This is a piece I co-wrote with Andy Brims. Andy is part of the team at Croydon Vineyard Church and has directed Vineyard English School since 2019. VES provides free conversational english classes in Croydon, and has welcomed hundreds of asylum seekers and refugees since its inception in 2015.
Under the auspices of Vineyard English School we recently hosted a roundtable on ‘Welcoming Well‘ which surfaced the idea of a Framework for Feeling At Home which you might want to look at in conjunction with this piece for practical ideas of how you and your community might respond to the needs of refugees and asylum seekers in your midst.
You may also find it helpful to engage with the materials I noted down during the Sanctuary Foundation’s conference on Migration in Christian Perspective.
The human face of asylum anxiety
In the nondescript hotel lobby that doubles as a makeshift classroom each Wednesday, Tariq1, a new student lingered after our English class. Anxiety lined his face as he pulled us aside, his words tumbling out in heavily accented English. “Am I going to be sent to Rwanda?” he asked with fear in his voice, “I’ve got a domestic worker visa…my wife is pregnant”. His raw vulnerability highlighted to us the grim reality facing those navigating the asylum process in the UK.
A couple of weeks previously Farhan2 and Ayesha3 had met us in a similar state of panic. For months these educated professionals and their eldest children had been regularly attending our sessions while their two youngest settled into local schools. Yet now the Home Office had told them they were to be relocated, immediately, to somewhere in the country they didn’t know, as though they were a problem to be solved, not people to respect.
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