Closed doors

Every journey ends
somewhere.
 
Yesterday one of the ambulance drivers told me that he’d worked for eight months on the refugee rescue boats in the Mediterranean, out of Lesbos then out of Palermo. I mentioned that iconic picture of little Alan Kurdi washed up on a beach last year, just like hundreds of other pictures that had been ignored, and how strange it was that that child had touched people’s compassion. Yes, how strange, he said. Some days he’d walk along the beach past a hundred drowned corpses, some men, more women, many children.

Picture after unseen picture that might as well have been cast into the sea with those lives.
 
Journeys end every day.
Some journeys end
at my door.
Or at yours.


So far this year over 1,049 people have crossed every day on average and 14 a day have drowned. So 1,035 a day are looking for an open door.