General Chat

I am in total agreement

I think we all should join you in that Allan

yesterday we received our Gas bill: approximately $200.00 for 91 days supply.

Did the usual moaning and groaning: not much we can cut back on as we only use gas for cooking and water heating.

Then last night on the evening news there was an item about Syrian Refugees entering Jordan (the numbers were staggering). There was the usual footage of acres of tents/cabins forming a 'city'. Jordan is about to construct another camp.

My wife said "and we moan about the cost of gas!"

That got me thinking, so I went to my various utility bills and saw that our daily costs for gas, electricity and clean safe water is $5.16 per day (our bills give us the daily costs for each billing period).

For that we have running water and power at our fingertips. We also have deep sewer connected to the main sewerage line.

I'll bet those things are not provided in the camps on an individual basis.

I then thought about my attitudes to some of the so called boat people arriving in Australia :-(

So with all that buzzing around my head I made the not so quantum leap to my own wife's origins.

Her mother and father went to England at the end of WW2 as displaced persons (refugees). They only met in England but their stories were the same. When the Germans invaded the areas of Poland and the Ukraine where they lived they were both taken from their respective families and taken to Germany as, basically, slave labour. At the time my OH's father was married with 3 children. He never saw them again. OH's mother never saw her family either

OH's parents married in the UK and OH was born there. Until she was 5 and started school she could not speak English as Ukrainian was the language used at her home.

Apart from the colour of the skin, the same thing is still happening. We complain that refugees when released back into society won't speak English. My MIL could speak several languages but English was not one of them but she got by.

I'm now totally reassessing my previous attitudes to refugees