Five years ago, when my daughters were leaving for university and their rooms were going to be empty for a stretch, I signed up with Refugees at Home to be a host. A woman from the organisation came round to check me out, mostly to make sure that everybody in the household was in the loop. She said there had been a few instances of a wife failing to tell her husband that she had invited the huddled masses to stay, and him looking up from his newspaper at breakfast to find them staring at him over the marmalade. Then I got to meet my prospective guest over a cup of tea in Caffè Nero: given that I was going to live with him for a few months, I wanted to make sure that I liked the man. (I had said I’d rather have a woman, but the great majority of refugees at the time were men.)
I did, and the next day Mohammedain, a 28-year-old from Darfur in Sudan, turned up with a rucksack. He was no trouble, being pleasant, tidy and very partial to baked beans. I worried a bit about his diet, and bought him a halal chicken, which he ate with rice and made last for a week. Then he asked for more baked beans. His only complaint about the meals I provided was that we mostly ate them à deux. At home, he said, 20 or more family members would turn up for dinner.
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Mohammedain told me often how grateful he was. By the time he left, I was rather grateful to him too.
He made me feel lucky. Over several dinners, he told me his story. He had been driven from his home by civil war, evaded militias in Libya, crossed the Mediterranean on an inflatable boat with 170 others, dodged guards on trains, got stuck in a camp in Calais (where he discovered baked beans) and smuggled himself into Britain in the back of a lorry. He told me all of this in a very matter-of-fact way, as though it was quite normal. Sometimes normality feels a little dull, but compared with Mohammedain’s version of it, mine seemed just fine.
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He also made me feel proud of my country, for he would not hear a word against Britain. The streets were lit, the houses had running water and nobody shot at him. Didn’t he, I asked, have any complaints about the application process, which had taken six months and involved officials grilling him about details of his tribe, to make sure he was who he said he was? Not at all: he was very impressed by a bureaucratic process that didn’t involve paying bribes. Journalists, whose job in part is to point to holes in the system, tend to grumble a lot. Mohammedain kept my curmudgeonly side in check.
He cheered me up too, for he was an optimist. Having got as far as he had, he knew he was going much further. His ambition was to be an “international businessman”. I don’t think either of us knew what that meant, but he was certain it was going to be good. In a country that feels as though it is past its peak, in which most young people think they’re going to be worse off than their parents, his buoyancy was refreshing.
He stayed for a couple of months and was then given a place in a hostel. We had a fond, slightly awkward farewell — I couldn’t work out whether to hug him or not — after which I sent him a couple of WhatsApp messages. My motives in wanting to stay in touch were, I think, a little suspect — part curiosity and concern, part wanting the feeling that I had helped him on his way to a better life. He didn’t respond, though, so I was deprived of that little buzz, but I didn’t hold it against him. After all, he had an international business to get off the ground.
Watching the horrors in Ukraine, I’ve just filled in Refugees at Home’s form to become a host again. I hope my next experience is as good as the last one.
refugeesathome.org
