DELIVERING AID OVERSEAS

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How recycling your furniture has helped us develop an overseas aid programme.

Taking aid overseas all began quite by accident when in the spring of 1992 we had an urgent request from social services to help rehouse four refugee sisters from war torn Bosnia, as usual we were able to use the furniture and household goods donated by your good selves to rehouse these women and their children. They had come to us with nothing but the clothes they stood up in and they were so glad to be offered real practical help. Unlike seeing it all on TV, we could now see refugees as real people and it shook us to hear that they once had a good life back in Bosnia. The four sisters were all graduates, each with a profession, owning their own homes and cars. And here they stood before us with nothing. Looking back, I greatly admire them, for fighting to keep their spirits up and with great dignity and determination they were very keen to make a fresh start in a foreign country with a very different culture and language to their own. Not only did they go on to university here but all their six children quickly learnt English, worked hard at school and all of them went to University, two gaining an MA and one a PhD. Not bad from having to cope with the threat of death from the Serb army in that terrible war and losing everything, suffering terrible discrimination from neighbours.

I remember in the first week of our moving them into their very own home in Wythenshawe, how they stood out or rather clashed in their typical female Muslim attire, and then that awful second day when they woke up to find all their shoes were stolen from the front door and then later in the same week one of the neighbours threatened them with a knife, telling them they were not wanted here and to go back home. Which was terrible, this and many other experiences with our overseas guests taught us much about the tragedies of war and the plight of refugees. And to think of the way the Tories play the race card?!

We became involved in taking aid to Bosnia because on our usual weekly food delivery to them we found them in a terrible state, crying and really upset. Apparently they had saved up quite a large sum of money and bought food, medicine and clothing to send to their families back home in Komensko a small village high up in the hills above Sarajevo. When our refugee families heard that the UN aid convoy had left the aid in a Bosnian warehouse, which had then been robbed, they of course had been devastated. The refugee families then asked us if we could help them with this problem. In our naivety we said, we have a van, we will go and take it personally to each of their families. And so we started to prepare for what turned out to be an adventure of a life-time.

That very first trip was horrendous and so frightening, but also very exciting. We met many other dedicated amateur aid-delivery people from all over the world. We met a women folk singer from Germany who filled her car with food and clothes and just went over and handed them out. There was a group from Sweden who came over in an old Army lorry full of goodies. Because we had involvement with these wonderful, yet ordinary people who were responding to people in great need, (a bit like in Kiev now), It greatly encouraged us to keep going, and eventually we got through to Komensko in spite of the difficulties and dangers.

Setting off from England, we had not realised just what it meant to be going into a war zone. Not only were we not mentally prepared for it, but we were without flak jackets, helmets or satellite phones, which was a must in the early days of the war. The route going through Croatia and into Bosnia meant facing many dangers, i.e. sniper zones, driving through ghost towns, getting around Serb-occupied areas by driving through forests, across fields and down country lanes. Driving in a war zone without vehicle insurance and personal insurance was of course taking a great risk, but along with many other Europeans who were also taking a risk … well we just felt it had to be done if we were to get the aid into Bosnia.

We were the first to get aid into the small village about 30 miles from Sarajevo, and found terrible poverty and many victims of war crimes. The villagers were poorly dressed, with broken shoes, the few men that were left fought over the aid parcels of food and clothes, their women (wives and daughters) jumped on the backs of the men, I can see it to this very day, they tore their men apart, I’ve never seen anything like it before. But in spite of this trouble and the threat of raids by neighbouring villages for this newly arrived food aid, our stay in Bosnia was an amazing experience and I was so moved by their plight, their courage and their gratitude to us that I vowed there and then to go back every year that aid is needed, this led to our an annual aid delivery trek right up to the dreaded Covid lock-down in 2020.

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Therefore each year as promised we were able to bring food, clothing and medical supplies as advised by the refugee families here in Britain and take them to each family personally. On later trips we felt confident enough to smuggle the girl’s mother, and her son back from behind Serb lines. We were able to take them to Zagreb where the British Embassy, (which surely should be the proper route for all asylum seekers), granted them refugee status and they eventually joined up with the rest of the family back here in England. By the time the Serbs were eventually subdued in Bosnia by the UN and NATO, over 50,000 women had been raped, thousands killed, with 90% of homes damaged or destroyed. In Kosovo one million are either dead or missing, which adds up to 50% of the Kosovo population.

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KOSOVO

 

We began taking aid to the Kosovan people in 1998, when they fled as refugees into Albania before the onslaught of Serbian militia, under the brutal leadership of Milošević. We were so shocked to see how poor Albania was. I remember once having to travel by train from the docks to Tirana the capital, to see one of their ministers to get permission to take food into one of the refugee camps. The train had all it's windows broken and no ribbing between each carriage. We had to jump from one carriage to another – quite exciting for the young, no doubt, but a bit frightening for the elderly. We couldn’t help notice the millions of gun bunkers and air raid shelters, built by an obsession of their president: now used by the young as alternative coffee bars and meeting places. The following year we took aid into Kosovo to the families we had previously met in the Albanian refugee camps. ‘Thanks to NATO, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’ was written up all over the countryside. Even now, years later, if you’re British, or American, and go into any shop in Kosovo you can still be invited into the back parlour for a ceremonial cup of tea, for being part of the international peacekeeping force that got their country back for them. Just recently the Kosovan people have voted for independence and separation from Serbia, as have Montenegro, another poor country where we take aid.

Whilst travelling from Bosnia to Kosovo my partner at that time, Su Constable, and I were twice arrested by Serb paramilitary, we were harshly treated and severely pushed and shouted at, threatened with guns and thrown into prison for a day. The Serbs – who at that time were perhaps themselves the most undesirable in Europe – then kicked us out of the country with the words ‘Undesirable’ stamped in our passports. This happened two years running. In Montenegro, alongside the speed traps, they had Serb-traps. On the second occasion that the Serbs caught us in their illegal roadblock they also arrested and beat up two British policemen who were on a tour of duty with the UN Special Forces. The policemen’s two Kosovan friends were shot by the Serbs without a trial or without mercy.

Travelling to Bosnia and Kosovo gave us much insight into what was obviously not a civil war. We gained first-hand experience of how the Serbs so cruelly indulged in ethnic cleansing in their crude attempts to enlarge their country to achieve their mythical Greater Serbian Empire.

 

We have learnt a great deal over the years about what life is like for people who have had to flee from their country. Now the rebuilding of homes and infrastructure takes place, but who is to rebuild the factories? For unemployment then was very high, and how is the healing of lives to happen without a South African style Peace and Reconciliation operation? Alas, the Balkans seems not to have a Bill Gates or a Richard Branson for their economic recovery, or a Mandela, or a Bishop Tutu, to overcome the bitterness of Serbian brutality which still agitates today. It was pointed out to me during my recent stay in Palestine that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is also about ethnic cleansing for the ‘greater Jewish Empire’, but we are not supposed to criticise Israel because of the Holocaust or for fear of offending both Israel and America. On top of which our confusion seems that much more confounded by those fundamentalist Christians here in the west who believe that the Jews have religious and ancient land rights to Palestine.

But can the Native indigenous Americans take back their land, or can the Maoris or Aboriginals take back New Zealand and Australia? So why do the Jews think they can push the Palestinians out of their homes when they have obviously been living there for 2000 years and to make matters worse, it would seem they are obviously the remnant, the left behind Jews from when the Israelites fled their land back in about 70 AD? I would have thought George Bush’s idea of two separate states could have been completed long ago. On top of all this we now had the Arab Spring, now turned into a cruel, long drawn-out winter of death and destruction, the Syrian problem with Putin, plus Putin acting like Hitler in Ukraine; plus we see Trump was a trumpeting the same old deadly populism that has led to so many wars. But then Dictators are all much the same, mean, cruel insanely greedy and without feeling for ordinary people. Meanwhile our western leaders are as usual just a bit too slow to have stopped the suffering before it really got started, and as usual its women and children suffer most.

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NEW DIMENSIONS

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Twice over the years our aid trips have taken on a new dimension. Once when we were asked to take wheelchairs for landmine victims in 1997, and again in 2001 when we were asked to start taking aid to people blinded by mines, i.e. the sort of mine that jumps up in the air and explodes in people’s faces. 80% of landmine victims are women and children.

Each year the circle of friends we visit gets bigger and bigger until it developed into taking aid to 5 homes for the blind, three hospitals and two mine-rehab units, plus one struggling university. Our trip has now become a 5 or 6,000-mile round trip of Europe, from Manchester to Bosnia and on to Istanbul. In the hospital in Tuzla, Bosnia, we saw a 5-year-old boy, the victim of a landmine. As we entered his ward I thought he was covered in scabs, but on closer inspection we could see that small bits of metal were embedded in his skin. His arms were encased in bandages, his hands badly damaged and his sight in question. What chance does this young boy have in the Balkans, the poor part of Europe?

In 2004 we travelled for the first time to Iran as a one-off, taking children’s clothes, toys and computers. We got to know the back-lane border-crossing points in Central and Eastern Europe, the best shops for a bargain and best sights to see: Lake Bled, Kotor Bay and especially the Koka Pass, which is a secretive road through the mountains from Montenegro into Kosovo. Some of these routes are pure magic. There is the world’s second largest Grand Canyon in Montenegro with it's Tara bridge, very grand and used as a setting for many films.

Imagine our surprise when we took aid to the blind association in Moldova when a group of workmen took us into the world’s largest underground wine cellar through the back (workers) entrance. What a surprise! 90 miles of underground motorway, and all these motorways linking up vast cave-like chambers, each full of some of the world’s rarest wines, spirits and champagnes. What made us smile was that in the first cave to the workers entrance was a chamber full of empty bottles left by the workers over many many years.

We also got to know the EU pretty well and found out that Britain was falling well behind in terms of high prices, low standards and poor recycling efforts, (for instance Britain is the only country with no deposit on bottles and cans.) Britain had become one of the most heavily fined country in the EU –and once I heard that the UK was being fined half a million euros a day for inadequate recycling. Also we feel our leaders have let us down over Europe in that we were led astray over European unity, The Northern Ireland issue for instance. Debate, if it is not stifled, is certainly not encouraged. The English Channel should not disadvantage us in Europe as regards travel insurance, and mobile phone costs, etc. I personally would like to see a United States of Europe for I believe Europe to be the most idealistic and safest continent, but our right-wing press is against it, never having a good word to say about Europe or immigrants. I feel this Brexit mess shows how the British public are far too influenced by the media, which do not, as they claim, reflect the public mood, but rather manipulate it.

Kosovo is very different from Bosnia in spite of its quite liberal Islamic background. The Kosovan Liberation Army was, recognised as a terrorist organisation by the Serbs. But to the Albanian Kosovars they are the resistance, the ‘Dad’s army’, the TA, their own sons, fathers and granddads who tried with too few weapons to protect themselves from Serb ethnic cleansing, who had at their disposal all the might of the Yugoslav army. The Albanian people certainly could not liberate themselves or seek independence for they were too few in number and too weakly armed. Thanks to a mixture of their own efforts (i.e. the KLA), the press, NATO bombing and diplomacy, both the Bosnians and the Kosovans are back home from the refugee camps and are busy rebuilding their homes, their lives and their country, but still ethnic strife lies just below the surface, especially now that Kosovo has got its independence from Serbia.

The second year when we visited Kosovo, we stayed with one of the refugee families who we had taken aid to the year before. This family, along with other people in the village, gave us a written invitation to attend the Memorial Day of the eight local villages celebrating their return from the refugee camps. So early one Saturday morning we started up the steep slopes of the mountain with our host family. Mum had given up teaching to have a family (of four children); Dad was a local head teacher, Veeyalsa, the eldest girl, now 20 and studying to be teacher at the nearby University of Prisren. Albert, now 17, also studying to be a teacher, in his final year of matriculation, he was 14 when the Serbs attacked their village and he, and the other teenagers had to live rough in the mountains for 5 months because the Serbs were killing teenagers on sight. I could not bear to think of my two sons at the age of 14 having to be left behind, to live rough, to look after themselves and to be prey to the bullets of a prowling enemy.) Because Albert and the other teenagers had seen where the Serbs had placed the mines he was able to guide me on my early morning jog, safely away from danger. Next came Lirridon, tall, and very bright; like most Albanians, he has blond hair and blue eyes, a boy of 16 who wanted to be a journalist. And last of the siblings, his twin sister Sarina, very pretty, also with blond hair and blue eyes, at college training to be a nursery teacher. Last in our group was the children’s aunt, Shemsee, who was a teacher but had, like most professional workers, succumbed to the higher wages of Kfor (combined UN and NATO forces in Kosovo) and was now a policewoman and translator. It was so strange to see Shemsee now, for when we first met her a year before she was a very thin, tall girl in a refugee camp, starving, ill-clad and very afraid. And I just stared at her, for she was now a fully grown woman, very smart and very confident in her uniform and wearing a gun. I wasn’t quite sure what shocked me the most, to see her so radiant and so confident, or to see the gun strapped to her waist, making her bare a striking resemblance to Lara Croft.

As we started climbing the steep slope we were joined by first the neighbours and then by people from the other villages. In all, eight villages in this region were involved in that fearful flight for freedom from the Serbs three years before. I tried to imagine how it must have been. I was out of breath within a minute of the climb, even before we had reached the cover of the thick forest. I tried to apply the stories we heard of their flight, to myself. Of carrying food and belongings, carrying the small children and helping the weak and elderly. I shuddered, for I couldn’t really imagine how … But it must be true that the fear of death would make any one of us run, as they must have done, up this mountain. I heard so many stories of heroism, of bravery, of sadness and death. Special mention must be made of the teenagers who lived rough in the hills just to keep watch from a distance to see where the mines were laid and what was happening to the farms and livestock whilst the Serbs looted their homes, killed their animals and burned whole communities. We heard so many grim stories, one of which was how on that first fatal night, teenagers crept down to refill their Coke bottles with water from the wells, only to find that the Serbs had fouled the water, so they returned that night empty-handed. Four or five hours after starting out, panting and sweating, we came in sight of the summit; it was similar to climbing a forest-covered Snowdon or Ben Nevis. At the top there were 15,000–20,000 people, laughing and talking, exchanging stories about what had happened to them, how they had escaped, which country they had ended up in as refugees, how they had come back, what damage there was to their homes and livestock, what aid they had received to help them get back on their feet. And of course sad stories too, of loved ones raped, tortured, murdered and missing.

At the celebrations there was much speech making, music, and guns fired into the air (which made us jump out of our skin). The atmosphere was that of a pop festival. Towards the end of the day the memorial service started and the KLA led a procession to some kind of war memorial. There a guard of honour fired volleys of shots into the air. The General was there, and was very pleased to meet us, and after much hand-shaking with the General and his entourage, we went back to our group. We saw many people crying and mourning for their dead and lost ones, but eventually the people began to drift down the mountain and back to their newly reacquired and partly rebuilt homes. There was a strange religious feeling about it all, having celebrated NATO’s victory on their behalf and having mourned and remembered their dead, injured and missing loved ones. In a way it was a bit like communal therapy.

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MOLDOVA

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MOLDOVA needs special mention. Not just because it is Europe’s poorest country, but also because it is another Chechnya or Northern Ireland waiting to happen, and it will also soon be part of the EU. At one time it was part of Romania but, given a false status of independence under the Soviets, it has now ended up as a watering hole for the Russian mafia. The Romanians, or rather the Moldovans, as they are now known, are little more than serfs and foreigners in their own country. We stayed with a Moldovan family who told us they felt deep despair at the stranglehold the Russians had on their country; they felt in a vacuum and had no hope for the future. They kept crying to us in despair, ‘Why are the Russian soldiers here in our country when Russia is on the other side of the Ukraine?’ Of the three MPs who spoke in parliament about the Russian problem, two were killed and the other kidnapped. We saw the secret police’s luxurious holiday camp next to the five palaces built by FIFA, yes FIFA, what are they doing in Moldova? Of the £15 million given to the country by Britain, the Moldovans say much or most of it goes straight to the Russian mafia in their fiefdom of Transnistria, a large part of Moldova. We felt that the only way we could possibly help some of the people we met at the blind institution in Kissenou, the capital, is purely through personal contact and giving things directly to them. What is needed, of course, is for someone to highlight the problem at a European level before the Moldovan liberation front gets properly organised and falls prey to the US-led war on terrorism.

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AFRICA, EGYPT, JAMAICA AND CUBA

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Some years ago we had been supporting a group of women from Manchester who worked hard to send aid back home to their respective countries. For instance, Lillian from Nigeria, who twice a year sends a 40-foot container full of household goods to Port Harcourt, her home town. There Lillian runs a community shop, an old container pitched on the side of the road like most DIY shops in Africa. The things we donate to her helps to keep it going. Then there’s Esther from Ghana, who was raising money to start up an orphanage for the many homeless children in her home-town of Accra. Cobra from Iran (one of our women volunteers who still helps us today). We took a van full of cloths and bedding to Iran to help her relations in the earthquake-stricken city of Bam. Then there are three women, Lorraine, Maxim and Joy, who run a charity shop to send money to pay for three clinics for handicapped children in Luxor (Egypt) and Cuba. Then Jenny whose family live in Jamaica, the most amazing thing about these women is that they are working so hard to send aid home to their families. For every 10 black people you meet, in all probability 8 of them will be working hard to send help back home, in fact aid from the African diaspora outweighs all other forms of western aid.

Having long been invited to see the work they are doing and where our aid is going in Africa, Egypt, Jamaica and Cuba, I finally, with the help of Lillian Jenny and Lorraine, got fixed up with my flight and accommodation. So without having any more excuses for not going, I excitedly set off for 4 week tour of those four wonderful places, and it was, as you can imagine, such a wonderful experience.

Africa is a real mad kaleidoscope of music, dancing, noise, exotic animals and insects, not to mention birds of paradise; there’s both mystery and danger. In crowded cities insane drivers do jalopy racing down narrow streets, bumping and scraping each other’s cars, having fun, using their nous instead of a non-existent highway code, and by sheer ingenuity the traffic always seemed to flow without my seeing any serious accidents. In Nigeria each shanty-town street holds on average about 7 to 10 churches rather than pubs, indicating an obsession with religion, which may account for the lack of pubs! When I was able to stop blinking and start looking properly, I was overcome with sadness because of the terrible poverty that blights the lives of what can only be described as incredibly nice, polite and amazingly beautiful people whose lithe bodies move so gracefully. I tremble at the contradiction of such natural beauty nestling amongst the beastliness of Western exploitation, and on top of that they kill each other

I saw the oil-blackened sandy beaches (courtesy of Shell), and further terrible pollution from Shell’s petroleum development area, where nothing will grow and farmers receive no compensation. Local people told me about human rights abuses – how Shell has taken over £17 billion-worth of oil at huge environmental cost and is putting nothing back. They told me that when they complained, Shell turned to the government, who raided their shanty-town village of Agoni, killing 750 people, injuring hundreds more (with no medical care) and making 30,000 people homeless. One of their leaders was Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged by the military. And now we hear of Shell (and other companies) misleading shareholders.

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AWARENESS

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Over the years we have run many awareness-raising group workshops here and overseas. For instance, we managed to run a five-year awareness raising scheme in the Gambia, and at the end of this paper I include a letter from Suwaibo Touray – a journalist who attended our course and has recently become an MP in the Gambia – explaining how he is trying to introduce awareness-raising schemes in Africa.

Whilst in Africa I was invited to give talks to students and businessmen and we discussed the idea that they should strive for the establishment of the United States of Africa. For, they all agreed, only by way of this kind of unity could Africa claim back it's land and resources and force the West into a real and proper fair-trade agreement, not like the sham we have today. It’s tragic that western farmers enjoy billions in subsidies, but not so for Africa.

I made so many good friends in Africa and I look forward to going back each year. What stands out most in my mind is going to a village of one million people and seeing them queue up to draw water from just the one village well. And then later in the evening the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as a tribal dance group of teenagers worked their way slowly through the thick jungle, with drums and music playing, to the chief’s house where I was staying, to perform traditional dance and music from a long distant past, and it was done especially for me, like I was Royalty. This group of teenagers had volunteered to undertake two tasks, one to entertain visitors, and the other task was to pick up litter in this vast village.

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EGYPT

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For me the magic of Egypt was the Nile, and if you go to Egypt expecting the pyramids to be the main splendour (of which doubtless they are), then you might just miss something just as amazing. Over millions of years the mysterious flooding of the Nile has created a magical Garden of Eden stretching from sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean. I got to see and feel the rich black soil as I helped a group of friends tend to their allotment just a few yards from the Nile River.

I arrived in Cairo two days before Lorraine and met up with a group of agriculture students who showed me around the sights of Cairo, even though they didn’t have a certificate from the police saying they could mix with westerners, without which they could end up in prison. And to think America gives $3 billion each year to prop up this very undemocratic regime in Egypt. Which is now in flux, thanks to the so-called Arab Spring?  Later I met up with Lorraine, and after purchasing some wheelchairs in Cairo for the children’s clinic, we then took a slow train 409 miles through the Nile valley to Luxor. The sights, sounds smells and life of the Nile is a very moving experience. For this great river like an artery of life cutting through and dividing the Sahara from the Arabian desert. Passing by Suez, Sinai, and the Red Sea with Sharm-el-Sheikh, Israel, Jordan, Palestine and Saudi Arabia. Although it was a slow train it arrived all too soon in Luxor, where friends awaited us to show us the three medical centres to where our medical equipment was to go. One of the doctors in one of the clinics had to build a wall around the building and grounds to stop local people from stealing from or encroaching on the clinic’s land.

Jamaica and Cuba are other countries I visited to see how the aid we pass on is being used. Although people are grateful for the things we send over, one could not help sensing a feeling of resentment deep down against rich countries who manipulate their economy, exploit their resources and then, to add insult to injury, dump hand-me-downs onto them in the name of charity, which, if it wasn’t for western exploitation, they wouldn’t need anyway.

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LOOKING BACK

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Looking back over the many years we feel so privileged to have had the opportunities to help so many people and to have done so much action-packed travelling and all because people want to see their things passed on to help others. In all those years we have always tried to maintain a professional, community-work approach to this project, offering a sympathetic, client-centred service, keeping up to date with various reports, attending conferences and endeavouring to understand the forces of change in our society and how these affect the less able and vulnerable members of our society. We have tried to use this understanding as well as the furniture you donate to us to offer real and practical help to those setting up home, helping them to look at their educational needs and career prospects. The project we have struggled with the most with over the years is that of trying to get informal education recognised as a legitimate way for people to raise their awareness about themselves and their society and the true nature of real democracy. Our research findings show that private schools incorporate informal education alongside formal education which helps the children of the wealthy to develop a questioning mind, independent thinking, giving them more confidence and setting them on the path to achieve their potential. ‘Training for leadership’, they call it. Unfortunately the state schools seem to lack the wherewithal to implement informal education for their students. We believe that this is the main reason why we have such a large gap between rich and poor. The rich to lead and the others to follow.

They say that democracy is the life blood of the people, but to try and get ordinary people to take an interest in politics is really very difficult, whereas when I worked with some of the top private schools, I found they talked about politics like we talk about the weather. So I thought if I can tell a story about politics it just might get people interested in how we as a nation can get better organised under the euphemistic name of politics. So here goes story number one.

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STORY NO.1 - POLITICS

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Once upon a very long time ago, 3,500 years ago in fact, somewhere in the Middle East, there lived this very old wise man, a judge and priest called Jethro, who had seven daughters. The youngest, a very beautiful girl nicknamed Zippy because she was always so quick and nimble, dancing and skipping everywhere, and not a little spoilt as the youngest ones usually are, but alas sometimes at her sisters’ beck and call and always the one to do the kitchen chores, in fact a bit of a Cinders really, only on this particular day she didn’t know she was just about to go to the ball and meet her prince. On this particular day something quite amazing happened which was to change her life for ever. She and her friends, as part of their usual household duties, had to draw water from the well about half a mile away. When she got there she saw this magnificent white stallion adorned with the bright purple colours of Egyptian royalty, and sitting near the well was this tall man in a black and scarlet robe, and she was just wondering who it could be, when some rough shepherds arrived and started their usual foul-mouthed cat-calling and abusive and aggressive banter that was just intended to get rid of what they thought was just a group of middle-class, snooty women. Then this stranger jumped on his horse and charged into their herd of sheep, scattering them, and he shouted at the men, ‘Go and round up your sheep and leave these women alone! They were here first; you should be ashamed of yourselves.’ The man dismounted and said to the women, ‘I think you’ll be OK now to draw water; those men will be some time rounding up their flock. Then he started to talk to Zippy, introducing himself as Mo, and asking her which village she was from as he was looking for somewhere to stay. Zippy blushed as she looked into the face of this tall, dark and handsome Egyptian nobleman. It was obvious from the way he kept looking at her that he was attracted to her for she was really very beautiful. She was so excited for nothing like this had ever happened before. From what he said she deduced that for some reason or other he was on the run from the law, it  was all so mysterious and fraught with danger, and ooh so romantic, nothing ever happens in her small village and now here was this wonderful mysterious handsome rich man and it was obvious he was smitten with her. She couldn’t believe her luck, she thought, he keeps looking at me, me of all people. I never in my wildest dreams thought something like this would happen to me. He asked her where she lived and offered to take her home on his horse, so of course she readily agreed, and in a flash she was lifted up into the saddle with her goatskin water carriers securely attached. The horse galloped off and she excitedly put her arms around his waist and hung on for dear life. As her village came into view she asked the stranger if he would drop her just a little way off from the farm until she told her father for she knew he would invite him in, which he did, of course, as it was his nature to be very hospitable towards strangers. She listened at the door as her father interrogated the man. Later she found quite by accident that she was sitting next to him at the dinner table. After this they seemed to find many reasons to spend time together and later they declared it was love at first sight.

Well they got married of course, she was ecstatic with happiness. But some time later Mo had to go away for a time; her heart was broken, but he promised he would return and this time it would be with his people, and she would live with him with his big family and they would live in a wonderful new land and be happy ever after, as he told her. They kissed and hugged each other for a long time before he mounted his horse and rode off.

Some months later big news hit the district; a massive nomadic tribe had emerged out of the desert with many wagons, horses, camels, sheep and goats and it was rumoured they had vast amounts of wealth, jewels,  gold, diamonds, etc. And to cap it all Mo was the leader!!! Her very own beloved Mo; he had come with his family, and what a family.  Jethro hurriedly saddled the camels, took a few servants and of course his daughter and hurried out to meet Mo and this mighty army of Mo’s people. What a joyous meeting she had with her dearly returned husband and oh what a party they had that night in his most prestigious and luxurious tent. But the next morning what an anti-climax for her, because Mo could not see her for days because it was his task to sort out all the problems of the tribes. She and her father looked at the long line of people queueing to see Mo with all their problems, she looked in dismay and thought there must be bloody hundreds of them. Jethro muttered to his daughter about Mo not being very good at delegating. She turned tearfully to her father who was as much concerned about his son-in-law’s problems as he was of his daughter’s disappointment. But being a wise old man he set to thinking about how he could help both Mo and his daughter. And he thought about some of the ideas he and the village elders had talked about on how to resolve local problems, and here was his chance to test out his grand idea of problem-solving, decision-making and power-sharing in small groups, only here it was on a vast scale indeed for there must have been over two million people there. No one had ever seen such a massive army of people like this before. He later found that they were in fact 12 different tribes who were united by a common faith, or were supposed to be, but there were so many differences and arguments between them all.

Jethro asked Mo if he could put an idea to him along with the elders of the 12 tribes. It was readily granted and here he outlined his idea of people talking things through in small groups of about ten people.

He told the leaders to split each of their tribes 1,700 people into groups of 10 (which turned the total of two million people into 200,000 groups of ten. Here they could choose the most learned in their group to oversee the group’s discussions, and now at long last they could talk about their problems, aims, ideas and frustrations in a small group setting, which would help the people to clarify their problems, sharpen up their thinking and clarify their questions, and in fact raise their awareness, a consciousness-raising exercise. Then they would choose one leader from their group to meet up in groups of ten with all the other leaders, making 20,000 groups, and they in turn would do the same, making it 2,000 groups, and of course the next day it would be only 200 groups, and the next day it would be down to just 20 groups, and then just two groups of 10. As you can see, out of these last 20 people of the 2 groups of 10 it would be now much easier to come to the leaders, who in turn would report back to Mo and the elders.

This 3,500- year- old idea of problem-solving, decision-making and power-sharing is probably the earliest example of an alternative to being ruled by a dictator. This idea could rightly be called ‘Metric Democracy’, probably the purist form of democracy there is. This is in fact a blueprint for proper democracy, or real proper popular people power, better than representative Democracy, which is the rich exploiting the poor.

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ORDINARY PEOPLE

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So what I am trying to show you is the unbelievable truth that ordinary people can run the country, any country, because real democracy is the government of ordinary people by ordinary people for ordinary people, which I believe can only be achieved by using this ancient 3,500- year- old idea of metric democracy. I believe we are at a second ‘poll-tax moment’, or a Martin Luther moment, or a Nicolaus Copernicus revelation type moment, where needs must make us discuss our economic blind spot to get us through the ‘class ceiling’. This will help us understand the real meaning of democracy – that’s why it’s called the House of Commons (for the common people, the debating chamber for the commoners, that means us, the ordinary people), not the ‘House of Experts’, or the house of solicitors/Barristers, or the ‘House of Eton’, or the ‘House of Windsor’. We need ordinary people, with a raised awareness and common sense, in the House of Commons – with experts to advise, of course, but the common people to decide. We constantly need reminding of this simple yet breathtaking concept or ordinary people with a raised awareness in the Houses of Parliament, debating and making decisions, passing laws, etc.

If you think about it, it’s obvious that a raised awareness is lacking in students leaving state schools, therefore, I believe it’s a crime against the people that ‘awareness-raising exercises’ are promoted in private schools but not in state schools. Surely ordinary people can run the country better than the rich, and that we the people can also organise a fair and just tax system leading to an economic revolution. We are confident about what the future of a modern parliament could look like, just think, electronic voting, a written constitution, a relaxed dress code, an elected second chamber, and so on and so on. And now story No 2, about the job I once had for a few years working with street gangs.

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STORY NO.2 - DEVELOPING FREE SPEECH

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It was New Year’s Day at about 2am when I was coming home from Manchester and saw a group of nine youngsters walking along Princess Parkway. I stopped to give them a lift, and they all piled in, or rather squeezed in, saying they were on their way home from a concert. We got talking and they were amazed that I was actually being paid to take young people to pop concerts. I told them about the different concerts I had taken groups to, and they were utterly gob-smacked over the fact that I had once shaken hands with Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight pop festival. As we got to my house, I invited them in for coffee. They all tumbled into the house and we sat talking until about ten o’clock in the morning. We had talked half the night away. We talked about the lack of youth facilities, and the ill feeling they had against the authorities, which in their minds was all jumbled up as ‘they’ were against them, they didn’t understand them, etc, etc. We talked and made plans about copying some of the teenage ideas that they had heard about in Amsterdam, particularly about the awareness- raising idea being tried out in the Milky Way club, an old milk depot taken over by a group of young people, which with the support of the local authority had turned it into their very own coffee bar.

After much more talking and planning and more rounds of coffee I took them home, promising to link up with them later. It was two days later when the group met up again at our house – the 9 had become 20, about 15 boys and 5 girls; all aged about 14 to 18. They sat in a circle in the large front room. I told them about my experiences at the pop concerts and about the nature of street-corner work, and especially about non-directive group work to raise young people’s awareness. They all agreed that talking freely about their thoughts and feelings, having time to reflect (just like it said in the many dust-gathering government reports), was definitely what they wanted to try. They just said quite spontaneously, ‘OK, let’s try it now!’ And straight away they fell silent, which was a bit strange for it was long and uncomfortable. There was much tittering and small bursts of laughter, but they soldiered on, got stuck in, and kept at it with a little starts and bursts of speech. Two or three kept saying, ‘What are we supposed to do?’ But after a lot of struggling they began to open up.  I sat there stunned! All the adult groups I had been involved with had taken at least half a day and some, one or two days to get to that stage of silence, and here they were, jumping straight into the deep end of that which frightened the life out of most adults. After a few minutes of eerie unnatural silence one, then another, then another began speaking, first about problems at home, at school and with each other, and especially about the petty crime and vandalism they were involved with. This first group workshop went on for 5 hours; I was mentally exhausted. Slowly, as the young people began to open up and talk freely, it was as if we were being released from that deadly feeling of conformity; the more these teenagers talked, the better they felt; we seemed to create an authority vacuum; it just seemed to happen quite naturally. These 20 youngsters had sat for 5 hours, starting with silence, had emerged from that silence, fitfully at first, discovering that they could talk freely in a non-judgmental atmosphere without criticism or put-downs. They became excited, began practising and experimenting with words and phrases. ‘I didn’t know what I thought until I heard what I’d said’ (as they later described it). I was shocked at first, especially at the oh-so-natural way they challenged each other; they were stimulated by each other, they were learning how to say things that they had long wanted to say but lacked confidence. They handled feedback from each other; they admired each other for risk taking. They talked freely about sex, and the girls were eager to see what the boys thought, and the boys were fascinated by what the girls thought, and both sides were putting each other right about certain things (as you could well imagine). There was tension and the release of tension, there were jokes – sexist, racist, crude, but mostly funny. There was laughter and at times tears and hugs. The seeds of all this were sown and began to sprout in the first few meetings, and it grew steadily in the next two years; they came to appreciate that awareness raising was speeding up their maturation process and helping them to achieve their potential. And why wouldn’t we want that for all our children?  Just one of the many awareness-raising projects we have run over the last 50 years.

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MEMORIES

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Of all the memories we have, the one that stands out the most is our school-student exchange trip to Russia in 1977, where we arranged to visit 4 schools in Russia, taking 10 students from 4 different schools here in England – 10 from Eton, 10 from Rugby, 10 from a comprehensive school in Swindon and 10 from a comprehensive school in Manchester. As you can imagine, it was a wonderful recipe for a full, exciting and life-changing 2-week trip for 40 English students. I shall never forget the first introductory meeting between the 4 different groups – they all looked at each other shyly, and one Eton lad broke the tension by saying to one of the of Manchester girls: ‘I say, are you a Trotskyist?’ She hadn’t a clue what that was but she replied, ‘No, but are you a toff?’ After that amusing start the young people from opposite backgrounds got on like a house on fire. As you can imagine, the young people were so excited, getting on the plane, getting into Moscow airport, getting through customs – a luxurious coach took us to one of those large incredible impressive Stalin-type hotels with a lady on each landing providing black tea and caviar-on-toast all through the night. Setting off next day to school number 326 in the suburbs of Moscow. Our guide stopped the bus at the entrance to an avenue of tall trees leading up to what looked like an old tsar’s palace. As we got out we could see the avenue was lined with school students with glowing red neckerchiefs, each with a red rose in their hands, awaiting our arrival. As we walked in hushed whispers up the driveway to this very grand old building each of the Russian students approached one of our students, boy to girl and girl to boy, presented them with a flower and, taking them by the arm, led them into the school. WE WERE SO AMAZED BY THIS GRAND RECEPTION!!! At the school the Head introduced himself to us and his staff and said, ‘Our students are going to entertain your students and you’ and then, pointing at me and our translator and the teachers from Eton and Rugby (that’s right, no teachers had come from the two state schools) ‘and you are joining our staff for a drink of vodka in the staff room and we shall talk of many things’. Later we all met up for lunch with our students talking excitedly about how the Russian students had organised a tour of the school, had created a forum, shown them their lessons and had plans to organise some games in the afternoon, one of which of course was chess. The day finished off with speeches and the presentation of gifts to all the students as well as the staff. It’s hard to describe how we felt. We all agreed it certainly was a mountain-top experience. A couple of days later we went off by an overnight train to a school by the sea in Latvia. Here again we had a wonderful time, and the same in St Petersburg (then Leningrad), and then a small town on the way back to Moscow with plenty of time for sightseeing and, of course, the usual shopping in those special western shops where everybody seem to buy those Russian dolls. One of our ideas for the trip was to try and understand more fully the role of informal education within the British way of life, for we were able to talk and compare the differences between our schools one with awareness raising and the other without. But now for something different

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THE FUTURE

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If you Google ‘3-D printers and nano-printers’, or ‘nano-fabricators’, you will see that enormous changes are about to hit us for six. The future will demand the world’s greatest aid programme ever, that of awareness raising for the masses. If we do not prepare for this coming revolution, then for the sake of our grandchildren, be very afraid. For scientists are now claiming that in about 60 years’ time, nanotechnology will have advanced to the point where we will be able to manipulate atoms through the use of a nano-printer or fabricator. Which means we will be able at long last to turn base metal into gold. Surely that will then make us a bit like gods: possessing and using this futuristic nano-printer/fabricator means we will be able to make anything anywhere! As James Burke wrote in the Radio Times (28 September 2013), nanotechnology, with its nanofabricators and/or printers, will bring about the biggest shake-up this planet has ever known. Burke predicts that within 60 years people will have adapted to this new, idealistic life of plenty and will probably be living in small non-polluting, autonomous, self-sustaining communities, anywhere on this planet that they would care to choose. Many other scientific inventions coming on stream will also help to shape this new scary sci-fi future. AI, Artificial Intelligence, with Robots and ChatBox, and ChatGPT, (Generative Pretrained Transformer, Google it and for it might not be too long before ChatBox replaces Google anyway). Energy from spray-on photovoltaics will make any object it's own source of power. Communication will not only be brain-to-brain (that’s here already), but by the use of 3-D holograms you will be able to see and talk to whoever you like in your own front room from anywhere around the world. Entertainment. Thanks to tele-hosting your grandchildren will be able to play for Manchester United (or is it City now?), or perhaps they would like to be the star of every film. Travel will become almost unnecessary, as virtual holographic reality will turn your garden into any worldwide wonderful scene, with the sun tanning your skin and a soft breeze in your hair. We certainly seem to be on the crest of the wave of our hi-tech future, therefore we believe people will need to think long and hard about all aspects of ourselves as living, thinking, feeling, imaginative, exciting  human beings and not just apathetic consumers, and what it means to have this wonderful gift of life. Hence the drastic need, the overwhelming need for awareness-raising if we are to prepare for this very explosive very high-tech future.

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As promised, I’d like to finish with the letter from Suwaibo Touray, a member of parliament in the Gambia, Africa, who writes:

I am a member of parliament for 40 villages in the Wuli East district that can be categorised into three ethnic communities: Mandinka, Fula and Serehulle. Informal Education for the people means education for personal development, or education for life. First and foremost, there needs to be a series of seminars and or workshops throughout our villages aimed at raising the level of people’s awareness of themselves and their society. Especially as there is a desperate need to do away with the culture of silence about the many harmful cultural practices and ethnic-based politics which so blights our beloved Africa. Teaching the 3 R’s is something we call formal education, but the icing on the educational cake for any country is this special form of education of ourselves, which we call Informal Education, with its main component, awareness raising, which will help to raise people’s confidence and understanding, giving them the ability of sound reasoning, long-term independent thinking, able to see the bigger picture, a boost to problem solving, decision making and power sharing. This educational process can easily be organised in the form of small group workshops which can be done extremely well at little cost and with short training courses for would-be group organisers. We believe Informal Education, simply used, will help people focus on issues relating to improving their socioeconomic, political, scientific and cultural and intellectual development, which will help steer us towards building of one modern sovereign united African nation.

This informal education agenda will help men to change their perceptions and attitudes towards women and see them as partners rather than tools or underlings. Small and active Informal Education groups, with its emphasis on awareness raising almost always develops into a support group, which quite naturally stimulates people’s interest in other forms of training, and in other forms of work, especially the long term village projects. For example, the provision of seed money for a group start-up. Training people in village industries and cottage industries, such as soap making, tie and dye, Omo, batik, jewellery making, etc., would be a typical example of informal education in action. With this process groups could arrange meetings to discuss any issue affecting their lives and any issue of national and international relevance which all helps to raise their awareness. Informal Education works best with youth groups as their hormonal process prepares them for independent thinking. Whether young people meet to talk, work, or play, this group-work process would be a catalyst to kick-start their plans, their imagination, motivation and well-being for themselves and wealth creation for Africa, creating a better future for all. 

Thankyou Suwaibo Touray MP for Wuli East, The Gambia, for your most interesting letter.