Last year my wife and I decided to share our house with Ukrainian refugees.
Since our children have now left home we decided we had room and we felt we should help those whom an unhinged Putin had unjustly attacked.
After a couple of false starts, not everyone wanted to move to Devon and be isolated from their countrymen, we ended up sponsoring a married couple with a young girl. The process was not straightforward. I spent some five hours one evening filling out application forms for them which was a bit of a struggle given their English was quite poor and my Ukrainian non-existent.
There were also some strange questions, especially for a one-year-old girl, such as previous addresses etc.
It took a few weeks and many interactions with the powers that be for their visas to be issued and I got my local MP, Ben Bradshaw, involved because two of the visas were relatively quick but issuing the third dragged on. Eventually, they booked their flights from Poland, after travelling by road and rail from their home town, and my wife met them at Bristol airport.
We couldn't have asked for better guests. They were clean and constantly tidied up, helped feed our dogs and tried to be as inconspicuous as possible (except for using the kitchen). Since they moved out I've had to remember how to unload the dishwasher :)
They both found work quite quickly and, after a year with us, decided to rent a house of their own in Exeter which they have now been in for a few months. I have quite a few stories to tell about the meeting of two different cultures and these will appear in future posts.
So what were the pros and cons?
On the plus side:
- We felt we had done something worthwhile
- We could go away overnight and have someone trustworthy mind the house and feed the dogs
- I learned a bit of Ukrainian and quite a bit more about their culture
- They kept the house tidy
- I still get the odd free manicure (she has her own nail treatment business in central Exeter)
Negatives:
- Utility bills rose steeply - but we had a contribution from the council that mainly covered this
- They tended to monopolise the kitchen as they cooked a lot more than we do
- Their young daughter could be noisy but that was good practice for when our granddaughter appeared last November :)
I will be expanding on some of those topics, including what I discovered about soup, in future posts but now to the focus of this post - red tape. Last October the family wanted to invite her parents over for a couple of weeks at Christmas. This involved applying for a travel visa and that was the problem. Under the Homes for Ukraine scheme that they had used their passports were scanned and verified using an app on their smartphones. There was no need to leave their home until they needed to travel. It was a bit of a faff, especially with the language barrier, but it all got done eventually.
With a travel visa, this wasn't possible. Due to old legislation, each traveller had to present themselves to the visa processing centre and have their documents inspected manually. This would have meant a 300-mile journey to Kyiv, through a war-torn country, for two people not in the first flush of youth. They weren't prepared to risk this and all looked hopeless until someone suggested they also apply to the Homes for Ukraine scheme. This went through without a hitch!
So they came over in December and spent an enjoyable couple of weeks with their daughter and her husband. They could legally have stayed but returned to Ukraine as planned.
I thought this country was trying to discourage immigration but due to being slow to take up new technology, in this case a document scanning app, they are encouraging people to come and stay even when they don't want to.
