Former recording clerk talks on hosting refugees
'One of our guests, his relatives were killed by a Russian bomb only weeks after he had started to live with us.'
Gillian Ashmore, a former recording clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM), spoke on radio last month about her experience of hosting refugees.
Speaking on the Sunday programme on 20 March, the Quaker chatted to Malcolm Singer, a rabbi who has also hosted refugees from more than ten countries.
‘The point came when our youngest child turned eighteen and went off abroad,’ Gillian Ashmore told presenter Edward Stourton. ‘Suddenly we became aware of having so much space… why wouldn’t we respond?’
Before her guest arrived in 2007, Gillian said that she was ‘worried he might be messy or noisy or not do his washing up, but the most important worry is that he would have problems that we just couldn’t solve, and we would feel terribly bad.’ Their visitors never proved to be messy, but ‘having things you couldn’t solve did happen to some extent’, but it just worried them less over the years.
Some of the best times, she said, were when their visitors got ‘leave to remain’ after a long wait and were finally ‘able to get on with their lives’. There was also joy with one guest getting married and another having a daughter. Malcolm Singer said that one learns a lot about the problems in guests’ countries, and their cuisines, and how the British bureaucracy works and doesn’t work, which was quite ‘an eye opener’.
‘Everything is stacked against them,’ added Gillian. ‘With the Syrians particularly, what is going on back home is so agonising for them. One of our guests, his relatives were killed by a Russian bomb only weeks after he had started to live with us – that was the hardest thing of all I think.’
The programme can be heard on www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0015ks8.
