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Emma Thompsonis getting candid about her son Tindy Agaba’s experiences as a refugee, including the “resilience” that comes from daily hardships.
In an essay forThe Times of London, Thompson said her son “has flourished and grown in a million different ways” since beginning his life in Britain — but that growth didn’t come without a number of “shocking incidents” along the way.
Thompson, 62, met Agaba, now 34, in 2003 at a Christmas charity event she created in partnership wit theRefugee Council. The event was put together to help welcome those arriving in Britain because “hospitality is the most basic thing that one human can offer to another.”
Agaba was 16 at the time and spoke little English, so he and Thompson communicated through “a combination of sign language, laughing, [and] smiling.” As her son “slowly” learned English, he shared his stories of having been kidnapped and forced to be a child soldier.
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In this way, she believes the Refugee Council — which she penned the essay to urge people to support — is “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.”
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Getting more personal, she wrote, “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.”
Despite the mistreatment he faced, Thompson said Agaba “received some fantastically open-hearted and open-minded support” from those at the Refugee Council, the local authority and educators at the Sixth Form College in Islington and Exeter University.
She reflected, “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.”
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Today, she wrote, Agaba has cultivated “wonderful friendships” and has an “extraordinary” wife and “a fascinating, very challenging job” within England’s Criminal Investigation Department.
Refugees, she wrote, “can become not only hugely useful members of society but peculiarly gifted ones,” due to their experiences. “They have an unusual resilience and they see this place, this country, in a very original way,” she added.
“And they take nothing for granted unlike, let’s face it, a lot of us who haven’t come here under those circumstances,” she added. “So what they have to offer as citizens of this country is often profoundly valuable.”
source: people.com
