Storytelling benefit for Southwark Day Centre for Asylum Seekers

Southwark Day Centre for Asylum Seekers (SDCAS) is a vital charity who provide help, training, advice, a nourishing meal, and a warm, supportive atmosphere for asylum seekers. SDCAS is like a family to everyone. I will be doing a benefit performance on 27th June at 7pm at Peckham Park Road Baptist Church. SDCAS runs on a shoestring, and my performance is to help raise a bit of money for this truly amazing charity and keep it going.

I have been working with SDCAS since 2007. I approached them with an idea for my project Stories to Build Bridges and started using storytelling to encourage the group to share and tell their own stories, to keep their traditions alive, and find ways of translating them to their new surroundings. I became part of their family. They shared fables and folktales, recipes and riddles, cultural traditions, and proverbs. They even had the courage to share stories at evening events at Persepolis shop in Peckham and The Horniman Musuem. Here are some of the proverbs they have told me:

When the heart overflows it comes out of the mouth. Ethiopia.
Drop by Drop an ocean is formed. Iran.
Nothing in the whole world is as good as Mum. Somalia.

I will be telling ‘Tales Told in Tents’ taking a tour of Central Asia and the Middle East through wild romances and fragments of epics, weaving in a few stories of my own travels. Speaking, imagining and remembering are healing acts – come and join us for a very special evening and please give generously.