It isn't happening here, thank God.

But driving on and joining the joyful  stream of the M25, I reflected that if I had seen the same woman standing at a bus-stop in inner London, I wouldn’t have given it a thought. Context is everything.

Which is why  the video trending in my on-line  community is so shocking. Tagged #saveSyriaschildren, it translates the trauma of the Syrian child to Britain. An ordinary little English girl cheerfully gets on with her life.  She blows out the candles on her cake, surrounded by friends. In sixty one-second clips, we see her life deteriorate from normal to terrible, as society disintegrates around her. The family flees the chaos.  With only her mother, ill and traumatised, she gazes at the single candle on another birthday cake and  cannot blow it out. The tagline is: “Just because it isn’t happening here, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”

Context is everything.

As long as we see migrants and asylum seekers as a faceless swarm, our natural  reaction is negative. Of course it is. They are alien and scary and clamorous.  Not like us. But the first time you see a migrant or asylum seeker as a person, as person like you, made in the image of God,  everything changes.

But what should we do?  Yes, I can give money, but it’s not enough.  I could sponsor a migrant – one out of hundreds of thousands. But not even that option is open to me. Why not? 

Imogen de la Bere is a writer from New Zealand. Contact  delaberi@gmail.com

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