The Rescue road

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A four-month-long walk on an old pilgrimage or spiritual journey offers young criminals a different way to walk. Adam Weymouth on the slow healing of Oikoten.

‘Santiago de Compostela – 2,496 km’, reads the signpost. I am standing at the end of a road half an hour’s train ride from Brussels, in the Belgian town of Herent. It seems an unlikely place from which to begin one of Christianity’s most important spiritual journeys or pilgrimages. But since 1982 more than 350 teenagers have walked down this road at the beginning of a four-month journey to Spain. At the end of the journey lies the tomb of St James, and also their own freedom.

This is the home of Oikoten. The word comes from the Greek, and means ‘away from home’ and ‘by one’s own effort’. Thirty years ago, a group headed by Pol Symons and Luc Couvreur asked permission to take two teenagers out of prison and walk with them to Santiago. If they arrived, the teenagers would be free to go. Sophie Boddez, one of the project managers, shows me into their meeting room . On the walls are photographs from the past thirty years. The photos are mostly of young men They carry heavy rucksacks, they are topless and burnt by the sun They smoke cigarettes and smile at the camera.

‘The idea,’ Sophie says ‘is that we give young people a different role in society from the one they know. Normally people see them as aggressive criminals, but here they are only pilgrims, people on a spiritual journey. Nobody knows their story.’ The teenagers get in contact with the organization themselves. Their social worker or the institution tell them about it. ‘Generally we choose the ones who don’t have many other choices. Young people with problems in different areas, with a long history in institutions. At 17 they arrive at Oikoten saying, “Nobody wants me, nobody can work with me. Can you please take me on the trip, because I have nowhere else to go?”’

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Young peoples on Oikoten’s pilgrimage walk. The trip is about getting to know yourself and it is about discovering a new country.

The adults who walk with them are paid for their time, but are not professionals. Oikoten prefers that each helper does the walk only once, so that they too have a unique experience. Luc Peters arrives, a social worker in his fifties, who walked with two teenagers in 2006. Thomas was in an open prison for the first time, for drug crimes, while Guillaume had spent most of his life in and out of institutions. The night before they left, Luc met their families at Oikoten. The teenagers, the mentor or helper, and the families were all asked to write what they hoped to gain from the journey. As Thomas’ father began to cry as he read out what he had written, Luc understood very clearly how important the trip was. Sitting round the fire that night, Thomas and Guillaume made an agreement that they would not let each other fail, even if they had to push each other all the way to Santiago.

The route is planned, but all other decisions are taken as a group. Each day they walk 25 kilometres, with a rest day every 10. A small amount of money lets them stay sometimes on a campsite or in a pilgrim hostel but mostly they sleep outside and cook their own meals. Sometimes someone they meet along the way offers them a bed. ‘People have told them for most of their lives that they’re not worth anything,’ says Luc, ‘and now someone has enough trust in them to let them stay in their house and send them off in the morning with a sandwich.’ He tells me how Guillaume said to one family over dinner ‘What the hell are you doing, letting two people like us into your house?’

For the first time in years they do not have a strict authority watching over them, and Luc found those first weeks very tiring as they were always testing the rules. On the second night one came back from the village shop with a bottle of vodka, and Luc found himself paying for and drinking half to stop them drinking it all themselves. ‘The whole time,’ he says, ‘it is a question of balance. When should I say something, when should I let them think it out for themselves? Walking gives you the opportunities to talk, to think and to do things together. That’s the most important thing, going through it together.’

The next day I go to see 37-year-old Marc Vangasse, who did the walk 20 years ago. He has found his photo albums and we sit down to look through them. At 15, Mark was living alone, which is illegal in Belgium. When the authorities found out, he was sent to a young persons’ prison. ‘In those places, you come out worse than you go in,’ he says. ‘I learnt where to buy weapons, how to steal cars. I took my first drugs in there.’ A familiar routine of moving from institutions to the streets started. During one of his periods in prison he heard about Oikoten. Walking to Spain seemed a better idea than the life he was in, and it offered the sort of independence he was wanting badly.

We look at photos of the three of them in the mountains: two young men and another in his forties, smiling in the snow. I ask him what he feels he learnt from the walk. ‘That many people are very nice,’ he says. ‘That was the big thing I learnt.’ He tells me about the house where they stopped to ask for water on Christmas Eve and were invited to stay for Christmas, and the party that they went to for New Year’s Eve, and a restaurant that gave them a free meal ‘Those sorts of experiences happened all the time. It’s amazing how good people are.’

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'A walk is medicine. Prison is not.

He felt very happy at arriving in Santiago but knew he would soon be back in the old life he had left behind. At first Oikoten gave him some money, but when that stopped, he found himself back on the streets. But the experience had given him the strength to stop getting trapped in his old ways. Soon he met a girl and moved into her parents’ apartment. Then he got a job and they moved into a place of their own. A year later he became a father. His daughter is now 17, and in college, and he has a son who is 16. He split from his partner two years ago but they have stayed close and share looking after the children. He is now a political activist, and helped to organize last year’s Occupy protests in Belgium. He tells me he would like to be a helper or mentor himself one day.

Around 70 per cent of the teenagers finish the walk, and reports have shown the clear positive effects on the walkers and how they join society again. But deciding how successful is Oikoten’s method is complicated. ‘Often the effects show later on,’ says Sophie. When Oikoten celebrated its 25th birthday, people who had walked 20 years ago brought their children to show them their photos that are still up on the office walls. ‘That’s how you know it works.’ Every year, Luc sends an email to Thomas and Guillaume on the anniversary of their departure. When Thomas went back to taking drugs after losing his job due to injury, his family got in touch. Luc went and stayed with him for a week and helped him find again the reasons that had got him to Santiago. ‘You must keep thinking you’ve done something that not many young people have done,’ he told him. ‘Everything you’ve met, the friendliness, the difficult moments, finding solutions. That positive experience you can keep with you all your life.’

Sophie agrees. She talks about the crossing of the Pyrenees, two-thirds of the way through the journey, as a very important moment. ‘They say, “I thought I wouldn’t make it to the top of the mountain, but I did.” They learn that difficult things happen, but you can get over them. We can’t solve what went wrong for years in a few months. But they gain confidence and learn things that will help them solve problems in the future.’

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A long road ahead – but walking as medicine works, say the organizers.

I ask Sophie how Oikoten has changed over the past 30 years. She tells me that the teenagers’ problems are more complicated now, that their crimes are different, and that they take more medicine – tranquillizers, Ritalin, sleeping pills. But many find they can stop taking the drugs during the walk. The route is also less wild than it was, and although they are not allowed to take a phone with them, most pilgrim hostels now have an internet connection.

Yet the main idea is the same ‘It’s a long time, a slow way of life,’ she says, ‘opposite to all the things we do in modern society. It’s only walking.’ ‘For a young person,’ says Luc, ‘the best possible result of prison is that if the punishment is hard enough, they might not do it again. It’s better to find another solution – something that will make the criminal think. That’s what a walk does, it makes you think. You’re trying to give people the chance to experiment, to experience a different world. Trying things, trying things again, without giving up, without being watched and judged. A walk is medicine. Prison is not.’

Adam Weymouth is a freelance journalist. adamweymouth.com Some names have been changed.

Oikoten Update

Celebrating 30 years this year, Oikoten received a shock in May. Money from the Belgian government would be cut, makzing the future of the organization uncertain. Discussions suggest that the government position is that Oikoten must reduce the number of trips to Santiago de Compostela and develop cheaper, shorter-term activities for the young people who ask them for help.