A former asylum seeker teaches newcomers how to navigate parenthood under pressure

Lucy Alexia Mncube pulls a plastic bag and a cardboard box out of her car’s boot.

She strolls towards the entrance of the Balseskin Reception Centre, past a health centre and a playground.

“I’m here for the training. Can I get the keys?” she says, at the counter. She is wearing a polka-dot dress and heels, and her hair is pulled back into a bun.

A tall burly guy hands her a key. It opens the door to a small trailer, where the asylum seekers who live in the Balseskin centre can come for classes and workshops.

The centre, on St Margaret’s Road north of the city, has space for more than 530 people at any one time. It is a temporary home, one where people who have recently arrived seeking a safe haven in Ireland are first processed before they are scattered to other centres around the country.

Their stay is supposed to be short. But, in recent times as the accommodation crisis has worsened, people have been here for longer and longer.

Inside the trailer, there’s a big whiteboard scrawled with the words “craic” and “Brexit” from a previous class. Graffiti on a wall shows a muscly Black man, topless under the sun in a jungle alongside a lion. “MY HAPPY PLACE”, is written in the sun.

In the corner of the room are a paint-stained sink and cabinet. The counter is covered in paintbrushes, palettes, and baskets. A small bookshelf near the door is stuffed with books and piled high with plants.

As soon as Mncube steps into the trailer, a resident starts helping her ready the room. “Is it our last session, sister?” she asks.

No, there are two more left, says Mncube as she surveys the room and prepares a tray of biscuits.

This session is the fourth of a six-week parenting course offered by Mncube through the charity Serve the City Ireland, funded by the Department of Children and Equality.

The idea is to help asylum seekers navigate the challenges of parenthood under supervision, in a new country with different norms, while coping with the extreme stresses of life in the asylum process, says Mncube.

That parenting is a flashpoint for immigrants and asylum seekers is backed up not only by personal testimonies, but also by research.

A disproportionate number of kids entangled in childcare proceedings had at least one ethnic minority parent without residency status, says an October 2021 report from the Child Care Law Reporting Project.

“Approximately a quarter of respondent families included at least one parent who was a national of another jurisdiction,” it says.

In Mncube’s trailer classroom at Balseskin, people soon start to glide in. Latecomers slip in the back. A few moms roll by pushing prams, dropping their kids to be watched by a staffer next door.

Too close to home

On Monday morning, about 20 people filled the small trailer in Balseskin, two guys, the rest women.

One man, Nicholson Mbhele, had come with his wife. They both sat straight through the whole session, listening intently.

All were Black parents, save for Salome Kalandadze. She’s a youngish mum to three kids from Georgia, a colourful scarf rolled around her short red hair.

About 15 years ago, Mncube stayed at Balseskin Centre, she said earlier. “Just for two days because my sons had chicken pox, and there were a lot of people here pregnant.”

Eventually, they were moved into a centre in Athlone. They stayed in the town after getting their papers too. “I love Athlone,” Mncube says.

On Monday, Mncube peppered the session with shards of stories about her own time as an asylum seeker.

How she can’t get the screams of a family pulled away from their centre for deportation out of her head, even after all these years.

A black van with tinted windows pulled over near their centre to take away another family on the same day the mum had planned a big birthday party for her kid. “For her four-year-old.”

A cartoon-themed party. All the kids at the centre were hyped up about it, she said.

Then there’s her own story. Mncube said she uses it to illustrate how quickly things can go sour and how much willpower it takes to be a parent under the gun like this.

She asks two women to read two letters addressed to her from the Department of Justice sent within weeks of each other, in 2013.

It was back when she had applied to get her deportation order cancelled based on being a mum to a child born in Ireland.

One letter says it’s been revoked. It triggered a flurry of hugs, screams and dances at her centre, she says to the class. “Back then, papers were so hard to come by.”

Everyone wanted to be around her, she says – like she was carrying something genuinely holy they needed to touch for good luck. The residents chuckled.

But then Kalandadze, the Georgian mum, reads the second letter. It says there’s been a mistake, a clerical error. She didn’t get her papers.

At the front of the class, a young woman gasps.

When Kalandadze reads the last line, Mncube mouths the words like she’s read it a thousand times: “I apologise for any confusion which this clerical error may have caused.”

Mncube says she was inconsolable. For her, she says, the mistake felt too big. Too unfair to accept. “I had to go on antidepressants.”

Talking about kids

Parents who finish the parenting course get a certificate.

Mncube says they only have funding to do these classes in the centre in Balseskin. But she hopes she gets to do them in other centres.

Mncube makes sure everyone participates in the session somehow.

While waiting for her sluggish laptop to load, she asked residents to take turns reading aloud from course material. It covers things like what Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, does and who can report what.

When Mncube asked the residents to share thoughts from the previous class, Kalandadze, the mum from Georgia, said it made her think about her parenting style.

She had two of her kids before she turned 20, she says. And she didn’t think too much about her parenting style or what her kids thought of it.

But now, when she asked them, one of her teens told her she was authoritarian, which surprised her. “I see myself as democratic,” she said, chuckling.

Her youngest kid said: “Mum, you’re just cute.” But she also asked for more screen time, Kalandadze said.

Promise Gora, sitting behind Kalandadze, said she’s been thinking about how important it is to listen to what the kids have to say. That way, they’d take you more seriously, too, she said.

At times, Mncube’s class is funny.

Like when she was talking about how she sees different styles of parenting between men and women.

Mncube stumbled over her words. “What can I say about men?” she said, sighing.

She asks Mbhele, the guy sitting in the middle with his wife, to tell the class how men parent.

“Men are patient; men are kind,” he says as the women laugh like crazy. Shaking their heads no.

The guy behind Mbhele, though, says he’s right, nodding his head and smiling.

Navigating judgment

Mncube talked about parenting under the supervision of White staffers at accommodation centres, too.

Parents may have let their kids run to the nearby shop in their places of birth, but Westerners might judge them for doing that here, she said. “I feel like we are judged based on how people see us, not based on our experiences.”

Someone can call Tusla on them for not being around their kids all the time. And ill-equipped centre staff can sometimes use Tusla as a tool to scare them, she said.

Mncube asked the parents in the room to look out for each other and find solidarity in sharing the same hardships. “I have friends from Bhutan, Kenya, Ghana, everywhere because we met in the centre.”

And, it’s normal for older teens to go clubbing here, she says. One woman in her centre learned it the hard way when her teenage kid got ready to go without her go-ahead, says Mncube.

She called the guards on her son, and to her shock, the Gardaí sided with the kid. “The woman almost collapsed,” says Mncube. Everyone laughs.

Mncube ended her class by asking the parents to reflect on all the times they felt their parenting was judged here.

Once the course wraps up, they are all going to go on a day trip to Airfield Estate, she said.

After the class, a few women stayed behind to tidy up the room – gabbing, sweeping, and laughing together.