Just refugees

I took this one photo today as I left the room the art gallery kindly lets us use for our community sponsorship meetings. The figures do not represent refugees as far as I am aware.
A couple of Home Office officials were making their routine visit to check how the latest family were getting along following their arrival three weeks ago, and to hear our group's feedback. They were particularly interested in how our first experience of settling a refugee family had informed the second.
We were able to report that the new family are doing  very well, supported by our first family, as well as members of our group who have facilitated the initial requirements: registering at the health centre and the job centre, getting a bank account, finding the way to the supermarket and  catching a bus to the nearest mosque. The eldest child is in school and the parents have started English lessons. Mum already speaks and reads some English and aims to reach a standard high enough to become an Arabic interpreter.  Dad wants to find work in his trade as a stonemason; he's also keen to play football and the two local teams are competing for him to join.
We all agreed that this second experience of community sponsored resettlement  has been smoother and simpler, partly because the family have proved to be so adaptable but also because we know the ropes. The success of the first arrivals has meant that the community as a whole is more relaxed about the idea too - the novelty has worn off. 

It also has to be said that our initial session at the job centre, a long and arduous bureaucratic process involving the whole family, was eased by gold standard treatment: a room set aside complete with refreshments and toys for the children, an excellent interpreter all the way from Bristol, and 2 DWP officers who could not have been more helpful and patient. It was a model of how these procedures could and should be done.

The folk singer and sociologist Roy Bailey died very recently. To be honest, I had forgotten all about him although he was a regular on the folk/protest song scene in the 70s and 80s with a strong left political agenda. Listening to a radio obituary last week I was very struck by his version of Woody Guthrie's song Deportee* (which refers to a 1948 plane crash in California in which the passengers, mostly illegal migrant fruit pickers being flown back to Mexico, died anonymously.) Roy Bailey was handed new words to the song at a folk festival in 2017 and he sang it right away without rehearsal. I've always found the original song unbearably poignant and this new version no less so. Plus ça change in 70 years.

* Listen to it sung by his son Arlo here.