Social Workers and Workers

Almshouse, B. Baron, 1728

1. The training of social workers

enables them to help people

to adjust themselves

to the existing environment.

2. The training of social workers

does not enable them

to help people

to change the environment.

3. Social workers

must become social minded

before they can be

critics of the existing environment

and free creative agents

of the new environment.

4. In the Houses of Hospitality

social workers can acquire

the art of human contacts

and the social-mindedness

or understanding of social forces

which will make them

critical of the existing environment

and free creative agents

of a new environment.

It still makes me cry...

Calais Borders, Art Refuge, 2023

Br Johannes Maertens and his co-workers report on their time in Calais and Dunkirk

Thursday afternoon I was in the Eritrean Refugee tent camp in Calais. The camp is situated alongside the busy motorway that brings cars and trucks into the Port of Calais. Three young teenagers came up to me with a question: “Why the English people didn't come with a ferry to take them to England?”

The young teenagers live in a noisy tent camp along adult men and woman and at least six other children under nine years old. I saw that one of the young boys (I guess 7 years old) had a broken cross around his neck. So, I gave him a new wooden cross from the Holy Land. He was so happy with it. Very soon other youngsters came and ask me for a new cross. I had only five with me.

And the children they played on like other children do, they put aside for a short while the worrying and dangerous world around them.

Here follows a short report from our monthly Art Refuge work in the camps of Calais and Dunkirk:

Dunkirk and Calais, October 4-5, 2023

On Wednesday the weather couldn’t make up its mind - sunny one minute, cold, windy or raining the next. Today was more settled; while this morning there was what appeared to be an unusually low tide making visual distances confusing.

There have been several tragic deaths on the border over the past couple of weeks, while heading into Winter is challenging for everyone in this border context.

We worked outside on both days. Yesterday we joined the @medecinsdumonde team of doctors, nurses and interpreters on the edge of Dunkirk, close to the main living site. We occupied the mobile psychosocial activities van and were joined by both adults and children from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Eritrea and Sudan.

On Thursday we worked alongside our colleagues from Calais organisations next to one of the Eritrean camps, taking tea, coffee, maps, postcards. We noted the heightened responsibility of some children and the chaotic presentation of others, all making sense in different ways of the challenging edge of town context.

Above all in both settings we were moved by the capacity of men, women and children for politeness, patience and respect towards each other and ourselves. Men sat and threaded necklaces in their flag’s colours, really making use of the space offered within the cosy confines of the activities van, and today postcards from around the world proved a helpful catalyst for ideas, knowledge and imagination.

Back in the UK, the Home Secretary spoke this week about a hurricane of mass migration coming to the UK.

Johannes Maertens, Miriam Usiskin, Bobby Lloyd, Jonny Craig

This article was originally published in the Autumn 2023 issue of the London Catholic Worker newsletter.

On Pilgrimage (July 1955)

Peter Maurin Farm, Staten Island

Dorothy Day writes shortly after the birth of her seventh grandchild, Martha.

During the two months since the last issue of the Catholic Worker came out, the great move from Newburgh, Maryfarm, to Peter Maurin Farm, Staten Island, has been accomplished and all the men have been housed and settled, and the furniture is still being sorted out and spread around. Fr. Faley is in his own quarters, with his own furniture, and with the additional comfort of windows facing north and south, so that he has had a little breeze these torrid days of July. Philip is in the dormitory. Joe Roche and Jim the carpenter have a room next to Fr. Faley’s, then there is Hans’s ship’s cabin, and next to him a room at one end of the carpenter shed for John Fillinger who in this month has made hay, milked the cows, tended the vegetables and built a shed for the hay and machinery in back of the other farm buildings. It is all on a small scale, compared to Maryfarm, but we are all together and we are near the heart of the work, which is Chrystie street. Joe Cotter has his private room in a converted chicken coop down behind the stone tool house, a little room which was occupied in the past by Emily Scarborough one summer, and Hector Black (who is now with the Society of Brothers) for a two week’s retreat a few summers ago. Chickens and rabbits have also lived there since. Bill and Mike have a room in back of the chapel, and the dormitory on either end of the barn accommodates the others. All in the house are women except Stanley who has himself and his press in a cubby hole of a room, with a low ceiling which makes it hot in summer, and with no connection with the furnace, which makes it cold in winter. Stanley saved us from being burnt up one night last month, when one of the women smelled smoke and called him and he went downstairs to find the couch in flames. No more overstuffed furniture in the dining-room-library where cigarettes can fall between the cushions and smolder. Three bookcases now take the place of the couch, and are far more useful.

Great News

After the jail, after the moving, after we had all settled down getting straightened out, Tamar quietly proceeded to have her seventh baby, with neatness and dispatch as she usually does. I had gone over to her home, a mile away to spend the night for the first time, now that the last of six truck loads had come down from Maryfarm and the moving was all but done. Fr. Faley had said his first Sunday Mass that morning, the heat had been broken that afternoon by a great thunder and lightning storm during which Prasse’s barn next door was struck by lightning. John and the men rushed over to help save the herd of pedigreed goats from the blazing barn, and the Hennessy children and Paul Yamamoto and the Scarpuli’s who were spending the afternoon at the farm all stood by in fascinated horror. When I took the Hennessys home that night Dave had to go to work on the graveyard shift, from eleven until seven the next morning. “You’d better stay,” Tamar told me.

It was a little after midnight that she called me, and with Vicenza Baglioni coming over from Peter Maurin farm to stay with the rest of the children, we got down to the little hospital in Princess Bay just in time. Martha was born at one thirty Monday morning, July 11th and is being baptized on the feast of St. Martha.

It has been a happy time these past two weeks, staying with the children. Tamar felt so well she was able to come home on Thursday morning after three days in the hospital. It was hard to keep her down but by applying herself to making a hooked rug she was able to keep quiet for a week.

In the two months since the paper came out last there has been Fr. Casey’s annual retreat, the picketing and the arrest and the experience of three police courts and two detention houses, the move from Maryfarm and the birth not only of my grandchild, but also of two other babies at Peter Maurin farm, and finally the death and burial at Calvary, of our old friend Fr. John Cordes. May he rest in peace. He had been sick for years, but confined to the hospital for the last year, and his death came as a result of a heart attack and was a surprise to us all. We ask the prayers of our readers for him.