“To me, a home is where you feel loved, safe, and cherished.”- Malala Yousafzai
The theme for Refugee Week 2024 is “Our Home”. From the places we gather to share meals to our collective home, planet earth: everyone is invited to celebrate what our Our Home means to them.
Home can be a place of refuge, a feeling or a state of mind. It can be found in smells, tastes and sounds. From the clothes we wear to the words we grew up with. It’s in food, music and arts. It’s in our cultures and in our landscapes.
Home can be more than one place and finding it can be a journey, as it is for so many of us who have to leave our countries and rebuild our lives. Sometimes we can find home in a single person. Other times it’s in a whole community. And often, it’s in a single gesture of care and welcome.
On World Refugee Day, we have thought about what would happen if we extended our warmth and hospitality beyond our own homes and made our school and even our local area more welcoming.
Throughout the day, each class created a piece of art to decorate the front of our school with. These all depicted scenes of hope, safety and welcome. We spent the day thinking about what makes a home and how we can welcome refugees and asylum seekers, who don’t have anywhere to call home. As a School of Sanctuary, we respond to Catholic Social Teaching, which calls us to share fairly, stand in solidarity with our global brother and sisters and to recognise that everyone is made in the image and likeness of God.
“Migrants and refugees are brothers and sisters to be welcomed, respected and loved” – Pope Francis
