This is the third multicultural Open Stage night organised by members of Swietlica and they decided to mark Refugee Week by promoting the work of as many different groups as possible. The result is an extraordinary programme including Nepalese dancers, Ukrainian singers, Tibetan performers, Indian sitar musicians and the headline band Ghanamma Trio as well as stalls of African crafts, Polish arts and multicultural food.
We were delighted to be asked to contribute names to the mailing list. During the last five years we have met so many inspiring people working in our part of town – achieving fantastic results with little or no money. Not least Swietlica (and their Welcome Home project). Their aims are to celebrate diversity and spread understanding between communities and (with a constant political undercurrent of concern about immigration confusing the issue of asylum) the 60th anniversary of Refugee Week could hardly be a more important time to spread understanding. With celebration.
As Iain Christie put it in an email: “We’re trying to highlight and celebrate the diversity of Edinburgh through food music, dance, performance, poetry and music, in a alcohol and drugs free environment.”
Click on the Refugee Week website and you find most Scottish activities happen in Glasgow. But there are heartwarming events in Edinburgh too – at The Welcoming, Melting Pot and the African support group Karibu – and though Welcome Home is not on the website list it is well promoted on their Facebook page and the Migrants Rights website
And we are very pleased to say that World Kitchen in Leith will be making a contribution towards what sounds like a spectacular spread of food displaying the talents of many great local cooks and cafes.
Welcome Home is from 5.30 to 9.30 on Monday 20th June at Fort Community Wing, North Fort Street, EH6 4HF, Edinburgh. The event is free but donations will be welcome.
Sofia steals the show at the first Open Stage night in November 2010.
The ‘poetry tree’ in St Andrew Square Garden
Home is a dead tree in the garden. Well, not quite so dead now that it is fluttering with poems about home to mark Refugee Week in Edinburgh.
The poems are in many languages – Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, English – but they all focus on thoughts of home. The shortest is just three words: “Here and there” a simple reality of a new life in Edinburgh far from the home that was Pakistan. You can fill in your own emotion.
Poems about home were written at a workshop in The Welcoming led by Ryan van Winkle, Reader in Residence at the city libraries and Scottish Poetry Library. The workshop was organised by the poetry library in partnership with The Welcoming and Oxfam. Then, in pouring rain, we hung the poems on the tree near the Coffee Republic Pavillion on Monday 15 June, the start of Refugee Week.
Some of the poems will be read at a simple lunchtime event in St Andrew Square Garden (Edinburgh’s poetry garden) on Thursday between 1pm and 2pm. With luck this time the rain will stay away – but the poetry will remain on the tree until 29 June.
[PS Or will they? You better hurry – at lunchtime, today Thursday, there were empty wires where the poems had been. Ryan says he refuses to be insulted: "I hope they are decorating someone's fridge somewhere"]
