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Meet the British families who have opened their homes to asylum seekers
(September 21, 2015)Meet the British families who have opened their homes to asylum seekers
source: The Guardian
published: 7 September 2015
For the past 10 years, the Boaz Trust in Manchester has tried to find accommodation for destitute asylum seekers. Until very recently, the Christian charity often struggled to find enough households willing to take these most vulnerable of strangers into their homes.
All that changed last week with the harrowing photo of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose tiny body became the symbol of the biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe for decades when it washed up on a beach in Turkey.
“We’ve never had so many inquiries,” says Boaz’s chief executive, Ros Holland. “We had someone from Gloucester call up the other day saying: ‘I know I’m not in Manchester, but I’ve got a spare room. How can I help?’ Someone else phoned up from Edinburgh. It’s been quite overwhelming.”