just had a birthday which has nudged me one year closer to oldness and means I’ve now been on the planet longer than Jesus was. I can’t help but feel that he achieved a bit more than I’ve done to date. And if that’s…
I like the second half of the week. It’s when I exchange the classrooms of SOAS for the College of Northwest London where I mentor an Afghan teenager. Just back from there now. I’m internally warm from cycling through the frostiness but my ears are bright red, icy and tingling. Must get one of those…
On Tuesday, before I got sick and drifted into a coma-like state for two days, I had a really great evening. It started out at the launch of a report by the Refugee Support Network (RSN), the charity that I’m volunteering with this year, which has researched the barriers facing young asylum seekers and refugees as they seek…
“This is quite grown up, isn’t it?” commented Ness on Friday, as we stood in the bleak corridor of Self Storage while the two Nice Young Men walked to and fro from the van to the storage unit, carting Granny’s Dresser, Granny’s fold-up camper mattress, and the bed frame that we’d proudly taken apart ourselves…
Coming downstairs and finding a typically unexpected pot of food on the kitchen side with a note from one of my housemates: ‘Random Pakistani pudding (contains nuts). Please eat some!’ Bumping into a young African refugee who, in the three years I’ve known him, has changed from an insecure and anxious teenager into a…
We sauntered down Cowley Road, full of Rice Box noodles and spicy spare ribs, to enjoy the milder, lighter evening and see who we’d bump into. I hadn’t realised there were so many Indians in Oxford. At any rate, most of them were out last night, euphorically celebrating their World Cup win. From groups…
Two weeks ago I was literally speechless. I had totally lost my voice. After a day of thwarted communication, of ‘conversations’ in which all I could do was listen, I set off to youth group with a slight sense of trepidation. It shouldn’t have surprised me that running a youth group with no voice wouldn’t…
It was a quiet reopening at the start of term, but sometimes those are the best opportunities to actually chat. A bit of table football and Wii, leftover mince pies, and the happy jokes and comfortable banter that come with shared experience and the security of consistent friendship. All with the familiar background battle over whose phone pumps Afghani music – just a…
emilyintheworld 