Cornerstone Number 182, October-November 2016 | Page 21

Cornerstone No. 182, page 21

'A Future Without Fear'
Kathy Galloway reflects on a visit to refugee camps in Greece
Recently, I was looking after my four-year old granddaughter, and over
ice-cream in Glasgow Botanic Gardens, I started to explain to her why I had
been in an aeroplane the previous week.
‘I was in a country called Greece,’ I said, ‘visiting some people who had to run
away from their homes in a war.’ ‘What’s a war, Granny?’ she said – and
suddenly, I was stricken to the heart, and didn’t know how to go on.
How could I speak to her about the children screaming as bombs rained down
on their homes, about their streets in shattered ruins, about crying from hunger
because there was no food available anywhere?
Or about why the mummies and daddies finally decided that they couldn’t stay
in their houses any longer, and why they had to leave their toys, their friends,
their schools and perhaps even their grannies, behind, and set out on a very
long and horrible journey when they didn’t even know where they were going
to end up?
Could I tell her about staying in lots of different places with strangers who spoke
many different languages that you couldn’t understand, about sleeping in tents
if they were lucky but in disused factories, or army camps surrounded with
barbed wire, or even in the street, if they were not lucky? Would I tell her about
walking for mile after mile, in the heat, in the rain, even in the snow; of being
wet and cold and hungry and feeling sick? Could I tell her about going in the
boats that had far too many people on board, and about the people who went
in the water and never came out?
I am someone who is usually considered good with words. But I was silenced.
‘What’s a war, Granny?’
In my silence, several strands of thought ran side by side through my mind. One
of them was focused on all the children, many of them younger than four,
whom I had seen the previous week, in Samos, in Thessaloniki, in Athens, and
all the millions I hadn’t seen but knew existed. Their innocence had been