Acts of kindness: Strangers became my surrogate parents

In the midst of big news stories, it’s easy to forget how much of a difference small acts of kindness can make. In this series, i writers reflect on kindness they’ve experienced that has stayed with them

Let me take you back to May 1972, the year I arrived in the UK from Uganda, my homeland. Springtime in London, the city of my dreams. Uganda was a British colony. Our rulers had filled our heads with stories about the loveliness of their capital, the nation’s supreme history and marvellous men and women.

Here I finally was, in the heart of greatness, with a scholarship and place at Oxford, where my fiancé had been a postgraduate student for a year. He was also a Ugandan Asian. We got married that June, moved into a student flat. Life was full of bliss and hope. I did not miss my old country, not in those heady days. That came later.  

That August, the military dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin, issued exile notices to all Asians. Our ancestors had arrived there in the 1900s. Initially Ugandan Asians didn’t take him seriously – he was like Donald Trump, unpredictable and a buffoon. But he meant it. He wanted us gone by November. 

The mass expulsion caused fear and confusion, humiliation and economic hardship. 

For my ex-husband and me it was like a sink hole had opened up. Our scholarships were gone. Fees had been paid for the entire course in advance, but living expenses came in every three months. The college bursar, both hard and soft cop, told us to vacate the flat but “as a generous man”, gave us a month’s grace.   

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To make matters worse, I was struggling in class. The English department didn’t know what to make of this brown girl from Africa. Tutors blanked me. It hurt. They always had better things to do – get back to the tome they were writing, tend rose gardens, pass the port. Fellow students spoke like they were masters of the universe. For the first time in my life, I stayed silent. Tutorials were purgatory. Maybe I really am no good, I soon thought. Just as they thought. This is when the loss of Uganda hit, and hit hard. 

‘He understood our pain’

We thought it was all over, hopeless, when we were contacted by one of the fellows at our college, Professor Hugh Blaschko, a renowned German Jewish scientist from Berlin, who had lost most of his family in the Holocaust. His wife, Mary was a Quaker. They offered us a flat, rent free, in the top floor of their house in North Oxford. We could stay as long as we needed to.

This arrangement lasted for seven years. He understood our pain because his people too had been hated for their race and forced to flee. Nationalism and patriotism, he believed, brought out the worst in people. Mary was sometimes nosy, but always sweet and open-hearted.   

The Blaschkos stepped in when we needed them most. If they hadn’t, I would not have completed my post-grad studies; would not have become a journalist. I still miss them so much, these kind strangers who became my surrogate parents.    

Read more in the Acts of kindness series here