Close encounters of the hugely kind
I’m amazed at numbers willing to share their living space with Ukrainian refugees they’ve never met, but they’re the model of British compassion
A FRIEND of mine has decided to offer a Ukrainian refugee a home and I am simultaneously both horrified and jealous. Horrified because I worry about how he’ll cope and jealous because I wish I was as kind a person as he is.
This chap works full time. He has elderly parents who he cares for, grown up kids who command his attention, quite a small house. And a dog.
This is not someone with time or space to spare in their lives. Yet here he is, giving up a room and his ‘fridge and telly and a chunk of his existence for a stranger.
‘He’s mad’, I think to myself. ‘How well has this whole thing been thought through?’ I wonder.
But in reality I am simply soothing my own conscience. For I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I would struggle to do it.
I would struggle to choose to live with someone I didn’t know, to opt in to hosting a stranger about whom I know nothing and who knows nothing about me.
I worry about the language barrier, cultural differences, the lack of privacy; above all I worry whether I would do right by a guest who may arrive traumatised and with nothing. I worry about the responsibility.
It’s an appalling admission. I’m not proud of it, especially when, night after night our TV screens are filled with images of a country and its people devastated by war, fleeing in terror over broken bridges with nothing but their suitcases and the hope that someone, somewhere, will help.
One of those someones is my friend. And thank God for people like him. I guess, though, that we can’t all be so selfless.
It takes a special person to open their homes to those in need and I, not one of them, comfort myself with the thought that kindness comes in many forms.
Despite what this country has been through in the last two years, I can’t be the only one moved by the charity that’s been on display for another country, so far away, going through so much more. We remain a nation of givers. Whether that’s kids raising cash from Tombolas or grandmas knitting woolly blankets for babies, lorry drivers crossing Europe to deliver medical supplies and volunteers rattling collection buckets in a supermarket. Compassion comes in many forms.
The fact is that we can’t help everyone but everyone can help someone. And every act counts.
Visit dec.org.uk to donate to the Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal