A NEWLY formed charity helping refugees in West Devon has announced it has received a gift of £250,000 to help their work.

The organisation West Devon Safe Haven (WDSH) has announced that the major gift will be used to buy a house in Tavistock specifically to provide a home for a refugee family.

Charity chair Angus Doulton expressed his and the entire group’s deep appreciation of the generosity of those who gave the gift to help those in need.

The charity works closely with Devon County Council and West Devon Borough Council to deliver the government’s Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme.

It has benefited from the support and long experience of Refugee Support Devon (RSD) in Exeter and Students and Refugees Together (START) in Plymouth.

WDSH helps new families to begin to settle in, familiarise themselves with their new surroundings and begin to get over the traumatic experiences they have suffered

A major aim is to help them learn English as quickly as they can.

Formal English tuition is delivered by Olive Tree (for Okehampton) and Open Door International Learning School (ODILS – for Tavistock). Volunteers from WDSH support this learning by running relaxed and friendly conversations and shared activities.

Amanda Salomonsson of the International Organisation for Migration gave the meeting an all too graphic description of conditions both in Syria itself and in the various camps and other arrangements in which refugees are now forced to live.

Her implication was that anything at all that could be done to help people escape from that was worth doing.

In a brief report on West Devon Safe Haven’s progress since the formative meeting in February, Angus said that there is now one family settled in Okehampton and one in Tavistock.

A third family will reach Tavistock in early December and then a fourth will come to the new house early in the New Year.

The meeting was chaired by Geoffrey Cox MP, who congratulated the group on the progress made and gave a short talk about his work in Parliament in support of unaccompanied children.

He encouraged all to write to him on this issue, as correspondence was always taken of a sign of the community’s commitment.

West Devon Safe Haven holds a monthly coffee morning for the families, at which all are welcome to come and chat and learn what coffee made the proper Syrian way tastes like.

The next coffee morning is at 11am on December 9 in the Lower Deck Café at Tavistock United Reformed Church.