Refugees

My mother left Germany in the mid 1930's & came to England on her way to Australia. She never got there because she met & married my father. She would never talk about it & sadly I didn't pursue my many questions. She had a difficult time here during & after the war & I remember being bullied as a child because of her nationality & my Christian name being German.

Now I'm helping a TEFL teacher teach Ukranian refugees learn English. We are dealing with highly specialised complex needs, they are refugees from a war zone & have experiences we can only try to imagine. Some need one to one specialist teaching & counselling. We don't have the resources to  give them that. The level of English varies hugely from children & adults who can hold a reasonably complex conversation, to those who find concentration & understanding really difficult.

It would be helpful to do a baseline assessment on all the attendees - Speaking, Listening, Reading & Writing. But that would take time & enough volunteers. We are in danger of losing the bright ones if they are bored with the level & repetition of simple vocabulary, or the slower ones if what we do is too difficult. We also need individual information about them, age, education etc. But we never know who will arrive & who won't.

In conversation with quite fluent children it became obvious that the educational culture in Ukraine is very different to the UK. The expectation of the children is high, they have a lot of homework, are expected to work hard during the school week & even weekend activities seem to be very controlled. That may be because the children I had came from middle class families.

The war in Ukraine & general refugee situation looks as if it is going to be long term. We need to organise contact with other people / groups who are running TEFL lessons. The work volunteers do is wonderful, but it needs to move to another level. Group organisers need to get together to share good practice & lobby for financial & practical support. The woman running the group I work with pays for a huge amount of material out of her own pocket. The government, typically, is just taking advantage of voluntary groups, churches & individuals. 

I also think that TEFL lessons need to be more inclusive, there are thousands of adult & children refugees. The vast majority of people who seek asylum in the UK have fled countries ravaged by war and human rights abuses. In 2015, the largest number of asylum applications to the UK came from nationals of Eritrea (3,695), Iran (3,242), Sudan (2,912) and Syria (2,539). But we haven't mobilised help for them in the way we have for Ukraine. According to the UNHCR, by mid-2015 there were 117,234 refugees, 37,829 pending asylum cases and 16 stateless persons in the UK. That’s less than one quarter of a percent of the UK’s total population (around 0.24%). 86% of the world’s refugees are hosted by developing countries. In June 2016, there were around 4.9 million Syrian refugees worldwide. Around 3.6 million of these refugees were being hosted by just two countries – Turkey and Lebanon.

https://mrsn.org.uk/facts-about-refugees/

We need to better empathise with refugees instead of being protectionist about our borders. Offloading  them to Rwanda isn't a solution to the criminal, people trafficking, gangs. Where is our humanity in that?