After All, We Are All Humans: Coleraine

Six weeks ago, a room full of strangers sat down together at the Infuse Tea Bar in Coleraine. Some of them had travelled a long way to be in this country. Some of them had never left this coast. None of them knew what they were walking into, and a few of them, by their own admission, were a wee bit nervous.

We called the programme After All We Are All Humans, and we ran it over six Tuesday evenings with Beyond Skin, supported through PeacePlus. I want to tell you what happened in that room, because I am still thinking about it.

Week one: who are you before your passport?

We started with silhouettes. Before your nationality, before your accent, before whatever anybody assumes when they hear your name, who are you? People wrote inside the outline of a person: mother, worrier, terrible singer, good listener, homesick, stubborn. Nobody wrote the name of a country. That was the first thing we noticed together, and it set the tone for everything after it.

Week two: where did that come from?

We looked at food. The potato that everybody here thinks of as ours came from Peru. The tea in the cups in front of us came from China. Half of what sits on a Sunday dinner plate in Coleraine arrived here from somewhere else, and it arrived so long ago that we stopped noticing. Ingredients are migrants too. Once you see it on a dinner plate, it is quite hard to unsee it in a town.

Week three: the oops moment

This was the funniest night of the six. We shared the times we got it wrong, the words we used that meant something else entirely, the customs we misread, the people we completely misjudged. We played the rumour game and watched a simple sentence turn into something unrecognisable as it travelled round the room, which is a lesson that lands better through laughing than through being told.

Then we talked about the iceberg. The part of a person you can see is tiny. Everything that actually makes them who they are sits underneath, and you will never get at it by looking. The laugh came first, and the penny dropped second, and because people felt it themselves it stayed with them.

Week four: home is more than a postcode

We asked what home feels like. The answers came from people born in Coleraine and people born thousands of miles away, and they were almost the same answers. A smell coming from a kitchen. A particular chair. Being able to relax your shoulders. Somebody knowing how you take your tea.

There were people in that room who had lost their homes. There were people who had never moved house in their lives. They described the same feeling in nearly the same words, and everybody in the room heard it happen.

Week five: the wisdom harvest

This was the week we stopped teaching and started collecting. Between the people in that room there was an enormous amount of knowledge about surviving, arriving, raising children, finding work, dealing with systems, keeping going. We put it all on a wall. We were also joined by our friends from White Ribbon NI, and that conversation went deeper than I expected it to.

Week six: after all

The last night was mostly food, music, laughter and hugging, which is exactly what it should have been. Two of the participants had suggested we walk back through the whole six weeks, and they were right. We remembered the potato and the rumours and the silhouettes, and the room filled up with the sound of people finishing each other's stories.

Then everybody got a card with one sentence to complete. After all, I now know that...

They wrote in quiet for a couple of minutes, and then one person read theirs out, and after that nobody needed encouraging. Every card went up on the wall, read or unread. That wall is the picture of the whole thing that I will keep.

We finished by going round the room, and each person said one thank you out loud to somebody else who had added something to their six weeks. There were happy tears. I will admit some of them were mine.

What I take from it

We began with a simple idea, which is that we are human first, before any passport or label or headline. Six weeks later that stopped being an idea and became something the room had evidence for.

We found out how easily we get each other wrong. We found out that when you sit down properly with somebody, they are almost never who you assumed they were. And we found out that we all want the same handful of things: to be safe, to be useful, to laugh, to belong somewhere, and to be seen properly by the people around us.

That is what we found out at those tables, over six Tuesdays, with the tea going cold in front of us.

Thank you to Beyond Skin for trusting me with it, to PeacePlus for making it possible, to White Ribbon NI for joining us, and to Infuse Tea Bar for giving us the warmest room in Coleraine to do it in.

And above all, thank you to the people who gave up six of their Tuesday evenings for a stranger and an idea, with no way of knowing whether it would be any good. You took a chance on that room and on each other, and look what we built.

After all, we are all humans.

Humanitas Initiative delivers intercultural integration and cultural intelligence workshops for schools, workplaces and community groups across the Causeway Coast and Glens. If you would like to talk about a programme, get in touch at contact@thehumanitasinitiative.org.

Zilka Gerritsen · Community Bridge Builder · thehumanitasinitiative.org

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