Western Morning News (Saturday)
There but for the Grace of God...
AS each day passes the stories from Ukraine get worse. Many of us feel a profound sense of impotence. How can we help these people who are barely four hours away from the peace of the UK? Four hours from starvation, hypothermia, homelessness, families broken, death, injury for countless numbers of people.
Thousands of people are now coming forward to share their homes or holiday homes to poor desperate folk who have no roof.
Show support by wearing a Ukrainian flag armband. Put a sticker on your car, in your window. It may not be much but it shows we’re aware, concerned. What else can we do? Well, for a start we can be kind. Kind when we hear an accent we don’t understand, kind when we see people dressed in hand-me-downs walking through the streets. Kind by buying them a coffee, spending time talking to them.
A normal act of human nature you might think. Sadly it’s not. An acquaintance has just moved back to his European homeland. This professional man, who has helped hundreds of people through his work will be a huge loss to the community. He’s leaving because his wife and son have been abused in the street because they speak English with an accent. The attacks have been so disturbing that this lovely family have left the country.
The ignorance and shame of the behaviour of this minority makes me fearful for those poor innocents who will soon be arriving on our shores and makes me realise that we have to be even more hospitable, show our best and most caring faces lest the nastiness of the few makes their existence even more difficult.
Regrettably I’ve seen many refugees in my lifetime. I worked as a journalist during the Kosovo war. I watched, devastated, as all aspects of human life formed ant-like columns crossing the border into Albania. Thousands of innocent victims exodusing their life of security, carrying a rag bag of possessions.
The raw emotion of parents separated from their children. An elderly grandma sitting on a sofa strapped on a mule-drawn cart who had had her teeth knocked out by the end of a rifle. A young woman who walked proudly, carrying nothing but a small black soap bag. Turned out it contained scissors and a comb. “I’m a hairdresser” she told my translator. “I will never be out of work while I have these. Men in the Balkans are keen to have neat beards and hair”.
I watched as people tried to make the best of living in small tents, looking in confusion at the food parcels dropped by the Americans. Peanut butter and Jello were not part of their diet and they remained untouched.
I listened, horrified, at gunshots in the camp as fathers fought off Albanian child smugglers who tried to take their children or daughters off in the middle of the night to sell them. I struggled with my interpreter as we dragged her pretty young sister, in broad daylight, from men in a shiny car who tried to capture her to sell for sex abroad.
In Greece, my husband and I worked with refugees on Lesbos. We saw people like you and me who had sold up everything to escape the dangers of war in Iran or other countries. They were robbed of their dignity, their life’s work and traffickers usually ensured they had no savings or possessions. They were huddled wrecks at the mercy of others’ compassion and help. I met educated men and women whose children had been raped in front of them, whose children had watched their parents raped. Of children who had become dumb because of the trauma their young eyes had seen. The stories I heard, too many to tell here, rarely get to be shared in our comfortable homes.
In Ireland recently I read of inappropriate clothes that had been donated for the displaced Ukranians. Again when I was in Greece I worked for a couple of days in a huge warehouse sorting clothes. Boxes came in from all over the world. One consignment contained boy scout uniforms. Another contained wedding dresses. Party clothes, mini skirts and crop tops – all totally unsuitable. Stiletto heels, plastic shoes, and worst of all, dirty underwear. The Lady Bountifuls who donated these clearly had a “let them eat cake” mentality, not stopping to think of the journey, the living conditions these souls had to make from the camps, the weather, the practical needs. It was painfully, maddeningly insulting to see how people believed they were “helping”.
The same insight is needed for items sent to the Ukraine. Would you wear them? Are they right for their circumstances? The weather? Think before you bundle stuff up, because many people don’t.
When I finish this article, my next job is to register a room in my house. I’ve no idea if it will work out, but doing nothing isn’t an option. If sleeping in a bed is an improvement on a railway platform then I hope it will. But for the grace of God go I.
Thousands of innocent victims exodusing their life of security, carrying a rag bag of possessions