A Better Society Begins With How We Treat One Another

When my mother arrived in a new country, she had two suitcases, a phone number written on the inside of a book, and very little else. The number belonged to a woman she had never met.

The first kindness

That woman met her at the bus station, gave her a bed for three weeks and helped her fill in forms she could not yet read. She never asked for anything back. Decades later my mother still talks about her as family.

What policy cannot do alone

Laws matter enormously. They decide who may stay, who may work, who receives care. But laws do not cook dinner or explain how the buses work. The texture of belonging is made by people.

Integration is not something newcomers do alone. It is something a whole community does together.

Passing it on

Today I help run a small welcome group in my neighbourhood. Nothing we do is heroic: lifts to appointments, help with job applications, a table at a community dinner. But every time someone arrives with a phone number written in a book, I think of the woman at the bus station — and try to be her.