What if we shut our doors to all the people traumatised by wars and persecution… would we live in a stable economy once we had selected our choice citizens?

A thought-provoking question is posed by Joyce Juma Phiri on a flyer advertising Edinburgh events during Refugee Week from 13-19 June.  With luck the events will provoke plenty of thought and action too.  Not least a film about young Afghan asylum seekers which could hardly be more topical.

In This World – showing at Tollcross Community Centre next Thursday 17 June– tracks the journey of two young Afghan asylum seekers from Pakistan across the Middle East and into the UK with the help of people smugglers.  It is a true-life award-winning documentary drama made by Michael Winterbottom (he of Cracker and Welcome to Sarajevo), featuring an asylum seeker, a market trader and a policeman.

With extra irony the young boy who played the part of asylum seeker, Jamal Udin Torabi, will be forced to return to Afghanistan when he reaches 18. (This film, made in 2002,  is newly topical with this week’s news that the new coalition government plans to deport 12 child asylum seekers back to Afghanistan every month.)

As always The Welcoming has drawn up a programme of events which are both truly welcoming and rightly challenging.  The week’s programme starts on Sunday with a film made more recently and much closer to home: A Long Way from Home showing at the Filmhouse on Sunday at 2.30pm – invites us to experience the problems of three asylum seekers from Columbia, Spain and Rwanda trying to make a new life in Scotland (The film, beautifully produced on a tiny budget by Pilton Video, was made by the refugee drama group IkaZe in collaboration with The Welcoming in 2008 and shown at the Red Eye film club last year).

Every year Refugee Week invites us to imagine what it must be like to seek a new life far from home and family.  This year The Welcoming rightly draws attention to the confusing issues of the economy, concern about immigration and the real hardship of refugees and asylum seekers (see the introduction by Joyce Juma Phiri, who came to Scotland as a refugee from Malawi and is now the Access and Inclusion Co-ordinator at Stevenson College in Edinburgh).

There is plenty more to see including A Sense of Place, an art and photographic exhibition opened by City of Edinburgh Councillors Joanna Mowat and David Becket at Tollcross Community Centre. And the week ends with a party and great music to raise money for Refugee Survival (see below).

Great news in from the west.  That’s the west of Edinburgh, where the Welcoming centre runs a terrific programme of events bringing together local communities with refugees and asylum seekers – sharing ideas and learning together through art, film, music, discussion and food.   The cinema club starts again next week with an exciting list of films (and new comfy chairs).  But that is not the only good news…

As Stan Reeves explains, after a year of uncertainty, the Adult Learning Project which runs The Welcoming migrant support programme, has been awarded a contract to supply migrant employability and social integration services on behalf of the City council. “We will start back a full Welcoming programme just as soon as the money is released.” emails Stan.

Leith Open Space visited The Welcoming in Tollcross Community Centre earlier this year. The centre is an important meeting place for new Scots from all over the city (“to learn about Scots society and culture and also practise their English”, as the website puts it). These are ideas very much after our own heart so we were delighted when Jon Busby of The Welcoming enabled Mike Cowley (a member of Leith Open Space who runs the Red Eye Cinema club) to include the film A Long Way from Home in this year’s film programme at Pilmeny Youth Centre.

Now there’s a great line up of films starting at The Welcoming 6pm Thursday 19th November with Tehran Has No More Pomegranates, an experimental documentary from Mahmoud Bakshi, about the capital of the Islamic republic,  one of the most polluted cities on the planet.

The weekly programme (free) continues on 26 November with The Flower of My Secret and 3 December The Age of Stupid. All films have English subtitles and are followed by refreshments and discussion. [see more about The Welcoming below the poster, and on their website]

A little background information about The Welcoming

In the beginining The Welcoming was a health and literacies pilot project set up in February 2003 by the Adult Learning Project (ALP) in partnership with the Minority Ethnic Health Inclusion Project (MEHIP) in order to bring together refugees, asylum seekers, Scottish and people from local minority ethnic communities.

The aim of the project was to socialise, share cultures and learn together. Newcomers to the society wanted to learn about Scots society and culture and also practise their English. The project was successful and funding has been secured from Communities Scotland to continue the project as a literacies Pathfinder Project.
For more information see the website: www.tollcross.edin.org/alp

Or contact Stan Reeves at:

117 Fountainbridge
Edinburgh EH3 9QG
0131 221 5800

Jon Busby of The Welcoming along with one of the IkaZe film makers will be joining Mike Cowley, organiser of Red Eye, to take part in discussion after the film.

As ever, this is a free event. All are welcome.