Blog 4: "Despite being here since November, I have not yet experienced a ‘normal’ day at Klein Kasteeltje"

I was away over Christmas, and was extremely surprised by how calm and orderly the situation at Klein Kasteeltje was, on Monday, when I returned. It is strange to think that our whole team was applauding the fact that people can now access their basic right to asylum, but it is safe to say that everybody I talked to from work was really excited to see things start to return to normal.

This return to normality means that we can finally bring back all our volunteers and start giving information again. This is very exciting news for me personally as, despite being here since mid-November, I have not yet experienced a ‘normal’ day at Klein Kasteeltje.

Despite not yet experiencing a normal day, Klein Kasteeltje remains the centre of our work universe and my team and I spend the majority of time discussing new strategies and learning information which will hopefully help us when we start working there properly next week. In this regard, it can be difficult to disassociate from Klein Kasteeltje and even while on holidays I found myself trying to relate my experiences to those of the people we meet.

I was hiking in Nepal, near to the Tibet border, and spent many nights in villages populated by Sherpa communities. Sherpa is one of the many castes in Nepal and is made up of Buddhist people of Tibetan or Eastern origin. Sherpa people have lived in Nepal for over a thousand years but their numbers increased significantly after the 1950 invasion of Tibet as refugees started fleeing across the border. Today, the rich Tibetan culture is evident across the Manaslu region where I went trekking with colourful pray flags swaying between the buildings in most high mountain villages.

Having told my guide where I worked, he insisted on telling me every time one of the guest house owners or workers we met were Tibetan refugees. While all I could muster up in response to his warm introductions, was a feeble ‘Namaste’ or ‘Tashi Delek’ meaning hello, it was interesting to see how different families had clearly integrated into pre-established local communities while, in other areas, groups of families had managed to establish their own villages and communities.

"I was even more intrigued when I ended up visiting a refugee camp"

I was even more intrigued when I ended up visiting a refugee camp or ‘Tibetan Village’ outside Pokhara, Nepal’s second largest city. I feel the need to point out that it was definitely not my aim to spend my holiday searching for a refugee camp and it was very much by chance that I ended up there. My friend had decided that he wanted to buy Yak wool and bring it back to Ireland as a present for his Mum who is an avid knitter.

Given the countless number of yaks we had seen and the omnipresence of yak wool products, we thought this would be a relatively simple present to get. However, after talking to various shop keepers, it seemed like my friend was in fact the first tourist ever to ask for wool opposed to a nice colourful woollen blanket or socks. This was quite shocking given that  it was almost impossible to go down a street without finding a store that specialised in wool products and, if, in the unlikely event a tourist did find themselves on a street without a specialised wool store even they did not need to worry because other shops that seemed to sell completely unrelated goods like postcards or groceries always seemed to have at least one hidden yak blanket just in case a desperate tourist needed to buy a last a last-minute present.

Nonetheless, nobody had wool and nobody knew where to get it. Eventually one shop keeper told us that the Tibetan refugees made all the wool products so if we really wanted to buy wool then we would have to walk to the Tibetan Village which he added was the old ‘UNHCR’. This Tibetan Village, which I later learned was one of several former refugee camps, was only a twenty-minute walk away so we decided that if we really could not find wool anywhere in the city centre, we would stroll over to the refugee camp later that afternoon.

Walking along the road towards the Tibetan Village, I was not sure what to expect from the camp. In my head, I conjured up an image of white tents and people standing around waiting in lines. I guess I imagined the type of image that has come to define the current refugee crisis in Europe, particularly in those countries such as Greece and Italy where refugees arrive in large numbers and the States claim to be too overwhelmed to provide emergency accommodation on arrival.

In contrast, the Tibetan village really was a village, indistinguishable from a lot of other villages I had seen around the country. It did not have the multi-story buildings and big brand stores that flanked the main streets of Pokhara but it had its own thriving economy. There were small tea shops, a convenience store, monks chanting together in unison, women weaving and children in school uniforms playing together. It was like a small city within a city.

For me, seeing how these people had build their lives again was incredibly inspiring"

For me, seeing how these people had build their lives again was incredibly inspiring. It brought me a lot of joy but it also made me question how we treat migrants in Europe. I understand that the many of these people fled Tibet more than fifty years ago, but I still could not help but feel that migrants in Europe do not receive the same warm welcome and in certain respects it is much harder for migrants in Europe to successfully establish their own communities.

In the Tibetan camp, it did not seem to matter if people spoke Nepali or not, they still managed to set up their own stores or sell their handmade products to a friend who owned a store.  Too often, refugees are not given the same opportunities to integrate into western communities and find themselves ostracized and pushed towards underfunded areas- modern day ghettos particularly when they do not speak the language. At the same time, long lists of legal requirements make it harder for people to set up their own businesses, something which I have read is quite common in refugee camps in developing countries, where communities have to establish mini villages, towns and cities within camps in order to survive.

Getting to Europe takes an incredible amount of bravery and emotional intelligence, refugees have so many skills which we sometimes, unintentionally, prevent them from utilising because we focus on the wrong things. Maybe it is time we look towards developing countries to see what they are doing right when it comes to supporting refugee populations especially given the fact that many developing countries are hosting a much higher percentage of refugees based on their population compared to western states.

Of course, no system is perfect and there are a lot of aspects of the Nepali approach that I would definitely not recommend adopting, but, nonetheless, it is worth reflecting on different models and also on how our system both supports and hinders innovation, development and community growth.