Members of the community

Some blippers may remember my many reports upon the progress of our community sponsorship of a Syrian family, who  in 2017 arrived straight from a refugee camp in Lebanon to settle in our small Welsh town on the edge of the Irish sea. (See here or click the tag community sponsorship for more.)

Now 7 years on they are indeed settled. The two eldest girls are glamorous teenagers, the lively little boy is a strapping adolescent with an incipient moustache, the newborn is still the family pet, still dressed in pink - but bigger. Father works in a fast food outlet, mother volunteers in a charity shop. It was lovely to see them, if briefly, when a visiting researcher wanted to interview some of the families who had been sponsored back then with a view to advocating a new scheme that would offer the same opportunity to a wider range of refugees. (The experience of hosting Ukrainians may have made people more receptive to  the idea; likewise, recent media portrayal of Nicholas Winton's campaign to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis.)

The second Syrian family we sponsored moved to a larger town in South Wales after they had been here about a year and they seem to be running  a restaurant there now.