From single mothers to a prime minister, Europeans are opening their homes for refugees who need housing.
Because he is serving in the capital, Helsinki, Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipilä seldom visits his home 370 miles away, so he has offered his house in Kempele to shelter refugees.
“I hope this becomes some kind of people’s movement that will inspire many to shoulder part of the burden in this refugee housing crisis” Sipilä told Finnish broadcaster YLE. “What we need now is a show of compassion.”
A Christian charity in the UK, the Boaz Trust, reports it can’t keep up with the offers from people who are volunteering to share an empty room with the refugees. The Manchester-based group has been fielding calls from Gloucester to Edinburgh.
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“It’s been quite overwhelming,” chief Executive Ros Holland told the Guardian.
Yoshiko Stokoe and her boyfriend Jack Palmer have hosted more than 20 refugees in their home in Leeds at different times over the last two-and-a-half years. They say it costs them no more than $25 a week.
Founded in Germany in 2014, Refugees Welcome was introduced in Austria this year, and today, dozens of asylum seekers and refugees have been placed in flatshares across that country.
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“I wonder why it hasn’t been done before,” Simone Fidler, who hosts a Nigerian refugee in Vienna told Al Jazeera News. “It just makes sense. People are having to sleep in tents while there are so many rooms free.”
(READ more at the Guardian) — Photos by Haeferl, Ppntori, CC
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