by Andrew Mickel
An interesting video has gone up this week on the unlikely location of Australia's ABC News website that reports on the Polish charity Barka, which was covered in Community Care last year.
An interesting video has gone up this week on the unlikely location of Australia's ABC News website that reports on the Polish charity Barka, which was covered in Community Care last year.
Barka helps people from eastern
Europe who have come to the UK to start a new life, but haven't been
able to find work or a home.
The video poses an interesting update to where we left the project in July. Then, the project was a stark illustration of the difficulties facing people trying to make it in a new country with no support networks. Now, the recession has had such a marked effect on employment prospects in construction - a major employer of immigrants - that the people Barka deal with are being flagged on foreign news networks.
It's all the starker when placed next to the sheer schadenfreude that comes with reading the blog of Alexandra Penney, an author who lost all her money in the Bernard Madoff scandal. Those that Barka helps may have to sleep rough, but spare a thought for Penney, who has had to fire the maid and start using public transport. It may be wrong to delight in the misery of others, but it would be wasteful to ignore a blog that includes the straight-faced line: "I have about 40 white shirts...how am I going to iron those shirts so I can feel like a poor civilized person?"
The video poses an interesting update to where we left the project in July. Then, the project was a stark illustration of the difficulties facing people trying to make it in a new country with no support networks. Now, the recession has had such a marked effect on employment prospects in construction - a major employer of immigrants - that the people Barka deal with are being flagged on foreign news networks.
It's all the starker when placed next to the sheer schadenfreude that comes with reading the blog of Alexandra Penney, an author who lost all her money in the Bernard Madoff scandal. Those that Barka helps may have to sleep rough, but spare a thought for Penney, who has had to fire the maid and start using public transport. It may be wrong to delight in the misery of others, but it would be wasteful to ignore a blog that includes the straight-faced line: "I have about 40 white shirts...how am I going to iron those shirts so I can feel like a poor civilized person?"
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