"When the full story of all these years in Northern Ireland is written, sadly you probably won't be recorded or mentioned - not BVS or you individually. Sorry about that. But more important, in ways that can never be measured, is that you've made a huge contribution to the lives of so many people here and to our overall situation - by your coming here you have encouraged us, by helping us to realize we are part of a great world family who are concerned about justice, peace, and people. It’s important that we’re not alone in that. … You’ve come to share that. You’ve touched the lives of so many people. Thank you for that, and we want to encourage you in return.”
We didn’t stop with sending a first BVSer
to that community center. BVSers were
placed in different corners of Belfast and beyond. Back in the day, we were generous with more
than sending volunteers, too, by giving a minivan to a group in Ligoniel, and
even a house to another volunteer service organization. (I would love to still
have that house!) One interesting
placement was in the mid 1970s when the general secretary of the Irish Council
of Churches, who talked to paramilitary groups on all sides, arranged to bring
one of our previous BVSers back to Belfast to work as a receptionist in the
office of the think tank group of some Protestant paramilitaries on cease
fire. David Stevens, a more recent ICC
general secretary, told us at the 30th anniversary: “That was an imaginative thing to do. Peace
requires you to work with people who you might not like to associate
with.”
Forty years later, we’ve sent about 160
volunteers to over 40 different organizations in Northern Ireland and
Ireland. Some are still going strong –
Quaker Cottage has had 24 of our volunteers throughout the years –but other
groups have changed, folded, or no longer work with international
volunteers.
Along with the memories from the 30th
anniversary event in Belfast in 2002, I’ve rummaged through the Geneva office
files, amidst early BVSers’ project reports and photos, and found other gems of
information. I kept travel notes in the
past 25 years and re-discovered some interesting things in those. Here is a small sampling:
My early annual meetings with David
Stevens (then assistant general secretary of the Irish Council of Churches in
Belfast) often gave me insights about the ongoing situation. In the late 1980s he was fond of saying that
“the situation is desperate but not serious.”
We got news that one of the BVSers who worked as an administrative
assistant at the ICC had tried to attend the Milltown Cemetery funeral in 1988
for the IRA trio who were killed in Gibraltar, and a guy named Michael Stone
started shooting at the Belfast funeral-goers.
David S. and I both agreed after that, I needed to have some serious
talks with some of the BVSers.
Occasionally we held joint meetings of
the BVS and the EIRENE volunteers from Germany, not only discussing heavy
issues like The Troubles, but also topics like “the role of foreigners in
Northern Ireland.”
Year after year, I arrived at the
international airport and took the bus in to Belfast, always seeing a banner
along the motorway admonishing that “Ulster still needs Jesus.” It disappeared a while ago. As did the “Belfast says no” banner on the
top of City Hall. Did Ulster find
Jesus? Belfast did eventually say yes
to the peace agreements.
In 1992 we held a BVS day for the volunteers
in Belfast and invited Mairead Corrigan-Maguire of Peace People fame to speak
with us. She told the BVSers to not get
lost in the issues in Northern Ireland, but to concentrate on one-to-one
relationships, to help people feel important about themselves, and to “be
happy.”
One newly arrived BVSer in 1993 told me
that he had “not been prepared for these kinds of kids” he was working with in
a local youth center in north Belfast. Hmmm.
And the peace lines separating the two
communities grew higher and looked ever more permanent.
I’ll never forget the summer 1994 phone
call from Vincent Bent, director of the Ulster Quaker Service Committee, who
shouted “Kristin, we have a cease fire!”!
That was the first of the IRA cease fires, leading up to the peace
agreement.
After that a church executive asked me
if we would leave Northern Ireland because peace had come. Do cease fires really mean that everything’s
changed? By then we had worked with
youth groups, with community organizations, with individual congregations, with
the Irish Council of Churches, with children and their families, with
prisoners, with the Peace People, with other peace or mediation or cross
community initiatives and organizations and centers and farms. Not only focusing on the causes and effects
of the Troubles, we had also had volunteers in Women’s Aid refuges and with
briefly with the Travelling Community. In 1996 we took on a placement at the
Multi Cultural Resource Center. In 1997
the first BVSer headed to a L’Arche community in the Republic of Ireland. To this date, 20 BVSers have served at the
L’Arche communities in the Republic and in Belfast.
We started holding annual weekend
retreats for the Northern Irish and Irish BVSers in the mid 1990’s at various
places around Northern Ireland. One
highlight was when our BVS group climbed Slieve Donard in the Mourne Mountains.
After the on- and off- and on-again
ceasefires, the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998. By 2002 I noticed that taxi companies had
suddenly flourished and some cab drivers would venture all across Belfast. Taxis as a sign of peace? And sadly more peace walls.
We were caught off guard by stricter UK
visa requirements in early 2004 and had to send two newly arrived BVSers home
to the USA to get those pesky visas, without which they could not enter the UK
as long term volunteers. We’d previously
always successfully avoided visas because of a handy letter from the Home
Office that allowed BVSers to sail through UK Immigration – which was the work
of MP Enoch Powell, but that’s another weird odd story. It’s been an adventure keeping up with the
new demands and requirements. In 2006
one BVSer could tragically only spend a weekend at her project because her visa
had been rejected by UK immigration. And
we still today encounter unexpected glitches in the UK visa process! Fortunately it’s much easier for us North
Americans to get volunteer status in the Republic of Ireland.
My first ever visit to Northern Ireland
was to attend my very first European BVS retreat in September 1978 before
starting my BVS project in Austria. I
flew from the USA directly to Northern Ireland and joined the other European
BVSers at the Corrymeela Community retreat center on the northeast coast; we
visited Belfast and other areas, too. I
never imagined then that I would later get the opportunity to see so much
history up close – well, from the vantage point of accompanying all the BVSers and
annual visits with friends and projects over the last 25 years.
While I have often been preoccupied in recent years with visas and other volunteer adventures, you BVSers have done so many great things in Ireland and Northern Ireland (and everywhere else!), and like Harold Good said: “you’ve come here to share and have touched the lives of so many people.” Thank you!
