Our heart is with you...

...which is the rough translation of a poster at the tram stop where we take our daily journey to the food tent. Bob is doing a live interview on BBC Lancashire radio tomorrow to raise awareness of the challenges facing refugees trying to come to the UK, including being penniless, often, and traumatised, always, and then having to navigate a complicated, heartless visa process. 

For example, we met with a young mother today whose husband, in the Ukrainian army, has been injured in the war for the second time and she didn't know if he was dead or alive. As she doesn't have an international passport she and her 2 children, aged 7 and 4 years, have to make a 8-hour round journey to a town that is back towards the Ukrainian border, in order to complete the biometric tests that are required for the UK visa application. 

One of the questions that Bob will be asked is what people are telling us. Well, in addition to the above, we met a woman who showed a photo of her block of flats that had been bombed on one side - it was just luck that she lived on the other side. 

Bob will want to describe meeting a woman who managed to escape from Mariupol, which seems to have been razed to the ground. 

There are not many light moments but a pigeon flew into the food tent this morning and refused to leave. Everything had to be covered up and the pigeon eventually had to be carefully escorted out on top of a cardboard box, to much applause. 

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