‘This is my home now’: The charities helping refugees rebuild their lives

Every day all over the world people make the difficult decision to leave their homes. Jon Bloomfield speaks to refugees taking their first steps in the UK and the charities helping them along the way

A destroyed street in the city of Daraa in 2018 (AFP/Getty)

Sitting in one of the Middle Eastern cafes that have sprung up in Birmingham over the last decade, Maan quietly tells his story. He was a 14-year-old school student, the son of a farmer in Daraa, an agricultural town in southern Syria, when the uprising started. “A group of teenagers were arrested for putting anti-government slogans on a wall. When the kids were not returned, the parents protested and the army shot them.” The uprising rapidly escalated into a full-blown military assault on the citizens of the town and its surrounding villages. Maan lost an uncle and four other relatives. With his mother and younger brother, he eventually fled to Jordan. After two years working illegally in cafes and restaurants, he realised he had no future there. “I dreamed of going to the UK to study business management. They respect humanity in the UK. The language, you can use it anywhere in the world. And the degrees are better.”

He went to the UK embassy in Amman. “They treated me in a rough way. They told me there was no asylum here. They don’t accept applications.” It was the same at the French and German embassy. So with family savings he flew to Algeria; paid $1,500 and was trafficked through Tunisia to Libya; spent 11 days in a house with no mattresses and little food; then at four in the morning he was taken with 900 others in a rickety boat across the Mediterranean. He feared for his life on the journey with water coming in. “Fortunately, the Italian military picked us up or we would all have drowned.” It took 20 hours for the Red Cross to check them all in – a mixture of west and east Africans, Afghanis, Syrians. And then he made his way through Europe – Catania, Milan, Nice and Paris to Calais. “I spent 27 days in Calais, climbing the fences, clinging underneath lorries, getting caught and returning to try again. I broke my leg climbing; was taken to hospital; then went back to trying to get onto a lorry.” 

He eventually managed it, arrived at Dover and put in a claim as an underage asylum seeker. He spent two months at Ashford’s Millbank centre to recover from the broken leg and then was put in shared accommodation for six months while his claim was processed and accepted, giving him temporary leave to remain. Over the last five years he has learnt English, worked as a waiter and a barman, studied in his spare time and is now starting on a university foundation course in business management.  While working at one of the five Damascena restaurants in the city he met a Romanian girl studying at Birmingham University and they plan to marry later this year. With his right to remain granted, Maan says, “I am building my future here.” The horrors of Syria are more distant. He has no contact with his old school friends in Daraa. “This is my home now.”

We are living in a tumultuous world. The number of people forced out of their home continues to rise each year.  The UN refugee agency estimates that 11 million people were newly displaced by conflict or persecution in 2019 and while most remained within their home country, some 2.4 million became refugees and asylum seekers, bringing the overall worldwide total to 30 million. Most stay near their home country – a fifth of Lebanon’s population is made up of displaced Syrians and Palestinians. But some make it to the UK. This year, as Covid reduces the lorry routes, over 7,000 asylum seekers have come across the Channel in small boats. The tabloid press and government ministers have raised a predictable hue and cry but until the drownings of the Iranian Kurdish family, compassion has been in short supply.

Significantly fewer apply for asylum in the UK than in both France and Germany, while overall in Europe the numbers are way below those for Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. Ministers seem happiest when they present refugees as an invading “other”.  The reality is that after finding a safe haven from their trauma, most refugees simply try to make new lives here and often find their way, through diligent study, into professional jobs.

Daniel had been forced into endless national service in Eritrea and when he objected was imprisoned and forced into harsh agricultural work in a rural labour camp. He escaped to Sudan, where his cousin paid for smugglers to organise his journey “across the desert and the sea”. It took him three months before he arrived in the UK. He spoke English and was able to get permission to stay relatively quickly. That was 15 years ago. “There was less hassle then,” he recalls. A trained accountant, he has been able to get work using his professional skills, as well as giving support and advice to the local, 2,000-strong Eritrean community in the city. After a similarly hazardous journey his wife joined him – the regime imprisoned her on account of her husband’s “traitorous” behaviour – and they now live in a south Birmingham suburb and their kids are well settled in school. “For me the UK is heaven on Earth. The people here are very friendly and welcoming.” He sees no prospect of going home and “for my children, home is here”.

The UK has given me life and opportunity. I prefer to stay in public service to serve those whose money helped me when I first came here

Nimrod got in trouble because he rejected tribal identification. As a student in Addis Ababa, “I didn’t want to describe myself as where my mum and dad came from. We’re all inter-married. It’s not helpful. I’m an Ethiopian.” The government was dominated by one tribe – the Tigray – and Nimrod was involved in protests and demonstrations against them and their corruption. He was thrown into prison. “I still get nightmares about it,” he says. After four months he was released with no charges but it was too dangerous to stay; so he escaped on foot and by donkey to a neighbouring country. He then had an eight-month wait before people smugglers arranged, at a cost of $3,000, a flight to Heathrow, where he claimed asylum. Eventually he was given leave to remain. While waiting, he attended a college course on computing and English and church volunteers gave him English lessons in their homes. He moved to Birmingham, because at least in the big city he could find others from east Africa –not just Ethiopia but Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea and Kenya too. In the following two decades he has made his life here. He studied on an access course from where he went to university, followed by a master’s degree and then a PhD in public health. As well as working for NHS trusts he is now a senior policy officer within the NHS, commissioning research projects on Covid-related issues. He’s settled here with a wife and two teenage children. “The UK has given me life and opportunity. I prefer to stay in public service to serve those whose money helped me when I first came here.”

Najma has a similarly positive view of the UK. After leaving Iran in 2014 she found her early years here very difficult. It took the help of the charity Refuge to deal with all the paperwork of her Home Office application and then with her CV. After jobs in restaurants and coffee shops, as her English improved she got a job in a law firm in Birmingham. After doing a legal practice course at Wolverhampton University she now works as a solicitor and is looking forward to establishing her own business. “This country gives you good opportunities to follow your dreams.”

Support organisations of all kinds are crucial to refugees whether in terms of befriending, legal advice, language learning or moral support. For Nikhat, a fully-qualified doctor from Karachi who specialised in sexual health and HIV and Aids medicine, the Birmingham-based EU regeneration programme USE-IT was crucial. Her work in Pakistan, especially with prostitutes, attracted the ire of religious fundamentalists, an antagonism worsened by the fact that Nikhat, as a Shia Muslim, had translated into Urdu a book on the history of the Sunni/Shia split within Islam. In separate incidents her house was attacked, her car firebombed and her life threatened. When she moved to a safe house, she was tracked down. When her children were threatened she decided that she had to flee the country. In the month after she left, five Shia doctors were killed in Karachi.

She came to England and applied for refugee status. After a two-year wait, in 2016 she was granted leave to remain for five years. Yet with four teenage children to attend to, there was no straightforward route back into professional life. As well as earning a living through a part-time office job, Nikhat had to prepare for the formidable Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board test (PLAB). This is designed to make sure doctors who qualified abroad have the right knowledge and skills to practice medicine in the UK. There are two parts to the PLAB test. Nikhat passed the first stage but for the second stage she needed to brush up on her practical skills. Here USE-IT, which runs a programme to reintegrate refugees with medical qualifications into the health service, was crucial. It organised a series of work shadowing opportunities at various sexual health centres and hospital clinics. “I was a little bit rusty. I needed to be in the work environment again. The shadowing helped to familiarise me with the system here. The medicine is the same but the system isn’t.” Having passed all her exams and registered with the General Medical Council in February 2020, Nikhat then had to shield during Covid. She’s exasperated at not getting a regular job within the NHS but when we speak she’s busy applying for posts around the country.

I suffered a lot. The Home Office treated me badly but the UK is OK. There is some racism going on but many people are kind and generous. I have made a new life here

Settling and integrating asylum seekers falls to city councils, working together with supportive non-governmental organisations and community bodies. John Cotton is the Birmingham councillor responsible for this work as part of his social inclusion and equalities mandate. He is proud of the city’s record. “We’re a city built on migration, an amazingly diverse city and we want to draw on the talent and potential of newcomers.” Currently there are around 1,600 asylum seekers in Birmingham including 524 who have come to the city via the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme since it started in 2015. The council runs a small unit working closely and collaborating with an extensive network of voluntary groups such as the Red Cross, Freedom from Torture, Community Law Centre, and more. As Cotton puts it, “Together we are proud of the warm welcome we offer to people from all corners of the globe seeking to rebuild their lives here.”

Restore is a small faith-based NGO created under the umbrella of the city’s mainstream churches with the mission to welcome, value and integrate asylum seekers and refugees to the city. They have been operating for over 20 years and one of their main activities is a befriending service, where they match trained and checked volunteers to refugees. “They helped me improve my English and meet new people,” recalls Najma. Jeremy Thompson is the Restore manager. He tells me they currently have 137 active befriending matches, with the majority of refugees coming from the Middle East and East Africa. Thompson says there has been a rise in activity since the Covid-19 pandemic. Befriending is now done remotely but the numbers have increased by a third since the turn of the year. The number of new volunteers is rising too, with 60 participants attending their latest virtual training course, of whom t26 have applied to befriend. “The work is really enriching as we support people in the early stages of their new lives.”

Their work is replicated in the grassroots activity that goes on in churches across the city. At All Saints church in south Birmingham, the vicar, David Warbrick, saw a Sunday congregation of over 100 people pre-Covid. The church’s campaigning group has refugee support as one of its main themes, donating regularly to Restore, while individual members of the congregation provide significant support to asylum seekers who find their way to the church. “We change these individual lives. We support them through the legal processes, buy their bus passes, help them to train. And then we’ve had anonymous donations when there are wilful and pernicious demands from the Home Office for legal fees of £500 or more. We can’t help everybody but it’s a human impulse to help those we can,” says Warbrick.

Helen, one of his parishioners, has been giving language support, advice and assistance to refugees for more than two decades and stays in touch with many of them. She says they are afraid to tell their stories, even when they are contributing in many different ways to the country that has given them refuge; like Shamiso from Zimbabwe who has just qualified as a staff nurse; or Francois who was 19 when he fled civil war in the Congo and now has a job at the huge Amazon plant in Rugeley sorting and dispatching parcels.

I dreamed of going to the UK to study business management. They respect humanity in the UK. The language, you can use it anywhere in the world. And the degrees are better

These are the ordinary, everyday stories of human beings from across the world, who have survived war, violence and imprisonment and set out to make new lives for themselves. Often, as with Maan, these are teenagers who go off on their own. Why? Nas, from Uruzgan in central Afghanistan, left home when he was just 13. It was 2010 and he was being threatened by the Taliban to be used as a suicide bomber, so his mother arranged for him to be smuggled into Iran. From there he made friends with Iranians and over the next seven months, in car boots, by bus and boat, he made his way across Turkey and Europe to Calais. “I had a friend killed there but a smuggler put us in a refrigerated lorry, the three of us. We didn’t like it but we got across.”

After being fostered by a Coventry family, he went to college and took an IT and public services diploma. Once his refugee status was agreed he started working in restaurants as a waiter and chef and is now applying to be a firefighter. It took eight years for his leave to remain status to be confirmed. He needed the help and advice of Migrant Voice to get through the appeal and tribunal processes. “I suffered a lot. The Home Office treated me badly but the UK is OK. There is some racism going on but many people are kind and generous. I have made a new life here.”

It’s a similar story with Musa who is currently in his final year studying law with business at the University of Law in Birmingham and wants to become a barrister.  He’s from Albania. His family had been persecuted under the old communist Hoxha regime. He had joined protests against its corrupt successors and been thrown into adult prison as a teenager. When arrested again, he escaped from the police station and his family said it was best if he left the country. They paid for him to be smuggled across the Adriatic from Durres to Bari and from there it was a two-day journey until he was dropped off in Birmingham. It took three years to get refugee status, during which time he learnt English, studied at Sutton College and was elected student union president.

For Musa, crucial support came from the Children’s Society, another of the voluntary organisations showing the country’s humanitarian face; last year, it worked with 1,500 unaccompanied migrant children. Someone at Musa’s hostel mentioned their youth group and for the past three years he has been involved with them, first on his own case and then on their Guardianship Campaign. “The society has been sponsoring a youth-led campaign on separated children with a petition calling for all youngsters to be allocated a legal guardian, as they have in Scotland. I’m championing this campaign so that other children and young people don’t have to go through the difficulties I went through because I didn’t have a legal guardian.”  

Nas and Musa have settled and are determined to contribute to the life of the city. They are following the path that Abdiweli trod two decades earlier. He has been running a travel business in east Birmingham for the past decade. Smart and affable, you wouldn’t guess that he had arrived in the UK as a 16-year-old, trafficked out of war-torn Mogadishu by an agent paid by his aunt. He arrived 16 hours later in Heathrow as an unaccompanied minor and was taken to Bradford. After moving to Birmingham and being granted indefinite leave to remain he studied for an accountancy diploma and ended up as a line supervisor for BMW in Oxford. But his main ambition was to run his own business, so in 2010 he set up a travel agency. He lost £8,000 in his first year – and his business partner too – but the business survived and grew. Before the pandemic it had a turnover of £1m a year and employed four staff members.

All these stories speak of the formidable determination of refugees to make a new start for themselves once they reach the UK. The right to claim asylum when fleeing persecution and war is a distinct component of migration policy, with rules set out in the UN Geneva Convention of 1951. Yet the tabloid press’ demonisation of refugees has been echoed by senior ministers. Home secretary Priti Patel’s speech to the Conservative Party conference denounced “lefty lawyers” who are preventing a reform of Britain’s “broken asylum system”. The government has stated that it wants to break from the “hostile environment” policy that the Home Office pursued during the Windrush scandal. 

If this is genuine then on refugee policy there are three, short-term steps it could quickly take. Firstly, it could ensure that there are clear, legal channels through which asylum seekers can apply. Secondly, it could deal with cases fairly, ensuring that applicants have access to proper legal support when they make their case. Special action is needed for unaccompanied youngsters so that they have legal guardians as proposed by the Children’s Society campaign. Thirdly, it should allow asylum seekers to work while waiting for their claim to be processed, as they can in Sweden. In the long run, generous aid to bring peace and conditions of prosperity to the countries from where refugees now flee will prove essential. For Europe that means a new relationship with Africa. For the UK, it means a commitment to keep the aid and development budget at 0.7 per cent of UK GDP and to focus it on the educational and skills needs of these countries. These measures won’t bring an end to refugee trauma but it’s a humanitarian test for the UK and the rest of Europe.

The refugees in this story want to contribute to the country and the city they’ve arrived in. Their grit, doggedness and drive in the face of danger is unmistakeable. They know from their lived experiences, the importance of making the most of what you can in life. That’s why they put in the effort to become nurses, doctors, firefighters, lawyers, dispatchers, accountants. As Musa says, “it doesn’t matter where you come from, it’s what you want to be that matters”. Can UK ministers, the press and the wider public be open to that energy and spirit?

Jon Bloomfield is an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham and author of ‘Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham’