Akerbet was five months pregnant last Christmas, but didn’t have a place to call home. On Christmas morning, she had been sleeping on the living room floor of some friends from her church.
“I was worried about my baby’s weight, she wasn’t moving. The situation blocked me from enjoying the moment,” Akerbet says.
It was a far cry from Christmas back home in Ethiopia. There, it’s a big day with family, and Akerbet would go to church with them, then go to the river and celebrate before making lunch and coffee, and seeing visitors.
But Akerbet fled Ethiopia and arrived in the UK in 2018, joining her husband. She has refugee status, and was working and paying for housing – until she became pregnant and stopped being able to work. From there, she fell into homelessness and has lived in six different temporary accommodation locations since.
It may seem a story ripped straight from the nativity: a pregnant woman, a foreign country, desperately trying to find somewhere to stay. Rather than innkeepers with no room, however, the story takes place in a United Kingdom where refugee homelessness is soaring.
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One charity has declared a ‘refugee homelessness emergency’, while statistics released over the course of 2024 show the number of refugees facing homelessness is in the thousands. Much of it stems back to last Christmas, when the Conservative government evicted hundreds of refugees into homelessness at short notice, as Big Issue extensively reported on – although the crisis continues into Labour’s tenure.
In January 2024 alone, 311 refugees slept rough after eviction from Home Office accommodation. As stark statistics continue to roll-in throughout 2024, this attempt to clear the backlog has been cited as a cause of growing homelessness.
After enduring two hospital stays and homelessness during her pregnancy, Akerbet named her baby Miracle
Pregnancy makes somebody a “priority need” for housing, and a council should provide support to eligible women. Akerbet and another new mother tell Big Issue they struggled to secure housing, be taken seriously, and that help only materialised when other organisations got involved.
Before being taken in by what she calls her “family” from church, Akerbet was staying in shared accommodation. She shared it with three other women, who were doing drugs and smoking. There was no drinking water, or cooking facilities. “You wouldn’t wish anyone to live in that house. It’s like prison,” she says. “It was really stressful and painful, it really hurt me.” The conditions, she says, drove her to the brink of suicide.
Stress during pregnancy is not just bad for the mother. There is a deep well of evidence showing how it can harm a baby: it puts children at higher risk of mental health and behavioural issues, predisposes a child to cardiovascular illnesses, and affects memory, language and learning outcomes.
During her pregnancy, Akerbet ended up in hospital twice over concerns for her baby’s health. After she gave birth in April midwives were concerned that her shared accommodation was cold and not suitable for a baby, so kept her in hospital for two weeks. At the end of this, Akerbet was “stressed, really tired”, and went back to stay with her friends from church.
Belaynesh, a woman who Akerbet met through a support group, did not know she was pregnant last Christmas. For her, it was a last dose of normality with the foster family she lived with. Belaynesh arrived in the UK from Eritrea via a small boat in 2019, at the age of 17. Eritrea operates a policy of “indefinite, involuntary conscription” for both men and women, as described by Amnesty International, which amounts to forced labour. Only North Korea and Afghanistan are ranked worse for civil liberties, and Eritreans make up the second largest group of refugees in Europe.
When Belaynesh had to leave her foster family, her troubles with homelessness began. One night, after spending the day at the council’s offices in a bid to find housing, she found herself on the street with three other pregnant women. “We cried because it was dark at night, we didn’t know where to go. We weren’t able to sleep on the streets,” she says. The next day, the same happened, and Belaynesh sheltered in a 24-hour McDonald’s, crying.
A member of staff noticed her upset, and started speaking to her – then offered to take her in for the night. “You never meet a person and then go to stay in their home. This is strange,” says Belaynesh. “But what I recognised was, it is better than staying on the streets, because it was cold, and I didn’t know what I’m gonna face if I stayed on the street. I realised that, well, at least it’s a house.”
From there, Belaynesh ended up spending four months sleeping on the floor of a friend from church, all while growing heavily pregnant. She wondered whether her baby would feel the stress, and asked herself: “What is he going to be, mentally and physically?”
Had she not been a refugee, Belaynesh wonders if she’d have been treated differently: “We are foreigners, I know, we come from a different country, but we have to think of ourselves as human beings. We have to treat everyone equally.”
As we speak, Belaynesh gets a call. It’s about new accommodation she’s being moved to. Later, when she arrives there with her baby, on a freezing night just as temperatures have dropped, there is no bedding, no pillow. The community she has found step in, donating bedding, a cot, a kettle and heater, and toys for her baby.
This Christmas will be different for Akerbet. It’s easy to understand why she named her baby Miracle: “She came in a very bad situation. She came as a gift.” Instead of staying wherever she can find, Akerbet will invite her church “family” over and cook. Something traditional, something from home.
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