September's Journal

Gentle Reader,
I’ve been journaling pretty frequently for the past month, leaving way too much for you to read. I’ve instead included the first entry for this month of September and the final entry for this month. Both, I think, give a nice snapshot of my world here and hopefully will spark some questions, discussion, and conversation at home and away.
-Ian M. Borton

September 1

The simple question, “Are you Irish?” was going to be what I asked the small boy who I met today. I figured as he and his small friend mock hid behind the lamppost in from of our house, that the first thing they would ask me is “Are you an American?”; I thought my response would be witty. I went outside to look for Mel and Jen who have jaunted off on a walk together… The boys, playing w/ a football, hurly sticks, and eating a bag of crisps crossed the street to approach me.

In the end, neither of them said much directly to me, but to each other they said things like, “We don’t know that man.”

“Are you Irish”-that statement encapsulates pretty much everything that I’m meant to observe here. It demonstrates my foreignness to this place, neighbourhood and time. It indicates my ignorance of the complexities of what, superficially, seems like a pretty straightforward question. “Are you Irish” is probably the ultimate loaded question. Probably no one would claim that they are English here, but saying that you are Irish may in-fact align you to a Republican/Catholic side of the issue of sectarianism. It would probably not be very easily or lightly answered by anyone but a small boy.

September 26

I’ve just returned from my weekend in Scotland with the Castle High and St. Patrick’s College youth. It was exactly the type of weekend I pictured myself having when I was in America. 20 students from these two schools all gathered early Friday morning to take the Sea-Cat to Troon, Scotland. When I met the kids, they had split into their individual schools, and further than that, the hurling team from St. Pat’s was also set apart from that school’s photography club. In the morning sun, 20 kids all aged between 13 and 17 passed through security and onto a waiting ship they quickly came to call the “vomit comet”.

St. Patrick’s and Castle High are probably a half mile apart in North Belfast. Each is easily within walking distance of my house, and of each other. However, St. Patrick’s is a Catholic grammar school and Castle High is Protestant. Even to get them together for this trip was quite a feat. The reason I ended up getting to go was a miraculous fluke, owing to my new mediation work in both schools, my co-worker Nigel having some other pressing plans, and my basic understanding and interest in photography.

In a moment of calm, Principal of St. Pat’s, P.J. O’Grady explained to me some of the difficulties he’s faced with organizing this trip. Beyond the obvious difficulties in getting 20 students to travel to another country via ferry and plane, overnight, with students from a totally different culture, the sport of hurling carries with it its own set of complications.

For those who have never seen hurling (or perhaps had never heard of it until now), it’s a bit like field hockey, soccer and baseball all mixed together. The game of shinty (whose Scottish final we attended on Saturday) is a variation of these sports as well, but looks like extremely violent golf. Hurling (or ‘Hurley’) is the official sport of the Republic of Ireland, and is seem almost totally as a Catholic sport. Even getting Protestant kids to watch, attend or acknowledge hurling is a big step. As hard as I’ve thought about it, there really is no American equivalent of this.

For the Protestant kids on this trip, it’s a pretty safe bet none of them have played hurling in their lives. Now they have chosen to put themselves in a situation where they are surrounded and forced to eat, work, travel, sleep, and participate in it. But, what I found was that these two groups began to do more than just ‘be’ together. They laughed, played, joked, engaged in some light-hearted picking back and forth, flirted, shared and (as they say here) had a bit of ‘craic’-a word meaning “a laughing good, relaxing time”.

Back in Belfast last week, Nigel told me of an incident involving these two schools. It seems that while on work-study out in the community, four Castle High students saw a student from St. Patrick’s and identified him by his school uniform (all schools wear easily distinguishable uniforms). The four chased the student down and apparently attacked him. This culminated with one of the Castle student striking the St. Pat’s student with a rock.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these two, superficially dichotomous, events: one group, a photography club of Catholics and Protestants and simultaneously a group from one side attacking another kid because he happened to be ‘one of them’. I think that each of these events tells me a tiny fraction about the complex, difficult lives the people of Belfast have to live.

It boils down now to the choices individuals make. Some of these teenagers are choosing to cross sectarian lines and be with kids they don’t know and learn how similar they can be to each other. Others are choosing to react with suspicion, fear and violence. The choices made do not, however, boil down to “one or the other” – most students have done neither of these things, and I wonder what to make of them?