A cloudburst of community spirit which helped rehouse scores of refugees affected by flooding has astonished a mosque in South Manchester.
Crowds of volunteers in Didsbury answered an urgent appeal from Didsbury Central Mosque and gave up their New Year’s Day to donate duvets, make meals, and help nearly 500 refugees find temporary homes across the city.
The mosque has been sheltering the refugees since yesterday after flooding from the River Mersey left their hotel without gas, electricity or clean drinking water.
Tracey Pook, Community Engagement Officer at Didsbury Mosque, said: “I’m so overwhelmed with the community and how people pulled together.
“I am a little bit emotional. The minister from [local parish] Christchurch just walked through the door and said ‘What can I do? I’m here to help’.
“Yes, this might have been a bad situation, but what came forward was humanity – to help each other, to ease people’s pain, to make them comfortable, to serve, laugh, smile.
“To me that lesson was ‘we’re in a new year, a new start, let’s start on something good’.”
Didsbury Central Mosque received a call from Manchester City Council at 4am on New Year’s Day asking them to act as an evacuation centre.
But the mosque had been ready to shelter the refugees since midnight.
“I knew it was going to happen,” said Tracey.
“I spoke to my manager and said the River Mersey had burst its bank and we may need to become an evacuation centre again.”
Around 400 refugees were driven from their hotel by off-duty Bee Network bus drivers and took shelter inside the mosque, alongside 60 residents from nearby roads.
One-by-one, with the help of the volunteers and the emergency services, they were given new accommodation for the week while the hotel is drained and the electricity safely put back on.
This is the third time in four years that Didsbury Central Mosque has been an evacuation centre for victims of flooding.
But this is the first time Tracey has been so moved by the groundswell of community spirit.
“It’s awful if you’ve fled war and the next thing you know you’re being evacuated again.
“There were a lot of people with a lot of complex needs as well – people with dementia, one of the couples had a newborn baby.
“But people from all backgrounds walked through our doors, rolled their sleeves up, made tea, sat with people and comforted them if they were crying or frightened.”
Tracey has been up for 34 hours helping those in need, but insists it hasn’t been hard work.
“We were determined to stay until the end,” she said. “To see it through, and make sure the last person was safe and had somewhere to go. And we saw it through – that’s been our drive.
“The mosque isn’t just a place of worship, we’re a community.
“We open our doors for everybody who needs us, and to do that and be part of this community is really important to us all at Didsbury Mosque.
“I’m so proud of all who came to help. What they’ve shown is that this is a community, and this is how we look after each other.”
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Feature Image: الدبوني on Wikimedia – [Creative Commons License]
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