As a community, PC4R is pretty unique. Comprising both refugees and supporters, everyone’s situation and experience is unique, but there are a few common aims we all share – to help keep people connected, and to learn more about each others’ lives to increase compassion and understanding. Here, PC4R supporter Xanthe finds that reflecting on her own lifestyle choices helps her to empathise more deeply with the difficult choices refugees must contend with…
I first started living a more alternative lifestyle in the winter of 2015, moving to a community called Yorkley Court Community Farm. There, I lived in a geodesic dome, insulated with blankets and old duvets, with tarps to keep the rain out and a floor made of pallets. It was heated by a little wood stove. The small space was warmed through within ten minutes of the stove being lit, but it was cold once the fire burned down to embers.
After Yorkley Court was evicted, about half of us who had been living there moved to the local traveller site. The site was on a long-deserted tip, with a stretch of hardstanding at the front and a slightly boggy bit of wilderness at the back. After a summer of experimenting with living in a tent and a hammock, I was offered a caravan. It was an old Tabbert (a German made caravan), with lots of windows, a good-sized wood burner, and interior walls painted red, purple and green. It had previously been a family home, with the parents sleeping in the double bed at one end and the kids at the other. Pink butterfly stickers adorned the windows at the children’s end.
A comfortable home
My Tabbert was a big step up from the tent/hammock experiment. I was still surrounded by lush greenery and wildlife, and would wake up to the dawn chorus in the summer, but I never woke up shivering with cold. There was storage for my clothes and belongings, and life felt more settled. Poppy the cat, who had followed us from Yorkley Court, would come and sleep on my bed or on the seat next to the wood burner. It was a comfortable home.
Those days were glorious. We cooked on an open fire beneath a tarpaulin shelter. We ate together, played music and went for long walks in the forest that surrounded us. I had no work, no money, no real plan of what I was doing in life beyond day-to-day living, but I was happy. I was warm enough, well fed and I was in love. Poppy the cat’s other favoured human had a caravan next to mine, and I wound up staying in there more than in my own home.
Life went on in a similar way for a while. We were evicted from that site and moved to another, bigger site about a mile away. Things became a little less communal, as most of us had gas cookers by that point. We still shared a drink around a fire pit now and again, but less than before. Seasons went by. We all worked more and got things like cars and cleaner clothes. After some years, I got a van and slowly converted it to a live-in. Poppy’s other human moved away and, after some time spent in a long-distance relationship, we split up. It wasn’t long before I rejoined them though – as friends.
Poppy the cat
Some friends set up a new community in Wales. It was a neglected little house, with peeling 50s wallpaper and dusty Christmas decorations still hanging from the ceiling. Two fields sloped gently down towards the house and a stretch of woodland ran from the yard down alongside the bumpy track that went into the town. By the time I moved in, the house had all the mod cons – functional electrics, hot water on tap (if the Rayburn had been lit recently enough) and a gas-fired outdoor shower. With only one bedroom, most of us stayed living in our vans or caravans. We weren’t so interested in living in a house anyway. Bricks and mortar are useful, and we cooked and had baths and socialised in the house, but who would leave behind the dawn chorus, opening your door to the woods, or the field with a view of the valley, and the privacy of having twenty feet or more between your living space and the next person’s? Who would give up the freedom of being able to change the view from your bedroom window on a whim, of being able to travel elsewhere and take your home with you?
All change
Who, I ask? Who would change all that for bricks and mortar? I write this from my little bedroom in a rented shared house, a four-hour drive away from my friends in Wales. It’s a step down in the world, to go from being a footloose ‘homeowner’, to paying rent each month for a single bedroom in a terraced house in the cold North of England. I can practically hear my neighbours fart. My bedroom window looks out onto neat suburban back gardens. I changed the dawn chorus for the rumble and roar of motorway traffic. There are positives. My clothes have lost that musty smell of clothes stored in damp drawers. I have a washing machine, radiators and unlimited hot water for washing. Although my bedroom is small, it’s bigger than my van was. I miss my wood burner, and I miss being able to make my morning coffee from my bed, and I miss the rolling Ceredigion hills and shining river Teifi. I miss my community, although I do keep in touch, and I am making new friends here.
It's a bit of a culture shock, going from being a van-dwelling part-time carer who lives in a community and spends her time herding chickens, sowing seeds and weeding the garden, to being a full-time student social-worker living in a shared house in a town. I’ve supported PC4R for a while now, and I suppose it’s only through this change in my life that I’ve thought more about refugees and the things they’ve left behind.
Difficult choices
These people have made a difficult choice: they have left their community. They’ve weighed it up and decided that the danger they face by staying outweighs all of the positive factors of their home and community. They know they’re making a dangerous journey. They know the living conditions they will face in the camps will be difficult. They know they might never see their family again. What incredible strength it must take to make the decision to leave your community and seek safety elsewhere. It’s not a decision that anyone makes lightly, and many would not make this decision were they not pushed to it by factors out of their control: war, persecution, famine, floods. I’m proud to be a part of something that helps people to connect with the community that they’ve left behind – with their families, friends and loved ones. It really feels like the least I can do.