Dorothy Day House

Hospitality and Resistance

Dorothy Day House is a faith based community house of hospitality and resistance. We provide accommodation for "destitute refugees”, who are not allowed to work, able to claim Housing Benefit or NASS (National Asylum Seekers Support) which hostels usually rely on.

When we started, temporarily in a rented council flat in the Isle of Dogs, there were an average of five of us living in a three bedroom flat. We now have a bigger house near Dalston. Even an overcrowded house is better than the streets, and a secure bed is better than "sofa surfing".

Our house guests have been referred to Giuseppe Conlon House, mainly by other refugee projects in London, such as the Refugee Council and the Jesuit Refugee Service, and then move on here. We have also had referrals from the Passage Day Centre for homeless people who meet refugees on the streets in central London and one or two other informal connections. About half our guests have been short-term and about half long-term.

We provide basic food supplies in the house, most of which is donated, for example we get a weekly pickup from a local ethical supermarket and another from a farmers' market. Although we don't buy any meat, occasionally we get it in the donations and guests buy some if they have any money. We have had our arguments and personality clashes, as well as problems caused by lack of mutually understood languages, but overall we get on well like some kind of multinational family. It seems that whatever are the vices and virtues of our society, we are pretty inhospitable and protective of our private space, and we can learn a lot from our guests from other parts of the world in this regard.

Most of our guests have been African, and many of them church going. It has been a blessing to occasionally pray with them, although our approach to God, faith, politics and religion are usually quite different.

To me this is a political act as much as an act of "charity". The borderline between the so-called "First World" and "Third World" are the new and real class barriers. Which side do we want to be on? If we come from a position of relative and/or absolute privilege, it is very difficult to enter the world of the undocumented migrant or the destitute refugee seeking to find a way to survive, or just to find a way here into fortress Europe across the battlements and invisible barbed wire.

It is all too easy to be comfortable behind the safety net of employment and health and social security systems. It is vital to enter into the "community of destiny" of those that we would keep outside, if we are to play a real role in the process of liberation and repentance. Which in the end simply about remaining and becoming human.