A family’s story and how HUGS are helping embrace refugees
LAST year, our son Callum married Vitalina at Hinckley URC Church.
It was a great day, and one which will live for always in the memory.
They had met at the church whilst I was still minister there (I retired in 2016), since we hosted the International Friendship Centre, and Vita’s parents had come along to that, and they introduced their daughter into our church Youth Activities. And the relationship between Cal and Vita grew, until last year they became man and wife.
The point is Vitalina, like her mum and dad, was born in Ukraine. The family in Ukraine was unable to attend the wedding owing to economics and Covid, though it was live-streamed “back home” to where we ourselves had previously visited. Kyiv, and the towns and villages we visited, meeting up with Vita’s family, were wonderful, and if things were different in 2022, we’d have no problem at all with commending them as holiday destinations.
But then in February of this year, the Russian forces invaded Ukraine. And since then all of us have learned the names of Ukrainian cities that previously we’d never heard of, some of which have become 21st century bywords for obliteration and for total inhuman destruction.
So ours became one of those families whose fundamental family responsibility is to bring relatives into our homes and into the safe environment of our community.
“Back home” our folk were getting little rest because of the constant air raid sirens. The news reports on TV are alarming every day still, and at an early stage we pressed the Ukrainian family to come over here. Even at that the first attempt to catch a train to Lviv was thwarted by sheer weight of numbers trying to get on board.
So Vita’s uncle drove halfway across the country in his white van, with Vita’s gran, her two aunts, her three cousins, and the family dog to drop them (all except the dog) off near Lviv, where they could catch a bus into Poland.
Inevitably they brought with them next to nothing. Four of the six had no passports anyway, and little proof of identity, as is a commonplace requirement here. They had just pretty much what they stood up in. Leaving the menfolk, the homes, the lifestyle, the neighbours and neighbourhood, all the familiar, behind them,
A horrendous journey. But now, once arrived in the very generous Poland, in the middle of the night, and in the snow, they were safely into the EU.
At the same time Callum, Vita and
Vita’s mum flew out from Heathrow to help with translation, and with the UK immigration systems. Long story short: they travelled East in Poland, to UK offices. They travelled North. They travelled West.
Callum was interviewed by the BBC, by Robert Rinder of Talk Radio, and by others, but it all took the best part of a fortnight to comply with all the UK systems before at long last they landed safely in London and came on to Hinckley.
Ours was the first family here; quickly followed by another; but now there’s a considerable influx of guests arriving under the Homes for Ukraine scheme, too.
Once our family and our guests are here they are faced with a mountain of applications, biometric residency permits, education, doctors, dentists, DWP issues, how to get about when you have no family transport and no funds and so on.
So we have felt it wise to gather our
Ukrainian arrivals together for mutual support and to see how we can put our heads, hearts and prayers together, to answer questions and to make things happen.
There’s a group meeting in Barlestone, another in Stoke Golding and here’s a picture of ours in Hinckley, which met on June 10 at 10am, at the Pathways Centre run by Hinckley Baptist Church next to Aldi.
And the International Friendship centre at Hinckley URC still gathers on Mondays at noon too.
Hinckley Ukrainian Group Support by its initials amounts to HUGS.
I guess that’s the shorthand for the love, support and kindness we want to show to displaced persons, whose nation, families, and homes are all under threat from the war machine from the East.
Scarcely imaginable!
Lord please bring Peace, and thus on beyond that, the life and lifestyle that some of us take for granted.