Wednesday out and about. Rescues and rejection!

It’s Wednesday again. I thought I was going to have to ride to the market in the rain as I woke quite early and heard a serious downpour. By the time I got up and moving, though, the rain had stopped and in fact The downpour must have been less copious than I thought because the puddles on the Donkey Line bridle path were not too bad.

While I was out and about I finally got round to buying some secateurs. I am sure we had some at some time but they have not been seen for a while. We wanted a pair that could be carried quite easily in a pocket as we keep coming across dangerously treacherous trailing brambles and such like when we are out and about. So now we can snip happily as we go, at the same time hoping that carrying a pair of secateurs does not count as carrying a dangerous or offensive weapon!

I have come across a number of stories of people being found or rescued. In one case a man, an immigrant worker I think, who was feared to have been murdered five years ago turned up living in woods. He disappeared from his workplace in Cambridgeshire and someone was even arrested on suspicion of his murder. The suspect was later released but the suspicion remained that the disappeared chap had perhaps been exploited and threatened and had fled. And then early in July he turned up, or was discovered, living in the woods. How did he live wild for five years? Quite amazing!

Another story is from the other side of the world and smacks of adventures such as we used to read about in comics when we were kids. We must all at some time have written words in the sand on a beach, usually nonsense and usually washed away not long afterwards by the tide. Well, three Micronesian sailors wrote an SOS on a beach after their small boat ran out of fuel and ran aground on the uninhabited Pikelot Island, less than half a kilometre long, is a low coral atoll, heavily forested and home to a seabird rookery and turtle nesting site.

When they did not turn up at their base and alarm was raised but the men were found when a rescue team spotted their giant SOS message. Oddly, the Australian rescuers just checked they were okay, gave them food and water and left them to it, informing the Micronesian authorities of their whereabouts so that they could send a patrol vessel to pick them up!

The Pacific islands seem to be the place to get stranded. Just last week a man from Brisbane was rescued after drifting about near the Solomon Islands for three days after bis trimaran was damaged by a storm. And in 2016 a couple stranded on the uninhabited Micronesian island of East Fayu for a week were found by the US navy also after writing a big SOS in the sand.

There you go.

Some people get stranded. Others are in danger of being expelled. Here’s the story of someone who had lived in the UK from the age of 2, considered herself British and suddenly found she was being threatened with deportation - at age 15:-

“ Why do you sound so British?” the immigration officer asked 15-year-old Ijeoma Moore as she followed orders to pack for herself and her 10-year-old brother. Officers had arrived at their London home that morning in 2010, as they were eating breakfast and getting ready to leave for school. “Because I am British,” the teenager replied. What else could she be? She had lived in the UK since she was two years old. She loved tea and toast and “stupid telly”. But her mother’s repeated residency applications to the Home Office had all been rejected. Moore was not a British citizen.
Still in school uniform, the children and their visiting father – her mother was not there that day – were put in the Home Office van. Moore felt like she was watching someone else’s life on TV. They were taken to an immigration detention centre, where she narrowly avoided deportation three times. Eventually she and her brother were placed in foster care and her father sent to Nigeria.
“I had to grow up really quick and become like a mum to my brother,” Moore says.

A decade on, Moore is still not a UK citizen. She will not officially become British until she turns 33 – 31 years after she arrived in the country and picked up a London accent. And it is not guaranteed if she runs out of money to pay the soaring fees, or the Home Office loses a document from the required stack of evidence, or if the rules change yet again.”

In the USA they call such young people “dreamers”, undocumented or “alien” minors who as a group have for two decades campaigned for legal status under the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (Dream) Act. But this is going on in our own country. And we just get on with our lives, unaware for the most part of such goings on.

Meanwhile things are a whole lot worse in Beirut, in the aftermath of that huge explosion. I can’t begin to imagine how you deal with such devastation in the middle of a pandemic.

But somehow life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!