My journey to international teaching was much more complex than it seems on the outside. Without going into specifics of how I got to this moment, suffice it to say I have a heart for internationalism, diversity and humanitarianism, and the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme which celebrates these in its learner profile was the catalyst through which I joined the international teaching community. After twelve years of teaching high school English in Texas, I sold just about everything I owned, left a fantastic job at an incredible school, and moved my family to the UK, thus becoming a full fledged, work-visa-carrying immigrant.
Learning how to navigate through nuances and expectations of culture here and the consequential misinterpretations have, on more than one occasion, left me sheepishly side-stepping away from awkward situations. Perhaps my transition from the safe and familiar to a situation that, by far, was more foreign than I anticipated is part of why Breaking Barriers interested me, especially since it involves refugees who didn’t choose for their lives to turn out this way, uprooted and unrecognizable.
I had just finished teaching a creative writing class here in the high school at ACS Cobham International School and was gearing up to meet with the Disaster Relief Fund Charity, one of our school's leading, robust charity groups. They were interested in speaking to the CEO of Breaking Barriers, a British organization committed to helping refugees find their ways into jobs within their skill areas. I felt lucky to be invited and was impressed with the Breaking Barriers website, their motto declaring, "Refugees Lived Once, Help Them Live Again".
It is, first of all, vital to recognize the current refugee displacement as the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II. We must attempt to grasp the scope of this: Over 50 million people have fled their homes, the majority fleeing from Syria, Central Africa and South Sudan, war ravaged countries that offer little chance of survival, much less any kind of livelihood. This crisis was quite literally flung on our British doorstep in the form of the “Calais Jungle” as it’s been coined, an incredibly impoverished refugee camp located at the immigration border of France and England where families sit and wait while European governments try to figure out what to do with them. They want to come to England, and as the hubris of political posturing and propagated fear prevent intervention, people are going hungry and getting sick, children have lost hope, and pleas for help have become familiar and normalized and are no longer making headlines. Considering this, the DRF charity committee determined to look at how and in what capacity our school could possibly help aid and support them, thus the meeting.
Matthew Powell is the CEO of Breaking Barriers. After introductions, the DRF student president, in a confident, business-like tone, asked, "So, what exactly do you do at Breaking Barriers?" Powell began detailing what they do. We learned other than helping people with language skills and literacy, Breaking Barriers pairs refugees with corporations that offer work experience and/or opportunities to shadow/work with lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc, so they get an idea of how the UK system works while building their CVs and livelihoods.
He reiterated the widely held, misguided belief that refugees are unskilled people, that they are poor or trying to take advantage of a system. We see these types of images on the news, "poverty porn" they call them - desperate people in dire circumstances: forms clinging to sinking rafts, frantic and terrified faces, a child lying dead on a beach. And in the moment of crisis they are desperate people in dire circumstances. However, that is not the full story. They are also people who have lived their lives, who went to school and to work, who built businesses from the ground up, who fed their kids dinner at night and tucked them in, annoyed when they got out of bed for a glass of water after an hour of reading stories and singing lullabies. This is the type of very recognizable, human life these people left at the mercy of complete and utter destruction. They traded survival for displacement.
Matthew conveyed part of the story of Eiad, a refugee he works with who had to flee his war torn country because he was drafted into the military and decided he didn't want to fight a hopeless, meaningless war. He said, "I traded my profession as a well established dentist to risk my life to come here, to work on the weekends at Starbucks and pick up a few hours a week working with what placements I can find. No. This is not my paradise."
He said Breaking Barriers also helps folks apply for leave to remain in the UK and (perhaps, eventually) citizenship. I laughed and told him, actually, we, as immigrants here, are going through some of the same processes with visa paperwork and when/how to apply to stay in this country, how to file taxes while we study things like what day the Queen was born or the name of Churchill's dogs, questions we may be asked if we apply for dual citizenship someday. It occurred to me what an advantage I have in having a job, knowing the language, and having the means to make it work. It's super hard even then, so I can't imagine how much harder it would be to have none of this support while also carrying the judgment and condemnation of folks who don't welcome nor want me here, the constant reminders in my face at all times.
I look forward to working with Breaking Barriers at school, and I imagine we will all come away better educated about the circumstances of refugees, or at least learn the truths that media is not conveying.
