On the road to nowhere
NO ONE interested in history can fail to notice how much of it is about homelessness. From the Polynesians pouring through the South Pacific in canoes, to the Vikings in longboats, the Mongol hordes on horseback, the Romany gipsies in wagons, the dominant theme is people coming from somewhere else, usually because they have to.
Even the USA, now planning a giant wall to keep the Mexicans out, was founded as a place that let people in. EXODUS: OUR JOURNEY CONTINUES ( BBC2) merely charts another chapter of this endless saga but crucially, takes it out of history and into ongoing, human lives. Many people might see Ethiopian refugee Dame as a man who’d made it. He’d certainly made it over here. His existence in this country, however, was a shadowy one, and he described himself as a ghost.
As a member of Ethiopia’s persecuted Oromo people, he was unlikely to be deported. He seemed equally unlikely to be granted asylum, and while he sat out what might end up being a whole life in limbo, he couldn’t take a job. He was being looked after by a kindly British family, he’d learnt to speak English and the shelves of his room were stacked with books. He had the air of a man shipwrecked, though, a lonely soul on a desert island, with no hope of release.
Getting out doesn’t always mean getting there. Afghan newlyweds Ali and Shirin seemed, at first, to be the absolute opposite. They had each other, they laughed at everything, treating their trek into the West as a sort of honeymoon.
If they were that naive when they started out, they became swiftly less so as a brush with traffickers nearly cost them their lives.
Marooned in a grim camp in Serbia, Ali kept on laughing but it had a high, hollow tone, and his wife was often silent. Fellow Afghan Azizula was enduring - 15 degree temperatures in a deserted Belgrade railway station. Huddled over the toxic fires of chopped up railway sleepers, he and his friends seemed to have had painful changes of heart.
It wasn’t worth coming, they said. They should pray for peace in their country, not a ticket to Germany. It was hard to believe either prayer would be answered or that there would ever be a time when the exodus was history.
THE GANGES WITH SUE PERKINS ( BBC1) has been full of revelations, less about the big Indian river and more about the presenter. I wouldn’t say I know the talented Sue better after this epic trek through India, in fact I’d say I no longer kid myself I know her at all. The third instalment of her trip summed up the many parts of Ms Perkins perfectly. She spent much of it poking fun at men, who were really doing little more than being poorly dressed, not particularly well- groomed and staring, as people do when they come from backgrounds less privileged and more narrow than Sue’s own.
It seemed a little cruel, at times, although it was offset by frequent, quite staggering bursts of bigheartedness. Sue’s reunion with Rakhi, the street kid she’d met in Kolkata on a previous trip, proved to be immensely sad, the spirited nine- year- old having become a withdrawn, anxious eleven- year- old, and Sue’s distress at it too great to hide.
You realised throughout the whole river trip that there were people worse off than the badly-dressed blokes and the compassion was flowing in the right direction.