‘I can dance, I can shout’: the charity bringing some joy to asylum seekers’ lives | Refugees

When Nzuzi Musungu isn’t singing in Asylum Link Merseyside’s community choir, she’s working as a carer, looking after her blind husband and four children, and working feverishly with immigration lawyers to bring back the son she left behind when she escaped political persecution in the Congo 20 years ago.

That’s why being able to put her powerful vocal range, inflected with traditional Congolese style, to good use means so much to her. She also teaches sewing and drawing in the food bank to make ends meet.

“This place is like therapy to me. When I come here I can dance, I can shout, I can do anything I want. All my stress, I leave it here,” she says.

She is one of the hundreds of asylum seekers and refugees supported by Asylum Link Merseyside in Liverpool, a grassroots one-stop shop that fills in the gaps left by crumbling public services, including legal advice, healthcare and food banks, as well as activities that promote wellbeing and community cohesion, from yoga and rock climbing to litter picking and beach cleanups.

Asylum Link is a member of Naccom – the No Accommodation Network, one of three refugee and asylum seeker charities supported by this year’s Guardian and Observer annual appeal, alongside Refugee Councils of Britain and Refugees at Home. Naccom will regrant most of its share of donations to grassroots members such as Asylum Link.

Lately, a huge focus of Asylum Link’s work has been housing, which the charity says has reached an unprecedented crisis point. Administrative changes in the summer meant refugees with leave to remain were given just seven days instead of 28 days to quit Home Office-funded accommodation across the UK, leaving them with little time to secure somewhere to live. Many ended up on the streets. But on Thursday, the Home Office reversed the policy.

Asylum Link’s staff have been reluctantly buying tents and sleeping bags for destitute asylum seekers, because they say there is nothing else they can do.

“The number of people coming through the system, getting refugee status and becoming homeless is through the roof – you’re talking about tens of people a week. It shouldn’t be happening. They’re exiting into a great big hole because there is no accommodation,” says Ewan Roberts, who runs the centre as well as the community choir.

He worries that the scale of need could exacerbate tensions with the community, leading to a perception that refugees are taking homes from local people, and undoing the charity’s hard work to rebuild relations after far-right protests.

Roberts believes the solution to such sentiments is to integrate asylum seekers into the local community. Citing Musungu’s story, and her contribution to local people, he says: “All that is lost under the label of asylum seeker because of all the myths and the negativity that is attached to it. If British people knew more about their background I think they would react far differently.”

All of this feeds into the hostile environment the Home Office has fostered for asylum seekers – compounded by the government’s plans to send them to Rwanda.

Bemoaning this “adversarial” approach, Roberts says: “It’s not stopping people coming here; but the people who are here, it’s terrifying them. The government seems to want to do harsher and harsher things as a bigger deterrent, but none of this stuff works. It drives people underground and into the arms of the true criminals. It’s such a counterproductive way of doing things.”

This atmosphere exerts a toll on the mental health of Asylum Link service users, most of whom are already dealing with deep-seated trauma from their home country and the process of escaping it.

“If you asked the government whether they thought a place like this [Asylum Link] was necessary, they would probably say no, yet there’s 200 people a day coming through here for things they need. We’re not just doing it because it’s nice to have,” says Roberts.

Roberts hopes wellbeing and community activities will help asylum seekers escape the isolation they face while waiting to secure leave to remain, restoring dignity and self-respect, while preventing their mental health and professional skills from degrading.

“This should be a place of despair, but it’s not. The resilience of people comes through and people take pleasure in the smallest things. Asylum seekers have such little joy in their life that when it does come along, by god you grab it with both hands and you make the most of it because you don’t know when it’s coming back,” Roberts says.

At Asylum Link’s Christmas party, where the choir is performing, this is in full evidence. A room strung up with shiny Christmas decorations reverberates with animated chatter.

When the choir strikes up, the atmosphere in the room is charged with a shared desire for joy and escape. For an hour, people sing, clap and dance as though later that night they won’t be sleeping in substandard, often crowded housing, or in sleeping bags in Lime Street station, or tents pitched in the park.

Hours later, once the cleanup is done, one young Kurdish man waits in the hallway with a large rucksack. He’s been offered space on a friend’s floor for the night, but refused to avoid posing an inconvenience. Instead, he is savouring his final moments in the warmth before bedding down outside in the frosty night. Asked about his situation, he pauses, deep in thought. Then, snapping out of it, he shrugs: “It’s OK.”