Wednesday 18 June 2008

Refugee Week in UK


What a great week; a celebration of the contribution refugees have made and are making to society in Britain. After all the bad press it is so refreshing to see articles in the Sunday Observer and other newspapers and magazines and events up and down the country - see Refugee Week.
This site lists just some of the events going on, but certainly gives an idea of the wide range of ways people find to pay respect to the refugees in their area. There are conferences, discussions groups, concerts, food tastings, films and cultural exchanges.

Borderline Books attended an afternoon in Middlesbrough held by the Hope Foundation which supports people with literacy and numeracy, computer lessons and plenty of advice and information for local asylum applicants. We took books in French and English together with posters, cards and stickers from our friends UNITED. The great thing is that the Hope Foundation decided that they want to set up a multilingual library and today was the start of that project. This is so encouraging, and the third project to which we have given books who have decided to use our donation as the basis for their own library.
There are a number of events happening in Newcastle this week. We will having an information stand at the event at the Civic Centre on Friday and the Northern Conference Against Racism on Saturday at the University of Northumberland and may get to some of the other happenings as well.
We do finally have a prototype new English flyer. Prototype in that the production was not quite up to scratch, but it was a rush job and we got a huge discount, so I suppose we shouldn't complain!