Article Containing The Relative Pronoun
Introduction
The ‘Shared History Project’ came about
as part of a local initiative by the South Belfast Roundtable against
Racism (SBRR) in South Belfast, Northern Ireland. SBRR is an umbrella
organisation working across local communities to identify local needs in
relation to tackling racism at ground level. In light of Northern
Ireland’s increasing multi-ethnicity and multi-culturalism, and the
subsequent challenges this brings, a group of community workers from an
area of South Belfast felt that working to address some of the myths
surrounding why people come to Northern Ireland was of great importance.
The Chinese community has a
forty year history in Northern Ireland and the Polish community is
representative of the migrant workers who have come to live in Belfast
more recently. So the Roundtable set out to approach members of these
groups to come on board in a project with the aim of working with
Northern Irish residents of the Donegall Pass area of South Belfast to
share their stories and to start to breakdown barriers and strengthen
positive relationships. The project would therefore consist of these
three working groups separately participating in a series of group
interviews before coming together to share their experiences. These
experiences, in text and photo form, would then form the basis for an
educational exhibition. This article takes the opportunity to examine
in more detail the experience of the Polish group in relation to the
overall project.
Establishment of the project
To achieve the goals of the project,
Denise Wright, the Coordinator of the SBRR brought together two kinds of
participants. This included two community organisations whose workers
had built contacts with the local, Chinese and Polish people living in
this area. As the worker who had already worked extensively with the
Polish community I was able to take up the role of co-facilitator for
this specific working group. We also worked in partnership with Karen
McCartney, a lecturer in Adult and Community Education at the Ulster
People’s College (UPC). Through its People’s History Initiative, the
UPC has been working since 1998 with community groups who want to gain
research skills to present the stories of their communities in
exhibition format. This was the first time the College had worked with
minority ethnic communities through the Peoples History Initiative as it
was the first time we, community workers, were working with our service
users on a storytelling exhibition.
Our collaborative work took
the form of three sessions of group interviews. To establish an
“interview guide” for each working session, the UPC worker had
established some common “prompts” for the community workers to use with
the group, which I partly adapted to the situation of Polish migrant
workers. These were a series of open-ended questions designed to
capture the range of participant experiences, including negative and
positive aspects. The first session explored the issue of “home”: what
was it like to live in Poland and why did people leave. The second
session covered the journey to Belfast, and settling in during the first
weeks. This was an opportunity to focus on the challenges faced by
Polish migrants on arrival in Northern Ireland, for example the process
of finding accommodation, a job, opening a bank account. The third
session covered settling in on the longer-term, and the “future”: how
did people create links in their new communities and where did people
see themselves in three years time. After these three story-telling
sessions, each community worker worked in partnership with the UPC
worker to select and format the texts and photos to be included in the
final exhibition. This information gathering stage was followed by an
opportunity for the three groups to come together to edit the materials
and to discover each others’ work and share stories. Finally, the whole
exhibition was ready to be displayed to the public while each
individual component or the whole work could potentially travel around
community or youth groups on demand.
Sharing experiences
The Polish participants ranged in age
from teenagers to those in their forties. There was also a wide range
in the level of English; from those with a high level of English to
those who required Polish-English interpretation. Maruska Svasek, an
anthropologist at Queen’s University Belfast, contacted the project and
asked if she could attend the sessions. She thus observed that the
Polish group responded in a positive way to the group work:
“There was a very
informal atmosphere; a lot of jokes were made […]. The meeting was not
marked by expressions of strong nostalgia and sadness, people were
rather joking, although they were also serious about the bad economic
and political conditions in Poland. I guess these are mostly young
people, who haven’t been away for long, and don’t have elderly parents,
so they may not feel their migratory experience as ‘painful’, but rather
as challenging and exciting”.
Although the ultimate aim of
the project was to share experiences with people from different
communities, the act of sharing experiences within the Polish group
itself had a positive and cathartic effect. People realised that their
difficulties had often been faced by their neighbour around the table
and recounted stories with humour. For instance, a young woman
recounted her own hectic trip to Belfast. In her home province,
travelling by plane is not common. She therefore thought that she would
be much better off reaching Belfast by bus. She described this three
day-long experience as “the journey from Hell”. They first took a bus
all the way to London, which broke down several times and was caught in a
storm, during which she considered going back home. After another
hectic train and ferry trip, she reached Belfast and reported having
“kissed the ground of the promised land”.
Some humour also arose from
the stressful situations faced by migrant workers, and the distance
permitted by story telling: one man reported that, on his first day in
Belfast, he walked from his friend’s house in the suburbs to the City
Centre and back three times, desperately looking for a sign advertising
job vacancies. Finally he bumped into a team of Polish street workers,
who told him that there was no spare vacancy in their firm. He was so
desperate that he shouted at them that he needed a job. They introduced
him to their boss, who gave him a job. We also talked about the huge
difficulties faced when trying to set up bank accounts as many banks
require proof of address. As migrants often live in shared houses with
shared bills, only one name is present on the bill. For one young
woman, even a letter from her mother explaining that she lived with her
parents and therefore did not pay any bills was not enough.
One component of the
exhibition was to include photographs from all three groups, documenting
the various stages of their lives in Belfast. As the Polish group did
not necessarily have large amounts of photographs with them, we
contacted the community photography project ‘Belfast Exposed’. ‘Belfast
Exposed’ was founded in 1983 as a community photography initiative,
which offers photographic walking tours and practical photography and
darkroom training. The group took photos of areas and things that were
relevant to their lives in Belfast, with a view to using them as the
visual basis for the exhibition. All texts of the Polish exhibition,
including the photo captions, were translated into Polish. This was
also done with the Chinese group’s work, which was translated into
traditional Chinese and Cantonese in order to widen the accessibility of
the exhibition beyond just English speakers.
The project group sharing evening
Once each of the interview sessions was
completed, a night was organised for the groups to come together and
discover each other’s work, sharing stories and getting to know each
other. The two migrant groups got the opportunity to draw some
unexpected parallels. Indeed, one of the Chinese texts mentioned that,
when they arrived in Belfast in the sixties, most Chinese people thought
they would stay for four or five years, and then go back to Hong-Kong.
Forty years later, some consider Belfast as home, and one man even
joked about the weather being too hot when he goes on holiday to
Hong-Kong. When reading this text, the Poles, who consider themselves
as migrant workers who are not here to stay, wondered if, forty years
from now, Belfast would be buzzing with Polish restaurants. The Poles
seemed also very interested to hear the stories of the Northern Irish
group. Indeed, when asked which activities they would like to
undertake, migrants from the Accession Countries often expressed the
desire to get to know Northern Irish culture and history better, as well
as gaining a better understanding of the Troubles. The exhibition
produced by local residents of the Donegall Pass area provided both.
SUMBER : http://www.developmenteducationreview.com/issue4-perspectives7?page=show
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