Uzuomaka arrived in Ireland last November to seek asylum after fleeing Nigeria. Since then, she has been volunteering to clean up Dublin’s beaches and canals, as a way to “interact and find common ground” with people in a country where, at first, she “didn’t know a single person”.
Uzuomaka has been living in a hostel for asylum seekers in East Wall for six months, which she says was very isolating at first.
“I have some sense of security here, unlike where I come from, but it can never be your home,” she says, explaining that she did not know anyone in Ireland, and shares a dorm room with strangers.
“It’s not easy, you don’t have your privacy, and you don’t even decide when you turn off your lights. If you want to take a nap, you can’t turn off the light in your room. It’s centrally done, it turns on at 8am and goes off at 10pm. You don’t decide what to eat, it’s the same every day, and there are no cooking facilities,” she says.
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When far-right protests against asylum seekers housed in the East Wall area began, Uzuomaka’s blood pressure was “so high that I started taking medication”.
“We were all living in fear. Sometimes you would be trying to go into your room and they would be blocking the entrance outside. You don’t know if you are going to be attacked,” she says.
Around the same time, Uzuomaka and other asylum seekers at her hostel registered to do some local volunteer work with Dublin City Volunteer Centre, as a way to better integrate and “give back”.
“I’ve been very active since then. I go every Saturday and Sunday, which means I have some plans and places to go. It’s a mixture of mostly asylum seekers, and some Irish people and others,” she explains.
Uzuomaka, who did not want her surname used but was happy to have her photograph taken, has helped clean Bull Island, Royal Canal and Grand Canal, and through this she has “met people from many cultures”.
“I never thought I’d meet someone from Egypt, or Mexico. Sometimes they will give you some refreshments, and after doing the clean-up we walk home in a group chatting. It gives us some liberty instead of being locked up in the hostel for god knows how long,” she says.
She’s one of many who have joined Dublin City Volunteer Centre’s Together for Better programme, which invites newly arrived international protection applicants to volunteer alongside local volunteers to “connect and learn from each other”.
The programme has been “hugely successful in helping people seeking refuge in Ireland to integrate into local communities, and the community benefits from having extra hands to support local events and initiatives,” Franzi O’Donnell, the Dublin City Volunteer Centre’s manager, says.
While many asylum seekers want to volunteer, lack of transportation and uncertainty about the future can be a barrier, O’Donnell explains, adding: “Organisations often require a time commitment of three months or more from volunteers, but international protection [IP] applicants may not know how long they will be living in one location.
“This really limits the volunteering opportunities available to them. The Together for Better project connects IP applicants with short-term and once-off volunteering opportunities and arranges transportation as needed.”
Volunteer Adeyemi says the programme has improved his quality of life and given him “the opportunity to interact more fully with people in my community”.
Uzuomaka says there are “a lot of options”, but she opted to “mostly clean beaches and canals, for the environment and for people going to sightsee to make it nice for them”. She has also helped out on Lollipop day and at the St Patrick’s Festival.
While volunteering has been helpful to settling into life in Ireland and making friends, Uzuomaka wishes “the Government could get the local community involved and find a way to unite everyone” following local protests.
“It would be good, because when people fleeing from persecution, and then come to a place where they are persecuted again, it’s scary.”
