The Malta branch of the Red Cross wishes to dissociate itself from the appeal made in my column last week, saying that it “wasn’t authorised”. It also said that “the person” mentioned as collecting the goods for which the appeal was made “wasn’t authorised” either. What can I say, except that the Malta branch of the Red Cross cannot possibly embarrass itself further? It really didn’t need to issue a statement making it plain that it isn’t doing its job.
The woman described as “the person” is a full-time volunteer, a trained nurse who has, for the last few years, foregone a salary to spend her days driving round Malta, in her own car and paying for the petrol with her own money, collecting clothes and chattels, storing them in her own family garage, and driving to the detention centres and Tent City every day to hand out the things that people have given her. She does this because she has a conscience, and more to the point, because nobody else is doing it – not even the Malta branch of the Red Cross with which she volunteers. There is a humanitarian crisis here beneath our noses, and what is the Malta branch of the Red Cross doing about it? It’s doing nothing that I know about.
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Perhaps it’s time the whole disgraceful system, or rather the lack of one, is exposed for what it is. We have had detention centres with thousands of people passing through them for years now. But guess what? There is absolutely no system for putting clothes on their backs and shoes on their feet, or for making sure that each one of them has even a single blanket in this cold weather. The government doesn’t have to buy or pay for these things because people are willing to donate and help out. Despite the fear of invasion by immigrant hordes and the rampant racism, there are still those who believe that it shames us to have people kept in a state of total deprivation in huge pens in our midst, without protection against the weather in winter or even adequate food.
Yet there is no way of getting the donations through in a systematic way. There is no warehouse to which donated clothes, shoes, bedding and food can be taken for organised distribution to those held in detention centres. There is no organisation which has seen fit to take this on, not even the Malta branch of the Red Cross. The government apparently has more serious problems on its mind than a couple of thousand of inadequately clothed and hungry people who are hated by those whose votes it wants. SOS Albania performed spectacular feats in sorting, warehousing and shipping container-loads of clothing to Albania some years ago, but a crisis here within our borders seems to be less compelling than a crisis at the far end of the Mediterranean. There is no SOS organisation to sort this one out, even though no containers and shipping are involved and it’s a whole lot less complicated.
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So shall I describe to you how the clothes and food are distributed to people in detention centres by volunteers? Some of you might prefer not to know, because it may very well spoil your Christmassy mood and turn your panettone sour. In that case, please turn the page now.
Imagine a barred compound with hundreds of people caged in. Think of one of those soul-destroying Nazi concentration camp photographs with desperate people caged like animals staring through the bars. The people are a different colour and they’re not wearing striped pyjamas, but there you are. The volunteers drive up. Their credentials are checked by the army guards. They unload bags of clothes and shoes, boxes of flour, sugar and oil from a car that is packed to the roof.
The people in the cage see them and rush forwards en masse. Panic ensues, with pushing, shoving and shouting for attention, arms waving through the bars. The volunteers begin to take things out of the bags, pushing them in the direction of all those waving, grabbing hands. Somebody shouts for trousers. Somebody else shouts for shoes. Some of the men are wearing only a T-shirt in the cold. The volunteers try to get the jackets to them, but other arms come pushing ahead and snatch them out of their grasp. The strong elbow the weak out of the way. Bigger people have the advantage over smaller ones. It is the classic scene of desperation born of total deprivation: people pushed into absolute survival mode, despair driving them to mow down others to take as much as they can for themselves. Here you see it: the survival of the fittest. It is horrible, demeaning for those behind the bars who have been reduced to scrabbling and fighting for clothing; demeaning also for those who are handing it out, who have no other way of helping.
Those who push hardest get things; those who are weak and who are shoved to the rear get nothing. Those who are ill and can’t get to the bars haven’t a hope of getting the blankets they need. Many of them are wearing flip-flops, but today there aren’t any shoes. Somebody has offered the volunteer who the Malta Red Cross describes as “the person” Lm100 to buy things; another has offered her Lm250. Because she is careful about not accepting cash, she asks them to buy lots of socks instead. Socks? They’re puzzled. She explains that the socks for these thousands of people, like everything else they wear, must come from charity because they’re not going to come from anywhere else. And people don’t donate used socks. “I didn’t realise they don’t have socks,” one of them says. But of course they don’t have socks. They’re in detention, in a large cage. They arrived with just the sea-sodden clothes on their backs. Where on earth would they have got socks from – or anything else, for that matter?
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By now, all the bags of clothes are empty. It has taken just minutes for them to be snatched through the bars, but people are still shouting, asking for trousers, asking for jackets, asking for shoes. They want to know if the volunteer will be back tomorrow, with more clothes. They need blankets.
One of the women accompanying the volunteer is there for the first time, and she’s upset at the horrible scene of people stripped of all dignity, scrabbling and scrambling over each other to grab at clothes and blankets through the bars of their cage. (It wasn’t me; I’m not allowed anywhere near there because I write for the newspapers, so instead I drive around and pick things up.) She gets even more upset when she hears a man shouting “Sister, sister!” and turns round to see him angrily waving a woman’s bathing suit at her. He thinks she has insulted him by giving him women’s swimwear when he needs trousers. She has no idea how it got into the bag – maybe a donor who didn’t understand the instructions on men’s clothing only – and in the panic of handing things out, she didn’t notice it.
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The people in the cage don’t understand what’s going on. They don’t realise that the women who go every day to hand out clothes are doing so voluntarily, that they have collected the clothes with great inconvenience. They think the women are part of a failed system, rather than a voluntary measure born of the absence of any proper distribution channel for food and clothes. The woman who has gone there to help for the first time brings out a box of flour and sugar. The soldier steps forward. “You’d better not hand those through the bars,” he tells her, “or they’ll kill each other trying to get their hands on them.” He asks her to leave the box with him, saying that he will hand the food out himself.
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The clothes received over the last few days, after the appeal in my column last Sunday, have been distributed in this way: by volunteers who pushed them through the bars. The household goods will go to the open centres. The Malta Branch of the Red Cross might disapprove and dissociate itself, but disapproval and dissociation don’t put shoes on people’s feet or blankets round their shoulders when it’s cold. Disapproval and dissociation let people go cold and unshod. They don’t feed or clothe anyone.
Other donations are still awaiting collection, but now that you know how it happens, you won’t be surprised that the process is slow. Volunteers drive round collecting things then transfer them to the car of the volunteer who’s allowed through the gate, and who goes to the detention centre every day.
This wouldn’t be a problem if a registered charity decided to get its act together and help with a humanitarian crisis within our borders, instead of somewhere halfway across the world. Registered charities have administrative support, they can get hold of a warehouse, they can organise teams of volunteers and a proper distribution system within the detention camps, in cooperation with the army. But this particular humanitarian crisis isn’t an attractive one, so instead we’ll wait for the next tsunami to hit south-east Asia and then we’ll galvanise ourselves into action.
In the absence of a registered charity bringing its full clout to bear on the situation, a few volunteers are doing what they can to help. It means that some people at least now have decent things to wear and a blanket where they had none before. It has made a small difference.
Those who can donate blankets, quilts, warm practical clothing and shoes for men, towels, sheets, pots, pans, and crockery, please email me at [email protected], and I’ll make sure they get through. If you want to donate money, please go to your preferred shop and use it to buy socks or stout shoes in the usual men’s sizes. We’ll collect them. Please don’t deliver anything directly to the Malta Branch of the Red Cross, because we’ve been told that they don’t want to have to deal with it. They don’t want donations cluttering up their hallway, forcing somebody who’s comfortable in the office to – oh dear God, how awful – actually get into a car and drive them over to the people who need them. They don’t want to have to come face to face with all those desperate people behind bars. It’s not what the Malta branch of the Red Cross is there for. Heaven knows what it’s there for, then. And thank God for volunteers who think it’s shameful to let people go cold and hungry while “administrative systems” are set up on the never-never. Happy Christmas.