Peace Walk Day 3 Slough to Uxbridge

Thurs 2nd August Slough to Uxbridge
From now on the walk becomes urban, with few places for unofficial toilet breaks and few public conveniences. When your walking, these things become more important. We diverted slightly to visit Harmondsworth detention center where last year Bereket Yohannes from Eritrea was found hanged causing a hunger strike. More recently Tamils have been sent back to Sri Lanka and then found dead.

We walked in and seeing no barriers and no signs telling us not to, we found a tree
commemorating someone unnamed who had died there last year. We gathered around it for a silent moment of contemplation, and found that the authorities there had panicked and called the police. They asked us to move on when we had finished what we were doing, which we agreed to. We had intended to move on anyway, but first we wrote a letter to Sujeevan, telling him he had our support and sympathy. Sujeevan is a Tamil youth in Harmondsworth, who, attempted suicide last week. He was taken to hospital and is being held in isolation. The guards seemed to know who we were talking about, but tried to make life difficult in the traditional bureaucratic way, did we know his first and last name etc. See www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=22841 for more on the treatment of
Tamils, our media don’t seem to be covering this story.

We crossing the M25 and stopping for some lunch, we walked past a RAF base in the afternoon. We hadn’t intended any action there, but 3 police cars rushes towards us, officers leapt out and approaching us in a menacing manner. After a few words from Marcus we were allowed to proceed, what a waste of their time. Perhaps we are more of a threat to the authorities than we thought. Continuing along a high street we met some girls out shopping, who were very exited to join us on the way to Uxbridge, now only a couple of miles away. They were given the lead banner and lead us into the town, hopefully they will get involved again. We found lots of ripe blackberries today, so much wild food beside the road, fresh and tasty.

We gathered outside the friends meeting house for a local press photo and were then lead to a members house, where they had a lovely garden for us to relax in with a trampoline and lots of tea.