Nell Frizzell

One of the many Syrians resettled in London by the charity SHP, 18-year-old Ibrahim Hussein has started a new life in this city… ‘My family is from Syria, but I was born in Jordan. I grew up in the east of the capital city, Amman, and lived there until a year and two months ago, when my family and I came to the UK via Turkey. Now I’m 18 and the five of us live in a house in Streatham Vale. Before I came here I watched YouTube videos about London. That’s how I learned my first bits of English, and what English people were like. I’m very happy to be here. I don’t think of myself as a refugee, really. This feels like my country. I speak to English people and learn from them. I’ve learned you have to be friendly: at my college, if you don’t make the effort to talk to people, you’ll end up alone. I go to a Kurdish barber – I’m Kurdish, and we talk in our language, not Arabic. He asked about how I came here and whether I like my life here. I tell him what I want to tell him, but I don’t talk to him about why we left Jordan. I never talk to anyone about that. It’s hard, but it’s finished now. If you get on a bus or go into a shop, you will see lots of refugees here. I have had some abuse: a man on the bus started calling me a tourist because I was wearing a cap. He was saying, ‘All Arab people are like this, all Muslims are like that…’ I replied, ‘If you see one bad person, it doesn’t mean all the people are bad.’ He was drinking and he was rude to me, but that doesn’t mean I will j