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Charity appeal: Helping refugees is about love, actually

For a boy who escaped the genocide in Rwanda, the long journey to safety ended in an unlikely place: a Christmas party for the Refugee Council hosted by the actress Emma Thompson

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Emma Thompson with her husband, Greg Wise, their daughter, Gaia, and Tindy, the Rwandan orphan they adopted
ANDREW COWIE/GETTY IMAGES
Kaya Burgess

Thursday December 16 2021, 12.01am, The Times
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At the turn of the millennium, Tindy Agaba was 13, had lost his father to Aids and the rest of his family during the Rwandan genocide, and had been kidnapped by a militia group and forced to become a child soldier.

Two decades later the young man who was once “brimming with trauma” has flourished. He is working for the police in the UK and is happily married to an astrophysics student, said Dame Emma Thompson, his adoptive mother.

The actress first met Tindy, now 34, as a teenager at a Christmas party she hosted for the Refugee Council charity in 2003, discovering that they were “alike in so many ways”. The encounter would change their lives.

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“I was kidnapped by Interahamwe [a militia group] at 13 and stayed with them for a year,” Agaba said in 2015. “At 14 I was then imprisoned.”

He said he was bailed out with plans “to evacuate me to a place I thought would be somewhere like Tanzania”, but he found himself in Britain.

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Before receiving support from the Refugee Council he “spent five nights sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square after I fell through the immigration net”, he said.

Agaba spoke no English when he was invited to the London home of Thompson, 62, and her husband, the actor Greg Wise, 55. Thompson and Wise informally adopted him in 2004 and he became part of the family alongside their daughter, Gaia, who was born in 1999.

With support from family, friends and teachers, and from the Refugee Council charity, which is supported by this year’s Times and Sunday Times Christmas Appeal, Tindy has flourished and grown, Thompson said.

Agaba was reported last year to have secured a job with the Metropolitan Police. Wise said the role would involve him “working with victims of trafficking and radicalisation”.



Thompson praised the Refugee Council as a “wonderfully practical organisation”. The charity, with its Scottish and Welsh counterparts, helps 20,000 refugees a year to find food, clothing and housing, access therapy and find employment. All donations will be doubled, up to £275,000, by anonymous donors.

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Emma Thompson stands outside Buckingham Palace, London, with her husband Greg Wise and their children Tindy Agaba and Gaia Wise, after being made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2018
JONATHAN BRADY/AP
Emma Thompson: We held a party for new arrivals ... and met our son
Eighteen years ago I suggested to the Refugee Council that we have a Christmas party every year which I could host.

It would be a festive evening, not “Christmas” as such, but a party with that festive feeling for those who had just arrived, often with children, and with very few resources. I thought of it not as a political act, but as an act of hospitality.

When a person has been “othered”, politicised, that is, when their status and motives have been doubted in the press and by voices of government, their humanity is often reduced in other people’s eyes. And they all too easily become seen as a burden at best and at worst as grasping interlopers.

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But hospitality is the most basic thing that one human can offer to another. It’s in our DNA and those parties we gave were wonderful. We always had a multilingual Santa and served beautiful vegetarian food. I think it gave refugee families a moment of respite, a moment to feel honoured and valued in a space that was safe and in which their children could be children and enjoy themselves.

It was at one of these parties I was fortunate enough to meet the boy who would become our son.

He was 16. Wordless, really. He didn’t speak English and he had been kidnapped, forced into child soldiery. He’d lost his family and he was brimming with trauma. He spent his first days sleeping rough in the streets around Trafalgar Square.

Yet we had a communication that to this day I can only explain by saying that humans can be surprisingly similar when we allow ourselves to come into contact with the unknown other person. We were, and are, alike in so many ways it never ceases to astonish me.

The first meetings when he came to our house for meals were all conducted in a combination of sign language, laughing, smiling — a sort of continuous game to work out what was being said, to whom. It was a slow process of relaxation and also of him learning English. Witnessing Tindy growing up has been a continual lesson in the day-to-day challenges that refugees and asylum seekers face — from language and not being able to express yourself or to say what you need, which is a very vulnerable position to be in, to finding the right kind of schooling, to facing everyday racism.

That’s why the Refugee Council always seemed to me to be a wonderfully practical organisation because it combined a raft of services (like a sort of Citizens Advice Bureau) for the people who might not have any access to the resources they needed and also who required a lot of different kinds of support, arriving as they so often did with nothing but the clothes on their back.

When Tindy was at university there were some shocking incidents of students laughing at his accent and childish racism born out of ignorance and racist taunts in the street. Common enough, sadly.

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But he also received some fantastically open-hearted and open-minded support. The combination of that help - from the Refugee Council, from the local authority, from the wonderful teachers at his sixth form college in Islington and later at Exeter university - was very much part of his recovery.

It all formed a part of the package that anyone who’s in a situation like that needs if they’re to survive and to develop. So Tindy has flourished and grown in a million different ways and has wonderful friendships, a fascinating, very challenging job at the CID and an extraordinary partner in his wife, who’s currently studying astrophysics.

It’s always been clear that with the right level of, and kind of, encouragement, so many refugees can become not only hugely useful members of society but peculiarly gifted ones, because of what they have been through. They have an unusual resilience and they see this place, this country, in a very original way.

And they take nothing for granted unlike, let’s face it, a lot of us who haven’t come here under those circumstances. So what they have to offer as citizens of this country is often profoundly valuable.

Those who have had to flee are in a unique position to tell us stories that we might one day have to face ourselves in real life. Given the habit of human beings to repeat mistakes, particularly the cruellest ones, it not only behoves us but it benefits us to know what it is to suffer exile, danger, the unknown, to make the best of ourselves in difficult circumstances, to cross many cultural barriers and to find friendship and family in an unknown place. This is an essential human experience.

No family chooses to exile themselves from all that is familiar without desperate cause. And the more humane our response, the quicker people can adapt. And the quicker they can make a decent life for themselves. They want to contribute and the more we can help them do that, the more powerful their presence becomes.

On a personal level it is important to say that Tindy has enriched the lives of me, my family, our friends, more than it’s possible to express in this short piece. Our outlook is broader for his presence, our resilience made stronger by his example, our understanding of ourselves and each other deepened and our astonishment at what a human being can overcome ever-growing.

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And on a more spiritual note, I’ll quote the human rights activist, Helen Bamber to describe the work of the Refugee Council – ‘It is about finding our reward through the eyes of those to whom we owe nothing. It is about love’.

• More than £1 million has been raised by The Times and Sunday Times Christmas Appeal so far. Readers have pledged £188,000 to the Refugee Council, £109,000 to Outward Bound and £95,000 to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT). With extra cash from private donors and every pound of reader donations doubled by philanthropists, the totals so far are £381,000 for the Refugee Council, £425,000 for Outward Bound and £194,000 for the WWT.

To donate to The Times and Sunday Times Christmas Appeal visit the times.co.uk/christmasappeal or call 0151 284 2336.



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We have you as a Trans Mod.

 

and you from them* , so your point being is....






* Over 100 years difference but you get the point

 

Insult your patrons and this is what happens.
Thankfully the UK SA are not that dumb

 

The point is you are a brain dead bullshit generator?

 

That's what everyone wants this Christmas a 13 year old Rwandan Aids orphan to dress up in a monkey suit.

 

Cheer up old man. Soon be Christmas. Cliffy and all that

 

Christmas is a difficult time for recovering alcoholics, temptation everywhere.

 

Quite the opposite old chap. Waking up on Christmas morning with a clear head, knowing where I am and what I did last night, is a blessing that never gets old.

On the other hand, Christmas is very much a festival for pooves and *****s