‘I’m still trying to get that smoke smell out of the house,’ she says a day after she accompanied her Ukrainian guests to the town hall. She does not want to be in the newspaper with her last name, because she received unpleasant reactions to her story on Facebook. ‘People write: you should have made better agreements. I have done that. Only those agreements were not fulfilled.’
Cindy and her family are not the only ones who have already said goodbye to their Ukrainian guests. Several security regions signaled this week that it is increasingly common for Ukrainian refugees who have found shelter in people’s homes to leave their host families again.
stress
According to the Brabant-Zuidoost Security Region, the ‘honeymoon weeks’ are now clearly over. “We see that more and more private families are coming to deliver their refugees to our registration location in Eindhoven,” says a spokesperson. In Brabant, they find this a worrying development. ‘These refugees have already gone through a very difficult road. If they move again, you will actually add a source of stress.’
Sometimes a lack of privacy is the reason that the care in people’s homes is missed. Cultural differences or a language barrier also lead to frustrations. “It doesn’t go wrong because people are upset, but simply because sharing a holiday apartment with your best friends for two weeks is already a task,” Danielle Braun, former director of an asylum seekers center, previously wrote in an opinion piece. ‘Few people realize that after a few days people in need are not grateful and not pleasant.’
That is why it is recommended from all sides for host families to register with an intermediary organization for a ‘careful introduction’. But for some Dutch people that all takes far too long. ‘I am also not waiting for such a social worker who comes to assess whether I am satisfactory,’ says Cindy from Tiel. That is why she contacted someone on Facebook who was going to pick up a bus of Ukrainians in Poland.
Messy
That is messy. First Cindy is asked if she has room for one or two women, later that is not done. When the bus is a few hours’ drive from Maastricht, the agreed transfer location, the request comes to offer accommodation to a couple.
She actually prefers female guests, but go ahead, Cindy thinks. She trains regularly to South Limburg. ‘There the man turned out to be a Syrian with a Ukrainian passport. Nothing had been said about this beforehand, otherwise I would not have agreed to it. A Muslim doesn’t really fit in with our family. But if the people are in front of you, you don’t show them the door.’
The couple, 52 and 47, tell Cindy that they are from Mariupol and have left behind a 25-year-old son. They take up residence in Tiel in a room on the first floor. ‘Since we are not smokers, I kindly asked them not to smoke indoors. Still, the man lit up butts in their room.’ Cindy also gets the impression that he pees in the sink in the upstairs bathroom at night, instead of on the downstairs toilet.
Goodbye
When they start talking on the street with a Georgian resident of Tiel, she tells Cindy that other Ukrainians are in a shelter with two rooms to themselves. The same evening Cindy gets a text from the Georgian woman, who has offered to interpret. ‘She wrote to me that my guests had told her they wanted to leave. Then I thought: you want to leave, then I also want to get rid of you now.’
On Monday, she accompanied the couple to city hall after a three-day sleepover. In the evening I texted them again to ask where they had ended up. They were in Nijmegen at the time, in a sports hall with hundreds of beds.’