This week marking Refugee Week, it’s been difficult not to think about the refugees and asylum seekers who have largely been forgotten in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Stranded far from family and friends in a strange country without any money and no roof over their head, many have had nowhere to turn.
Just two months before Covid-19 forced Britain into lockdown we, two retired academics in our 80s, welcomed into our home the wife of Tade, a refugee we have been hosting since last summer.
I and my husband first met Tade in August 2019 through Refugees At Home, a national UK charity that connects people with a spare room with refugees and asylum seekers in need of accommodation. We were keen to support a refugee as we are highly aware of the difficulties of settling as a newcomer in a new land because we came to Britain in 1960 from South Africa. Our own parents had escaped poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe and landed up as Jewish refugees in South Africa. My father was one of the First World War generation who, at the age of 12, was forced to flee in order to avoid the Russian army which was forcibly conscripting any young Jewish men they caught, many no older than him. Plus I had chaired the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) for many years, and been active in the anti-Apartheid movement.
We warmed to Tade, a political refugee from Ethiopia, immediately, when he joined us. A dedicated marine engineer, he was forced to abandon his home country – having to make the enormously painful decision to jump ship in London with his wife Aisha (not her real name) still in Ethiopia.
Unable to find a job and with nowhere to stay, Tade landed up sleeping on trains, buses and in train stations.
Once here, Tade managed to secure a university place but, four months into the degree, it turned out that the university’s student finance office had given him the wr