Ukrainian Catch up

[watervole]

 Apologies for not posting in ages.

 

Severe sciatica has been limiting my keyboard time, and much of what I have has gone on maintaining a Facebook page for local hosts for Ukrainian refugees.

The good news is that Kyryllo (spelt Kirill for English speakers) has arrived, and settled in very well.

While not a veggie himself, he's very happy to eat Richard's veggie and vegan food and enjoys it.

He's getting used to English foods like peanut butter which were carefully avoided when he first arrived.

With help from a friend of mine who knows lots of people in IT firms, he's already found a good job with a small local firm that specialise in web applications - he'd been doing an online course on creating web pages before the war broke out - hadn't completed it, but he'd made a fair bit of progress.   It got him the interview.

We did a lot of mock interviews with him - helped him to be a lot less stressed about it and helped him think about answers to questions that were likely to arise.

He did the interview (one of three candidates) and got the job.

He's now cycling to work in Wimborne (on a bike kindly donated by someone local) and is enjoying it.

He keeps in contact with his parents every evening (2 hour time shift).  They're in the occupied region near Kherson and are stuck there. Communications go down sometimes, and are under Russian control now, but it's very good that he's able to speak to them most of the time.

He's also a Dr Who fan (yay!) so we're having a joint rewatch of Jodie Whitaker's seasons.

All in all, he's very easy to have around the house, always uses earphones to listen to music, shares our meals, had a mock sword fight with balloons with our granddaughter and ended it by playing out the sequence from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where his limb's go chopped off one by one!

The payment to hosts from the government doesn't include anything for food though we've been happy to include that until he got a job.

We're now asking £4 per day, which he's quite happy with.

But I'm aware of one local Ukrainian family using the food bank - I guess for a host on a low income, feeding two extra people can add up.

And benefit payments are slow - Kyrilll has been here nearly a month and his benefits haven't kicked in yet. He has an appointment this week, which will thankfully be short, as he has a job, so only needs to ask for the back payment.

Government payments to hosts are slow also.  We're still waiting.  Everything is paid in arrears, and has paperwork first.

However,  I certainly don't regret being part of the scheme.

Kirill fits very well into our household - we used a matching site and exchanged messages with questions and had a chat over Discord before we made the decision to invite him.  I think that was key to this working so well.

He's becoming a friend. And that's good.

 

Comments

[kotturinn]

Argh to the sciatica still! Glad other things are going well.

[coth]

Sorry about the sciatica.

I'm glad your guest is fitting in well. I thought all Ukrainian men were conscripted? (Not sniping, genuinely curious.)

[lexin]

That all sounds excellent! Good luck to you and him.

[julesjones]

Glad to hear he's here and settling in. I was wondering how far that had got in the process.

Sorry to hear about the sciatica. :-(

[vera_j]

I am glad you have such a nice person there. And he is lucky to find you.
Here the situation is dire, too many refugees and it is showing on the state budget. Still the solidarity is huge but the sources are not endless...

[watervole]

I really feel for countries closer to Ukraine.

Here, we have far fewer and people are very willing to help in ways like donating bicycles or bedding.

The cost on the government isn't that high yet, and we have more jobs than people to fill them, so many Ukrainians will find work - though it may be difficult for mothers with children.

[replyhazy]

*applause!*

[eledonecirrhosa]

The Ukrainians are on Universal Credit, which means they don't get their first payment until 5 weeks (ish) from the day they claimed. Because no-one does.

The 5 weeks is assuming the case managers in your bit of the country have done the process to get him a National Insurance Number correctly. There is chaos here because the teams doing the processing split neatly into:

Type A: a team of people who actually read the instructions and ticked the "This claimant is Ukrainian" box to get the application sped to the top of the pile.
Type B: a team of people who drifted thru the process on autopilot and ignored the new instructions about Ukrainians.

Glad you and your guest are a good match. You'll have to get him to teach you to say "My hovercraft is full of eels" in Ukrainian! :-)

[watervole]

Er, why? Is it the cultural equivalent of 'My postillion has been struck by lightening'?

[eledonecirrhosa]

It's a Monty Python thing. Thought he might know the reference because he knew the Black Knight sketch from Monty Python & the Holy Grail.

[watervole]

Ah!