AN ANDOVER mother who has been volunteering with refugees and asylum seekers for the past seven years has turned her attention to people being housed in her hometown.

Kerrie Morley, from Picket Piece, began her volunteering journey in 2015, amidst the Syrian refugee crisis.

Her involvement was prompted by the shocking, now-famous images of Syrian infant Alan Kurdi, who was found swept up on a beach.

The two-year-old’s photo was shared widely, and made Kerrie think about what she could do to help.

READ MORE: Asylum seekers being housed in Andover hotel

She said: “I can still see that picture of him in his red t-shirt and blue shorts. I have children, and if that was my children and something happened in my country, I would want to know that people would look out for my children, so I knew I had to do the same.”

A post to a Facebook community of volunteers led to an influx of responses, and soon Kerrie had made four trips to Calais, the French city where thousands of refugees lived in an encampment until 2016.

“That was amazing, I met so many amazing people,” said Kerrie. “It is probably the friendliest place I have ever been, even though it was heartbreaking.

“What was going to be one trip became a life-changing experience.”

The Facebook group comprises many individual volunteers like Kerrie, who aren’t part of an organisation.

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The volunteers help people with a huge variety of needs, from medical, to work, to education, to clothing and, importantly, with filling out the vital right to remain paperwork in whichever country they have settled.

While Kerrie can sometimes help people to apply for support from various authorities, but the work she does day-to-day, for example taking a family shopping for clothes just last week, she self-funds.

“I don’t get funding, I just do it myself,” she said. “Sometimes I have done fundraisers, and I’ve got lovely friends who know what I do and will help where they can.”

The 50-year-old recently took a trip to Canada for three weeks, to visit a man who she had been speaking to for six-and-a-half years and had helped to secure residency for there, but had never met.

However, Kerrie said that the work she has done until recently has mostly been outside of the UK, adding: “I haven’t met that many people in this country because we don’t actually take that many people in, despite what people might think!”.

It was only when another volunteer, from Kent, put her in touch with a family who had been placed in Andover that Kerrie realised that more than 70 people were living in the town while seeking asylum. They cannot work until they secure the right to remain in the UK, which can be a very long process.

“I would like to see lots of changes,” she said. “I think it’s really positive that we are supporting people locally, but I would like to see the whole system change. People are only coming here because there is no safe, legal right to asylum.”

Kerrie continued: “We need to have asylum processing centres, and when people get here I wish there was more help, particularly around work because these people want to work. I fully understand that people need to be checked and verified, but if you are waiting somewhere between six months and three years life is so difficult for you, and that’s when problems set in.

“We are crying out for manual labour and if people could have work much sooner, they would have a sense of belonging, of community.

“At the end of the day, we are all human. The only thing that really determines your life is where you are born and I was lucky enough to be born here and that has opened up huge opportunities. We don’t own this land, we are on it for a short period of time, and borders are constructs that man has put in. We have always migrated as people, and if we were facing prosecution and violence, we would be moving too.”

“Of course, we can’t take everyone, but if every country did their bit, the world would be a better place.”

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