Many small lights in the darkness

This evening at work we held a party for the 40 or so volunteers who regularly visit detainees in the nearby immigration detention centre. Retired people, working people, students, they head out every week, in ones or sometimes twos, on a cold, dark evening or on Sunday afternoon to spend an hour with someone who has tried to flee oppression and has somehow found themselves… pretty oppressed. As well as companionship, the volunteer visitors offer practical support. If a detainee wants help applying for bail or appealing their refused asylum claim (or even starting a claim because they’ve been locked up before they could apply), or if they need some money on a phone card so they can contact friends or family, the visitors pass that message back to other volunteers in the office who make those things happen.

This evening was an opportunity for volunteers who don’t usually meet to start to get to know each other. Towards the end of the evening I joined four of them talking politics and how desperate things are: how the world isn’t the place they’d imagined it to be, how reading and commiserating over bad news on Facebook is so disheartening, how it’s difficult to know what to do or to summon the energy to do it. I agreed, but said that an awful lot of good is still going on; how maybe 90% of the time things look grim, but 10% of the time we can see brilliant things happening. What we need to do is share that 10%, not the 90%. The re-energising was visible: Yes, we must remember the good!

It was only on my way home that I realised that what they are doing, in their own time and for no money, is a multitude of small kindnesses that help keep me going. I think of them as an amazing bunch of generous people but none of them thinks of themselves as being a light in the darkness.

One small light on its own may not feel much, but when there are lots, not only is it brighter for us all but we can see the shape of the landscape.


 
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead