“I’m driving to the border now and going to get a Ukrainian family!” It is heartwarming that so many people want to support these refugees and provide a roof over their heads. Many hundreds of applications have already been received from various buger initiatives. But many don’t know what he’s getting into. My plea: a warm heart and a cool head.
At Takecarebnb we have been matching refugees and Dutch host families for six years now. We do this with Syrians and Yemenis who have fled the civil war, Turks who are persecuted by President Erdogan’s regime and gays and lesbians who have no life in Russia or Uganda. Last year the Afghans joined and now the people from Ukraine. We match them with a Dutch family for a stay of three months. This lodging offers security, helps to build a social and economic network and to learn the Dutch language. Friendships are formed that last after the stay.
Responsibility
We know very well what it means to welcome a refugee into your home. It’s a good deed, it’s educational. I experienced it myself with a guest from Yemen. But it also has a big impact. And it comes with a lot of responsibility. At least if you want to avoid accidents.
Because imagine that after a week you think it’s enough, taking care of that Ukrainian mother and her two children, or after two or three weeks, what do you do then? After all, you don’t know in advance how long the war will last and when someone can travel back. It is therefore important to think very carefully and to associate a cool head with the warm heart.
There is a lot to consider when linking refugees to host families. And even more when children are involved. There are emotional factors: sadness, anger, maybe nightmares, trauma. There are practical aspects: who takes a shower first and for how long and at what time the lights go out. “She’s on her phone all day.” If a child becomes ill, a visit to a doctor or perhaps a hospital follows. If it takes longer, boredom and perhaps minor irritation will follow. Nothing human is alien to us.
That is why the matching process at Takecarebnb is phased: getting acquainted, thinking, test staying, thinking again, and then staying overnight. That may now take too much time, we must and want to act quickly.
cool head
Hence that cool head. Consider taking a little while and applying to a professional organization. Then follows a careful introduction and expectations are aligned. And that patience is possible, because as yet there are not yet thousands of refugees in our country and reception locations are being set up in many municipalities.
If you don’t want to wait for that and deliberately want to act now by going to a train station or border crossing, keep in mind at least two things. First things first: think a few steps ahead when it comes to the length of your stay. Do it together with your network and make sure to backup neighbors, friends or family so you can alternate. In addition: make very clear agreements, also (no: correct!) on sensitive subjects (money, privacy, the possible duration of the stay), name what will happen and invite your guest to do the same.
Does this sound harsh? Perhaps even difficult to understand from someone who works for an organization that wants to house refugees? I hope not. But our experience is that reflection time is important. Rather think two days longer than determine after two days that the stay has to be cut short. You don’t deserve that as a host family, and certainly not as a guest.
Robert Hall is director of Takecarebnb.
Readers about aid to refugees
Revenue model
I do some shopping at Albert Heijn. And once again, the big grutter has found a revenue model in other people’s misery. At the exit there are shopping carts stating that what goes in there is for Ukraine. Earlier I wrote a letter to Albert Heijn that during the Christmas period the food banks are not intended to provide extra profit for a company that is already running very well.
My idea at the time was to offer customers a kind of vouchers for sale, for which AH then makes the food available to distressed authorities and in this case to refugees at a purchase price. It seems to me that send another letter to AH with the same idea will again generate no action. Incidentally, it is not only AH that does this.
Josephine de BruijnOudenbosch
The compassion and solidarity of the Dutch with refugee Ukrainians is heartwarming. All donations and actions are proof that the Dutch do indeed feel responsible for the well-being of others. This positive feeling is immediately put into perspective, especially by Leo Lucassen, who ad nauseam keeps telling the same story about our xenophobic and Islamophobic climate (Opinie en Debat, 2 March).
We would only feel related to people who are similar in way of life and with whom we can identify. To begin with, this is a socio-biological law: thanks to conformism to one’s own group, man has been able to survive. We would wrongly portray the Muslim and colored migrant as a major cultural threat. That migration science partly consists of wishful thinking and fantasy has been proven more often. Lucassen is blind to CBS figures, in which crime, for example, scores six times higher among Moroccans than among natives. It is not for nothing that we speak of the ruthless ‘Mocromafia’.
The tolerance for non-Western immigrants has very slowly changed in a negative sense in recent decades because we have passed on the consequences of migration to the poorer neighbourhoods, we are confronted with a fundamentally different image of women, the non-Western immigrant makes disproportionate use of financial support, terrorism carried out in the name of Allah, and the loss of cohesion in multi-ethnic neighborhoods.
Wilbert van RijenHolthees
In the article ‘Because refugees who look like us are real refugees’ (O&D, March 2), four experts explain why Ukrainian refugees can count on a warmer welcome than refugees from Syria or Eritrea, for example. Because they are also Europeans? Because the war suddenly breaks out? Because the conflict concerns us as members of the EU?
That’s probably part of the explanation. However, all experts emphasize that what matters most is whether the refugees in question resemble us. For example, whether they know a religion or customs known to us. And so Nanda Oudejans has little hope that we will show more solidarity with refugees from other continents in the future. Perhaps we should draw this conclusion more broadly: how much hope is there that in the future we will show more solidarity with our compatriots who are not like us?
Gijs WintersVoorburg