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Ukraine refugees
We've signed up with the government refugee scheme. Our spare bedroom isn't fantastic at present, but we're starting to give it a good clear out and remove all the stuff that's piled up in there.
It's a nice sunny room with a view over the garden - used to be Henry's room before he moved out to live with his fiancée.
I suspect a large number of hurdles ahead.- the government scheme does not look at though it's intended to make things particularly easy.
As far as I can tell, you need to contact your own 'named refugee', rather than them running any sort of pairing scheme. So we're signing up with a couple of charities that work with refugees.
It does strike me that trying to find people who mesh well is important both for refugee and host. Even such a basic question as smoker/non-smoker wasn't on the form I just filled in.
If I'm prepared to host a stranger fox six months, then we need to have some commonality or we'll drive each other crazy.
Likewise 'kid-friendly?'
To which the answer boils down to: "I love kids, but I would not accept an unaccompanied child. We looked after our granddaughter during the early lockdown when no movement between households was allowed. Dealing with a stressed child who missed her parents even with daily Zoom calls and grandparents there all the time. means I vividly imagine just how great the mental health stress is for a child with no family member present who has just escaped a war zone.
I don't have enough mental health or training to even begin to provide what that child would need.
With a parent? Maybe. But it would be two people squashed into one room. Though our two children shared that room for nearly 20 years.
I suspect I'm sounding awfully negative...
We want to help, but we also have to be realistic about what we can provide. If we over-commit and then back out, then we make a refugee's life even worse.
On a more positive note, I've already checked that Google Translate on my tablet can cope with Ukranian and convert English to spoken Ukranian (and hopefully the other way too)
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it might be worth specifying whether you need the person you can host
to have had one/two/three doses of COVID vaccine...
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Meanwhile this charity looked sensible: www.refugeesathome.org
The need is not going to go away, alas.
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They say upfront that most refugees want to be in cities, for reasons that make good sense. So, I'm not sure whether anyone would want to stay with us - though we are within reasonable distance of Poole/Bournemouth - so we'll apply and see what they say.
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eg. We're a very environmentally conscious household and minimise our use of water, electricity, etc. I very much hope we don't get paired with someone who likes to take a 20 min shower every morning. It would drive me crazy.
anyone is anti-LGBT would be an absolute NO.
So, we've signed with an organisation that already has experience in matching refugees to households.
But different eating habits, different times sleeping, volume of music/TV?
All things that will need to be negotiated carefully over time.
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The sort of person who would fit well with us would be:
Totally unbiased against trans people.
Concerned about climate change and willing to minimise their use of water/electricity (ie. living as we do) to minimise their carbon footprint.
This doesn't mean freezing - our house is actually very warm, but it does mean no long showers, not washing clothes unless they are actually dirty, drying them on the washing line (we don't own a tumble dryer)
Helping on the allotment - optional, but might help with stress.
Liking board games. We play a lot of board games, and we hope this is an interest that might be shared.
No smokers/vapers. No use of perfumes either - they all trigger my asthma.
Being willing to eat vegetarian/vegan (they're free to cook for themselves, but we'd be more than happy to include them in what we eat - and it minimises washing up. We don't own a dishwasher either)
We're a fairly relaxed household. Reasonably tidy, but not compulsively so.
We might be able to host either a single person, or possibly a person with a child around 8 (Oswin's age). There's only one room, but we could fit an extra bed in, or a bunk bed to give more space.
We might be able to co-host with another local family to split a larger family between us. That's something we could look into.
Some ability in English would help a lot.
We're in our early 60s and we will not have the energy to help with child care. Oswin for a few days a week is quite enough to cope with. (On the plus side, I'm just setting up a local Facebook for other people in Corfe Mullen who might be willing to help in ways other than hosting.)
For the same reason, we're not really capable of taking someone with serious health problems.
We have a garden, which they'd be free to use.
We live in a small town with bus connections to a couple of larger towns and we're within reasonable range of Poole/Bournemouth. Bus to Poole (1/2 hour or cycles) and rail from there to London is 2 hours.
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Or likes playing folk music or singing.
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Could get extra bed for a child - in theory, child welcome, but I'm expecting mental health problems -and that scares me a bit.
I have a little first-hand knowledge of how separation from home and parent/s can affect children, and it can get very bad for the child. Even with friendly loving adults. And I'm not sure I have the mental strength to help a stressed/frightened child in the way they need.
It's a friendly, safe house, in a safe country, but some rooms will look very dated.
Random jottings, as I think of them, really.
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Of course, it's easy for me to say, all I can give is money.
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I'm definitely not under the illusion that it will be easy. But if we can find someone with compatible interests and lifestyle expectations, it will hopefully be less stressful.
Sometimes I question my sanity!
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I don't think they are doing much of any kind of compatibility checks or such on private accommodation here in Germany, but then no visas or obligations are tied to it afaik. Will the refugees in the UK be tied to their hosts? That sounds like a bad idea, open to abuse, like visas tied to employers.
The normal refugee housing capacity of my city of thirty thousand was already 90% full at the start of this, mostly with Syrian and Afghan refugees, and then some fifteen thousand Ukrainians in the city now have to sleep somewhere, so they have had to put up tents with cots, because they ran even out of space in the halls that they always convert first. And ask for volunteers to take people in. Of course they are also trying to find hotel rooms and put up more sturdy trailers and containers as barracks, but all that takes time.
So I think private accommodation is pretty random here, like even just hosts and arrivals being at the train station at the same time in the repurposed tourist information point.
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I believe they will carrying out various checks on hosts, such as records of child abuse, etc. (I've already had that check for the work I do in schools)
The charity we've signed up with insists on a home visit first to ensure that the room is okay, and that the hosts know what they've let themselves in for and that there is reasonable compatibility.
We have some definite limits on who we would take. eg. I'm asthmatic, so no smokers.
I think Germany is responding faster and better to the crisis than we are in the UK, but things are at least starting to move now.
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Some coming here already have connections, not just families, e.g. a local firm had employees in Ukraine and organized an evacuation for them and their families and are for now staying with their colleagues.
But mostly people just seem to come because Poland is at its capacity to cope with some two million refugees there now. And apparently the state in Poland isn't doing that much, it's all on the volunteers. I can't imagine how that is going to hold up. So they will have to spread out more.
I think plenty of people would like to go to the UK because they already know English, so if the UK actually is willing to take significant numbers, even the extra hurdles with visas and matching won't matter, because staying in Germany or France or other EU countries may not need that paperwork now, but not knowing the language is probably a worse barrier to overcome when you need to stay for months or maybe even years.
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Accommodating the refugees at home for longer time is not easy...they are mostly women with children...there is a language barrier even here.
This war must be stopped before it escalates. But even now we will pay dearly for it. We are deep in economic problems NOW.
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A lot of people here are volunteering as hosts - around 150,000 so far. But the visa process is sluggish, and there's not yet any official system for pairing people up.
There are a couple of charities who have experience in this field, but they're overwhelmed at the moment.
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Here, it is crazy in a different way. We have over 100,000 people willing to welcome refugees into their homes, but the government insist that they must have proper visas and a current international passport, and there are delays on all the paperwork.
We signed up a week ago to take someone, but we have to make contact with a refugee ourselves and then help them with the paperwork - it's virtually impossible for a person to fill it all in if they are not a native English speaker. You could probably manage it, but a Ukranian with only moderate English?
There are so many hoops to jump through.
Prices are going up rapidly here. Fortunately, we have savings and an electric car, so we will be okay, but people were already struggling with energy bills before this crisis hit.
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If you happen to meet a woman who can speak English (doesn't need to be perfect), with a child age 6/7 (Oswin's age), who really cares about the environment and would be happy in our vegetarian, low-carbon lifestyle, then she might be someone we could take in.
She would need to have a current international passport (and her child also), as our government is currently being very fussy (stupid) about such things.
You know me. Hopefully, you know the kind of person who would get along with us -someone rather like yourself...
The UK scheme assumes people will be here for a minimum of 6 months and up to 3 years, and will give benefits to the parent and schooling for children.
There will be a lot of paperwork and delays - we know that from other people who are taking in refugees. But I think the system will gradually improve.
Should you find someone like that, we could talk over the Internet to see if we like each other. We need to like one another as we could be living in the same house for a very long time.
We would also take a single person, as an alternative, but we really do feel for the children.
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But thank you very much, dear friend. Every help is great. Because we never know...
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They are focused on survival. I would be the same in their place.
But longer term - people will be here from 6 months to 3years. I don't want a guest to feel uncomfortable for all that time, if I keep asking them to use less hot water for example.
I'm expecting massive psychological problems, especially among children. I know Oswin was under great distress only two months into lockdown - if you remember, she was staying with us rather than her parents.
She could talk to them every day over Zoom and she was with family members... So how much distress will a child have who has escaped from a war and left most of their family behind and is in a strange house with strange people and a strange language.
Which is why we want to take a mother and child as well if possible. Harder for us, but all those poor children....