The Questions and the Answers: Mentoring an Asylum Seeker in London

One of our mentors, Jon, shares some poignant thoughts about his mentoring experience.

Summer 2012. I had just returned from a long cycle journey that had taken me through 10 countries. It was a hard journey over 70 days, mostly alone and never knowing where I would end up, apart from my metropolitan destination: Istanbul. I was always the new one, the one who had arrived from somewhere far away for some strange reason. The questions were always the same: ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Why did you choose to come here?’ ‘How did you get here?’ It was quite a lonely experience, being the only one to answer these questions.

When I arrived back in London in the summer, it wasn’t long before I found the Migrant and Refugee Communities Forum (MRCF). MRCF runs a great mentoring scheme. Under the project, volunteers are matched with a ‘mentee’ who is a migrant to London and would benefit from having someone to give practical and emotional support. Mentoring is an informal role that lasts for 6-7 months, meeting up around once a week. The project seemed to me to be something special because it connected people who might not have otherwise met in the sprawl of London, so I got in touch with the coordinator. Mentoring appealed to me because I felt I would have something in common with migrants to the city after having spent some time being the ‘foreigner’ myself. I also wanted to keep learning about people, one of my main reasons for going away on my journey.

Before long, I was introduced to my ‘mentee,’ whom I will call Mussa. Over the next 7 months I would settle into my role as a mentor, meeting Mussa once a week for a few hours.

Mussa was in the midst of a long asylum claim, which represented a decade-long journey. At first, meeting up with him was a very daunting experience. I wondered how I would assist practically with his mountain of challenges. He was frustrated at the situation he had found himself in. He expressed how trapped he felt in this country and didn’t hide his anger for what was happening to him. Quite honestly, what he told me made me as angry as he was, though I didn’t show it. Despite being open about his emotions, Mussa didn’t tell me why he had claimed asylum in the UK. This gave rise to a big question in my mind: ‘Should I know what happened to this man if I am trying to support him?’

We started meeting in cafes, local libraries and colleges. Slowly, I came to grips with how I could lend some kind of practical support to Mussa. I set about doing what I could to help him tackle some of the main challenges in his life. We reinvigorated his asylum claim, found and enrolled him on a college course, registered him at a gym and got funding from a trust fund. These were some real, practical developments in his life, which I know he values greatly. Despite having met many times by this point, I still didn’t know why Mussa had chosen to come to the UK, what had happened to him back home or how he had arrived.

Then, as our work together continued to develop, I started to realise that our relationship wasn’t going to be defined by the answers to such questions. In fact, it became clear that it positively shouldn’t be. I have heard people say that the asylum process in the UK is a dehumanising process which destroys people’s dignity and self-esteem. What could be more disempowering than being defined by ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘Why did you come here?’ or ‘How did you get here?’?  It dawned on me why mentoring was so important for the both of us: it was a chance to form a relationship which isn’t constructed and weighed down by the ‘facts’ and reports, which package someone’s identity into a reference number.

I found I had a new understanding of what mentoring really means, and as a result, the relationship Mussa and I were developing gradually became a humanising one. Mussa wasn’t just an ‘asylum seeker,’ and I wasn’t just a ‘mentor;' we were two people creating a friendship.

And in that friendship there is freedom: there is freedom from the reference numbers and the £35 a week food ration, and the ‘asylum seeker’ brand of identity. I discovered that beneath his anger Mussa is a gentle man with a huge amount of compassion for other people. He’s a man who respects his elders and cares for the youth of tomorrow. For these reasons alone, he is a person who brings values to the UK we are desperately in need of. If only there were more people like him - people who live on £35 a week instead of rioting and looting shops even though he’s angry at what he’s enduring. I learnt this about Mussa not as an assistant or a helper, but as a friend.

I became a mentor thinking I would learn who Mussa was through the story of his asylum claim and I would discover how to solve his problems in the process. In actual fact, the reality was completely different. I learnt that first of all you can’t solve everything anyway. Secondly, I learnt that to be a true mentor to an ‘asylum seeker’ is to let that person be more than the answers to their asylum interview questions, and in turn you will learn a world of things yourself as you discover the person beneath.