Red Cross Blogs

A fun start to Refugee Week in Bristol

By Julie Linter
June 15, 2009 at 4:24 pm

Refugee week got off to a fantastic start in Bristol yesterday with a brilliant Celebrating Sanctuary fun day. The sun was shining and a large number of people gathered in Queen Square to enjoy themselves, meet people, listen to music and show their support to the refugee community in Bristol. Traditional drummers and dancers from the Ga tribe of Southern Ghana got everyone moving….

.. and there was loads of other great singing, dancing, poetry, workshops and much more to keep everyone entertained throughout the afternoon. People brought along picnics and for those that didn’t there was lots of international food available. Many of the refugee community organisations had food available for people to try.

About 15 Red Cross volunteers and staff turned up to celebrate and enjoy the day. Our interns, James and Lilly, put together a great information display about the work that we do in Bristol and lots of people came to talk to us to find out more. Some were keen to become volunteers others told us of their experiences of the Red Cross or Red Crescent in other countries.

Pat, Gini, Lucho and Kelly set themselves up in a good spot outside the information tent and offered therapeutic care massage to people. As always this proved extremely popular and we were able to let people know how we use service to help people in crisis who are stressed and anxious. In particular how we use it to help asylum seekers and refugees in Bristol.

Many of us were wearing our new ‘lookbeyondthelabel’ t-shirts – the Red Cross campaign for refugee week encouraging people to look beyond the ‘refugee’ label to the person themselves – who they are and what they do.

So we had a fantastic start to refugee week and plenty more to come this week. I’ll keep you posted. It would be great if you leave comments about what you are doing to celebrate refugee week where you live – I’d love to know.

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Tags: Bristol, Refugee Week, Therapeutic Care

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Health and social care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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