Courage, Close Up

This year’s Refugee Week took place against a backdrop of rising anti-refugee violence in parts of the United Kingdom. Its theme was courage — a word that, for SOS MEDITERRANEE, is not just an annual theme but a constant presence, witnessed across ten years of operations and rescues in the Central MediterraneanThis June marked our first Refugee Week presence in the UK — a chance to bring that reality into London, into different spaces and different rooms, and to see who was ready to meet it.

We began at The Conduit; a members’ club built around one idea: that the world’s most pressing challenges require people willing to act on them. The evening brought together journalists, researchers, humanitarian workers, and artists — an audience that came prepared to listen and to engage. At the centre of it was Rebecca Marcussen, a midwife from Wales who has spent the past few years working aboard the Ocean Viking. 

Her commitment to that work, and to returning to it, is its own form of courage. As a midwife, what she witnesses is particular: the women and girls who reach the ship have often survived trafficking and sexual violence, journeys they did not choose. Some arrive pregnant. Some with newborns in their arms. The Central Mediterranean is the deadliest maritime migration route in the world, and yet they cross it. Britain has its own tradition of civilians who go to sea when others cannot — that instinct is written into the coastline. Rebecca carries it into the Mediterranean. The women she receives carry something older: the determination to reach safety for the sake of their child. In that room in London, neither form of courage needed explaining. 

Later that week, at Worlding — an intimate exhibition space in Elephant and Castle — SOS MEDITERRANEE and Collective Aid presented Across Lands and Seas. Both organisations exist because their founders could not look away while people died: one on land, one at sea. The people both organisations encounter are often part of the same journey, moving along routes where safe passage simply does not exist. Different terrains, the same absence of protection.

That absence is not new. Both organisations have been witnessing it for a decade. The exhibition was built around that shared decade of distress on land and at sea— and the courage it takes to keep witnessing a crisis that has largely disappeared from public view. The exhibition was built around two rooms and a shared space between them. In the Land Room, photographer Paula Llopis documented landscapes of northern Serbia — forests, fields, border zones, almost entirely without people. These are places thousands have passed through, and where countless others did not make it. The absence is the evidence.

In the Sea Room, SOS MEDITERRANEE traced four forms of courage shared across both routes, connecting survivors and crew as much as their different circumstances set them apart. There is the courage of leaving loved ones behind: for those in exile, unable to travel with every member of their family; for the crew, who say goodbye to their own families every few weeks before returning to sea. There is the courage of not knowing: for people crossing by boat, uncertain they will make it; for crew members, uncertain that everyone aboard a boat in distress will still be alive when they reach it.

SOS MEDITERRANEE was founded in 2015 by citizens who refused to look away. Refugee Week 2026 was our first in the UK and the people in those rooms reminded us why we are here. One card read: “You are not alone in this.” Another: “Thank you for your humanity, in a world that seems to have forgotten it.”

This was a beginning.