Underground and invisible

Tukul Crafts, one of the small business projects that I am trying to support through Micah68 (click http://www.micah6-8.org.uk/micah-projects/egypt/tukul-crafts/ for more details), lives underground and is almost invisible.The business is housed in a small and rather chaotic set of two rooms under the Episcopal Cathedral in Cairo, which contains tricking running water, a large quantity of random pots of paint, endless bits of cloth, sewing machines, a steamer, and a battered computer. Three wonderful Sudanese guys, Justin, Wilson and Kasiano work down there as screen printers and tailors, and relate to each other in English due to the separate tribal languages they bring from their homeland – a place they fled from as refugees many years ago. They set up Tukul Crafts to use their skills, and try and make some money. No-one seems to want their goods at the moment, but they try and keep working – underground and invisible. Life is a struggle, and theirs is just a small story in the thousands of Sudanese refugees who are operating underground and invisible in Cairo. In turn their refugee story is turning out to be a small story when put against the huge number of Syrian refugees who continue to pour into Cairo in the latest refugee crisis. It was building up over two years ago, gathered pace enough that last year the UNHCR set up a full processing centre next to the Cathedral, and now the queues are down the street, with two entrances for registration and the UNHCR needing an additional church hall within the Cathedral compound to process the names. A couple of days ago over 2,000 new refugees were processed. Underground, and invisible. That’s how most people would want the refugee problems of the world…buried and out of sight. It’s hard to avoid when you have to walk in the street because the queues fill the pavements, but still we bury them, and look away. The Church in Egypt remembers that the Holy Family of Mary, Joseph and Jesus arrived as refugees, escaping persecution at home, many years ago. I wonder which one of the refugees I saw today under the Cathedral, or on the street was Jesus?