Q&A with the Founders - Simon & Lucy Darby

Lucy, tell us the story of how you came to England?

Lucy:  Well you’d have to go way back to the late 70’s! I came to this country as an au pair, lived in London in really terrible accommodation, I barely new any English. I got a job, which was being advertised in Spain where I’d gone to from Colombia, in those days it was easy to go live and work in Spain, but I could only stay for 3 months. My dad had died years before and then my mum passed away, so I thought I’d go to Spain because I loved to travel. I didn’t have any money really to come over to England and I couldn’t stay in Spain so a friend recommended that I try and get a job in England. I got the job and the family I was going to be working for paid for the ticket for me to come over. There was a lot of people applying for the job to work in England because it was being advertised in the newspaper. The women that was advertising, was really afraid of seeing blood, so when I told her that I had worked in a hospital in Colombia she gave me the job and I worked there for about a year. After that I worked in Reading at a launderette, which was really hard work.

What was your experience with immigration back then?

Lucy: It was great, I got the first stamp to stay for a year and then I got another one without any problems. I then fell pregnant which made things a little more complicated. At the time the Latin American community in London, no one spoke English. But when I was an au pair I was paid £11 a month to live and work for the family, but I also had to go learn English. Which meant a little later on, I was able to help my best friend come to England from Colombia. She was based in London while I was in Reading. When I’d go visit her, she started to introduce me to the Latin American community, and I’d see the problems they faced. Which really opened my eyes to a need.

Fast forward a few years, what steps did you take to be in a position to help them?

Lucy: Years later I moved to Sheffield in the north of England. I did a HND in Social Care but then there was not many Latino’s living in that part of the country. As part of my dissertation I did it on why Colombians come to the UK. So I went down to London to do research for it and interview people in the Latin American community and I ended up with a distinction.

I then went to speak with a charity in London that said they helped the Latin American community, but they were taking advantage of people because they didn’t speak the language. The guy who ran it was taking people’s money, saying that he had a room for people to live in, he’d take their money and they’d go to the room and it was literally a shoe box, so small you had squeeze to get in. People would complain but he refused to give people their money back. He also black mailed a good friend of mine, he’d be ringing her at 2am every morning, saying that if she didn’t give him one of her rooms to rent out (she lived in a 2 bedroom flat) he would tell people that she got her visa by deception. So when I got there she was really distressed, so we waited for him to ring again and I answered. I said “How dare you ring my friend at this time in the morning, threatening her. Go and speak to the police or whoever you want, and we’ll sue you and take you to court.” At the point I knew much more about the law and knew he was basically a thief and thug, he never called her again. What’s funny is that a few years later, the wife of that very man got in contact with the Hispanic Welfare Association asking for help! I said why don’t you get your husband to help? She then told me everything that he had done to people and she was no longer with him. Anyway, after I’d helped my friend and finished my dissertation, I really felt called to move from Sheffield to London because I couldn’t really make a difference from Sheffield. I asked Simon about moving, but he didn’t want to at the time, because of work.

Simon: But then not to long after, the company that I worked for at the time, merged but then went bankrupt. The only job that I could get was to work in London. So we moved to northwest London in 1997.

How did you get involved helping the Latin American community once you’d moved?

Simon: We had a pastor friend called Candido, who as part of the church had a charity called the Dorcas Project.

Lucy: I went to the charity straight away to see if I could help, and became a volunteer for them.  They liked how I was helping so they said would you come and work for us? Which I did, the only thing was they were a little slow in terms of offering advice to people, I’m not sure if they were that confident in giving out advice and they only wanted to help people that had problems in their church. The thing that most people rang for help about was help with English, people didn’t know how to read the letters they were getting from the home office and they needed interpreters to go with them to do certain things. I felt I could help people, and help people from outside the church to. So after a year working there, I left. Thankfully people kept ringing me to seek help. I had to start keeping a logbook of all the people I was helping, I was also spending more time meeting people in central London and giving them advice.

Simon: At this point we started to really pray about what God wanted to do next with us, whether he wanted us to start a charity or not. So we thought, lets see if God opens the doors, the first thing we did was apply for a charity number, which we got within a month which is really quick as it normally takes 3-6 months.

Lucy: The second thing, was to apply for grants from the Home Office to be able to start the charity, we got one.  We used the money to pay for the all the office equipment.  At this point we got in touch with another pastor called Michael in Ilford. I asked him if there were any Latin Americans around where his church was, he said he’d seen a few. I went to him because I thought he might be able to help us with a space to be able to see people. He couldn’t but another pastor in the area heard about what we were after and said we could use space in his church.  In return we had to help other people with social issues, give food and clothes out, and give general advice in relation to benefits etc. So along with helping the Latino’s in the area we could help other people to.  After we’d started I visited some big Spanish speaking churches in London to ask if they’d recommend us, but many said they wouldn’t and that we were wasting out time working in that area of London.  Then a pastor of the biggest Latino church in London called Edmundo, asked us for help in getting a charity number and said he’d pay for an ad in a London based Latino newspaper and let us speak to the church about what we did, which really grew things very quickly.  So many people came up to us and said that they’d been praying for a Christian to come and do what we were doing. Because there’s lot of dishonest people out there, that are giving poor advice and charging the world, and knowing that the person isn’t going to get what they’re after.

Simon you’re an accountant and Lucy you have a HND in Social Care, but you didn’t have the qualification in law regarding immigration. Was getting those qualifications the next step?

Simon: We had all the tests to be able to give advice on immigration. Someone came to the house from immigration and we sat the tests with them.

Simon, what was your journey to starting the HWA with Lucy?

Simon: I think when we came down to London to work on Lucy’s dissertation and saw the conditions of where some people lived, how they were treatedand how hard it was to navigate life when you don’t speak the language, that all had a profound effect on me. Plus the difference you could make by doing things properly. By giving people good advice and doing the job properly you can change people’s lives, literally. Some people think they need to leave the country or spend thousands of pounds on a lawyer, when it can be done much cheaper and you can be reasonably confident that you’ll get a positive result. What really surprised me, I think I’d lived quite a sheltered existence till I met Lucy, there’s a whole sub-class of people and it’s not just the Latin American’s, it’s people from all over and they exist under the radar of society and the way they are treated people, how they abused and took advantage of them was terrible. So it’s really a social justice issue. It’s not only refugee’s in Calais, or people trying to get here by boat, it’s people living here right under our nose and they’re being taken advantage of. But staying here is better, but it’s a catch 22. You get more money on minimum wage, cleaning floors than most professionals back in their own country.  But they’re working every hour they can to earn enough to send home, year after year, and that destroys their family life.

Do you have a personal testimony of someone that really stuck in your mind?

Simon: We had a vet who was going to be deported back to Bolivia on Christmas Eve. But Lucy went to the airport and managed to persuade them not to send him back and he came and had Christmas with us.  He ended up staying in London for a few more years, because we managed to help him and bring his wife over. Many people come to you in their hour of need, that they think is related to immigration but there’s also whole lot of other issues that people are facing that we’ve been able to help them with from marriage issues, to employment etc.

Lucy: Another story that really stuck in my mind was with a lady called Maria. She was referred to us by a psychologist, she was also having problems with her husband who was very violent towards her. I told her to go back to Colombia and apply for a visa there, she went back with her husband. They managed to get their visa and came back. But the husband continued to be violent, said she wasn’t allowed out the house and work. We offered her a job but he wouldn’t allow it. So she ran away, and then he started calling us, he was threatening me over the phone. So I took the phone and the messages he’d left me to the police. They sent someone to go to their house and collect all of Maria’s clothes. She went and lived with a brother and it took 2 years to get her a permanent residency. Because of what she’d been through and what he’d done to me, we were able to get indefinite leave to remain from the Home Office. Since then she’s brought over her son and daughter from Colombia.