On a dark December afternoon, Frieda Schicker and Robel, the Eritrean refugee she has been hosting for the past two months, are squabbling about who should be relaxing on the sofa and who should be making cups of tea.
“He thinks I’m too old to make tea, and he doesn’t like being served,” Frieda says as Robel tells her: “I’ll do it. Let me do it.” She insists on boiling the kettle herself, making him sit down and rest after a tiring day studying construction at a local college.
It has been years since Robel lived in a family home and he is slowly reacclimatising. “I’m taking a breath, trying to prepare myself for what comes next,” he says, stroking Frieda’s cat. “I feel peaceful here.”
“Try not to mumble when you’re talking,” Frieda says, kindly chiding him, thinking about how he will come across when he starts being interviewed for jobs.
A room in this warm, welcoming home represents a potentially life-changing piece of good fortune for Robel, who in early October was sleeping rough in a north London park. He hadn’t managed to source a tent or a sleeping bag and was wearing several layers of clothes to keep warm. Most passersby ignored him or quickly averted their eyes, but one woman stopped to ask if he needed help.
He explained that he had recently been granted refugee status, after two years spent waiting for a Home Office decision. He had been swiftly issued with an eviction letter from the Home Office accommodation where he had been housed for 24 months, but with no job and no money for a deposit to rent somewhere he found he had nowhere to go but the local park. Council staff were meant to offer help but they never returned his calls and seemed overwhelmed.
The woman told him to contact Refugees at Home, one of three charities the Guardian and Observer are supporting this year for our refugee and asylum seeker charity appeal, along with British Refugee Councils and Naccom (the No Accommodation Network). Within days he was linked up with Frieda and invited to move into one of her grownup children’s long-abandoned bedrooms.
The charity, which matches homeless refugees with hosts, is under unprecedented pressure after a Home Office policy change in August in effect dramatically reduced the time asylum seekers are given to find new homes once granted refugee status. Thousands were made homeless and destitute in recent months as a result. (The policy was quietly reversed in late December.)
“I don’t have the words to describe. There’s a sense of panic everywhere,” says Carly Whyborn, the charity’s interim executive director, at the charity’s Brixton headquarters. “Every day we have desperate people on the phone.” In November 2022 the charity placed 78 non-Ukrainian refugees with hosts (Ukrainians are housed under a different scheme); this November it placed almost four times as many.
On the day I visit, there are 53 new referrals who need homes, most of them from Sudan, Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan, and staff are checking references, discussing which hosts might best suit which refugees. Computer files indicate that the charity has 698 approved hosts, but not all of them are available immediately and many are in parts of the country where there is little demand. “We’d give our back teeth for new hosts in Brighton, Hastings, Manchester, South Yorkshire,” Whybourn says.
“We spend time getting it right, it’s not just putting two random people together,” she adds. “We ask what they love, what they don’t love. We have to make sure that the match works.” The charity doesn’t ask about the refugee’s journey to the UK or the grounds for their asylum application. “We’re not the Home Office.”
After Robel got in touch with the charity, Whybourn asked him to send in two references. One came from a member of staff at the Home Office hotel who described how much Robel had helped younger asylum seekers during his time there. “It was one of the most glowing references you could get,” she says. Asked to describe his hobbies, Robel wrote: “I enjoy watching football, and films in my spare time, I’m eager to meet new people and I’m very friendly.”
Whyborn knew Frieda and her husband had already successfully hosted eight refugees over the past three years, and was hopeful they would welcome another. “They have a really good understanding of what refugees need. Frieda said yes straight away.”
In Robel’s case, what he needed most of all was to sleep, to recover from the recent ordeal of living in a park, and from a deeper exhaustion caused by years spent searching for sanctuary. Once he had recuperated, he signed up to two college courses, and he began offering to cook Eritrean meals for Frieda and her husband (they appreciated the gesture, but admit being startled by the intensity of the spices).
Frieda’s father was a refugee who fled Austria in 1938, and this helped prompt her to volunteer with the charity. “This country has always had people coming from elsewhere; they’re usually the more dynamic people. You need a lot of courage and initiative to get this far,” she says. “I feel like I’m helping people who are going to contribute an enormous amount.”
The arrangement was due to last two months but has been extended to allow Robel a bit more time to find work and somewhere permanent to live. He is hesitant about his future, saying he feels too old to have real dreams or ambitions and just wants to find someone who will employ him. Having a home and, crucially, an address while he makes that happen is crucial.
“Frieda understands how it is for us,” Robel says. “I felt good as soon as I arrived.”
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