‘Santiago de Compostela – 2,496 km’, reads the signpost. I am standing at the end of a cul-de-sac half an hour’s train ride from Brussels, in the Belgian town of Herent. It seems an improbable place from which to begin one of Christianity’s most important pilgrimages. Yet 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 which lies not only the tomb of St James, but also their own freedom.
This is the home of Oikoten. The word comes from the Greek, and means both ‘away from home’ and ‘by one’s own effort’. Thirty years ago, a group headed by Pol Symons and Luc Couvreur sought permission to take two teenagers out of prison and walk with them to Santiago, inspired by a similar practice that they had seen in the US. If they arrived, the teens would be free to go. Sophie Boddez, one of the project managers, shows me into the meeting room of their converted barn. On the walls are photographs from the past three decades: mostly of young men, bent under rucksacks, topless and burnt by the sun, smoking cigarettes and grinning at the camera.
