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My home is too small for hosting refugees here, but I’ve been involved in a Finnish network that has been organizing hosting refugees at homes here in Finland.The hosting experiences have mostly been really positive.The hardest things have usually had to do with refugees receiving a negative decision to their asylum application, which has been a shock to the families who have learned to know them really well and have become good friends.Based on my experiences in this network I’ve come to think that hosting people from another country is very similar, whatever the reason that brought them here.I have had the privilege to stay around the world at homes of people who have never met me before; as an exchange student and language learner.I think it all comes down to trust, whether you host an exchange student, a couch surfer or a refugee.The things we emphasize in our network mostly have to do with being prepared to cultural differences.When you are sharing a home, there might be different ways of thinking concerning personal space, puctuality, responsibilities at home, privacy, cleaning habits, religion, gender roles, upbringing children etc.If you have a common language, it’s often a good idea to talk about these things beforehand. It’s important to have a clear understanding which things you can be flexible about and which not.Do you wish there to be an absolute silence at certain time of the evening? How do you wish to share the household tasks? Do you share the meals or not?It’s good to talk about these things from the start and agree upon the practical things.Most of the things that we have found important to take into account when hosting refugees are pretty much the same that I’ve come across with when volunteering for my exchange student organization. Sharing everyday life with people who come from a different culture mostly involves very concrete things.As to the things you might want to take into account, some refugees may come from areas that lack comprehensive vaccination programs. That’s why it may be good to check your vaccinations beforehand.Some refugees may also suffer from PTSD. It can be traumatizing to return to the difficult things by talking about them. Be kind, be respectful, let them decide what they want to share and what not.It may also be a good idea to discuss some of this with your kids beforehand; not too concretely—don’t say things that could scare them!—but in a way that suits their age.But I think it’s important not to overestimate the particularities of hosting a refugee.My experience from our network has shown that intercultural hosting stories are really similar, irrespective of the reason of staying at someone’s home. When people share everyday life, there are both compromises and learning, misunderstandings and attachment.In most cases you learn something invaluable along the way.

I struggle with this question daily. As a whole, it’s easy to see humanity as selfish and violent in the short term, and altogether suicidal in the long run.I think it’s question of focusing.There are signs of hope all around us, we just have to focus on them and not dwell in what’s brutal and ugly.One of the things that gives me faith in humanity is the international Refugees Welcome movement.The aim of the movement is to find private homes where asylum seekers can stay while their applications are being processed.If I’m right, the movement originally started in Germany.The asylum processes are often very long, they can last up to 3 years. Staying in reception centres during all those years, without knowing the outcome of the process, together with hundreds of people in the same situation, can be extremely depressing.In September 2015, a group of people (including many of my friends) thought we also ought to have a network like that here in Finland. They created a Facebook group looking for volunteers, and soon there were many dozens of people interested in volunteering for the cause — and many more who wanted to host an asylum seeker or a whole family.In 2–3 weeks, a website was created, legal details were agreed upon with authorities, and procedures were designed to make the system work efficiently.Since then, dozens of asylum seekers have found a Finnish home.People have shared their everyday life, taking turns washing the dishes, teaching and learning the language, and becoming friends.The network helps the hosts and the refugees to find each other. Families with children, women, minorities, and people with mental health problems often have a particularly hard time staying in reception centres, so volunteers make an extra effort to find homes for them.There are problems for sure, but they are pretty much the same kind of problems one can expect in any cross-cultural home-sharing context. I can relate to them very well after having spent a year abroad as an exchange student.I’ve heard amazing stories of extending the definition of family to cover also the new “members” adopted into it.Those with homes too small to permanently host people have also participated by inviting people to eat or to celebrate Christmas, for example. There are also psychologists and councellors who offer help in dealing with challenging experiences of the past or fears concerning uncertain future.I find it really encouraging to see people open their homes and their hearts for those in need. And I want to emphasize the courage of the refugees who accept the offer of staying in a Finnish home after what they have been through.Even if it’s not always obvious, there certainly is goodness in the world: altruism and unselfishness, trust and caring.Further information:Front Page - Refugees Welcome International(Photo source: Majoittajalle - Kotimajoitusverkosto)

Kind of magical. You bought a dial-up modem — often an external peripheral with blinking LEDs on it — and connected it to your PC with a serial cable, and to the phone jack on the wall using another cable. Cellphones weren’t a thing (at least not for ordinary people) but practically every family had a landline telephone and a phone line provided by the local telecom company.You would then need to get a phone directory of the local BBSes (their names and phone numbers) from somewhere. Maybe one would come in the form of a dot-matrix printout on a continuous-fold paper, given to you by a helpful friend. Or maybe you had a couple of numbers written down from a magazine article which discussed BBSes. Or maybe someone gave you a copy of a copy of the local BBS directory on a floppy disk. Or maybe you just had a single phone number scribbled on a Post-It note by someone who already had a modem and who wanted to help initiate you to the online world.Your next step would be installing a copy of a terminal emulator on your computer, or simply loading it from a floppy disk. You would need to set the serial port communication parameters and type in the commands or configuration that would make the modem open the phone line (switch it to the “off-hook” state) and dial a number... you would listen to the modem dialing a number, the telephone network providing the ring indication tones, and the modem at the other end answering the call, leading to the initial handshaking noise... and BANG, you were connected to someone else's computer — one that is now streaming text to your screen!You could see how that other computer sent you data character by character, line by line. A logo created out of characters and graphical symbols would come up.Also, a login prompt would come up. If this was your first time using the system, you would need register as a new user. After passing the login stage, a main menu or command prompt would come up.And then you were in — free to wander about from menu to menu and study the content offered by the system.Typically, you would find dozens of discussion areas categorized by topic — concerning things such as current affairs, computer hardware and software, music, or local events or happenings. Maybe there would be some discussion areas set aside for particular hobbies, or arts & crafts — and often also something more profound, such as areas for discussing philosophy, psychology, relationships or religion. Some discussion areas would be for generic discussion, some for news concerning the system itself. And certainly there would be a discussion area for humor, fun stories and jokes.These would not be real-time discussions, but those based on message threads and replies with quotes. And, of course, there would also be a way to leave private messages to other users of the system, or hold private conversations with them.To remind you, when you called the number of a dial-up BBS and a connection was established, you were only connected to that single system. Your call would be routed through the public switched telephone network, but only to that single system, to which your modem would establish a point-to-point virtual serial line connection, as if the two computers were sitting on the same desk and connected to each other using a null-modem serial cable. The BBS software running at the other end would provide a text-based and menu-based command-line UI for you to navigate.But you weren’t connected to a computer network — only to that single system. But if it was a popular system, dozens of active users would check in daily, read the discussions, participate in them, and upload and download files. So a single system could host a sizeable community of users.All this meant you no longer had to rely solely on computer magazines, or books, or computer club meetings to get updates on what is going on in the field: instead, you could now have these online discussions with people you did not really know, and get replies back the same day, or the next day. Since many BBSes had a fairly local user base — with people primarily calling in from the same city or the neighboring towns due to wanting to avoid long-distance phone charges — it was not uncommon to arrange live meetups as well.Aside from message thread-based discussions, you were usually given access to the file area maintained as one of the standard services of a BBS. The file area would typically contain a curated archive of categorized, downloadable files: shareware and freeware software, pictures, music, text files, etc., with a short textual description of each. You no longer had to rely on the “sneakernet” to get new software and document files such as underground “zines” or tutorials — but could instead download latest updates from a BBS near you. Or upload something to such systems in order to share a file with the other uses (that is, if you were producing something worthy of sharing on your own, be that software, images, etc.)Some BBSes specialized on some particular microcomputer system (such as the Kaypro II, the MSX, or the Commodore Amiga) or topic — such as fishing, music or religion, or had a specific theme. Many others were more generic “all-purpose” boards. Quite a many had fanciful names and character graphics-based “ANSI logo art” welcoming the user and creating a sense of a virtual space maintained by the System Operator, or SysOp.Some systems were also “networked”. This did not generally mean access to any kind of “always-on” computer network but rather that they batch-exchanged messages (and even files) with each other automatically by each night. Messages would trickle from system to system over the span of several days. There would be a definite delay in discussions as replies written in a remote system could take days to arrive to your local system, but they would eventually reach your local system, too. The benefit gained from such arrangement was that message exchange between the participating systems could take place over long-distance calls or even international calls (paid by your friendly SysOps) and reach a rather large combined user base while all that you had to do, as an ordinary user, was call your local system. FidoNet, for instance, worked on this principle — systems participating to the FidoNet message exchange network would designate some of their discussion areas as FidoNet “echomail” areas and some as purely local areas for local discussion.Yet, in later years, some BBSes were actually connected to the early academic Internet (not accessible by ordinary people) and offered some gateway services to their users, such as access to Usenet or access to Internet email.System with multiple modems and multiple phone lines commonly offered real-time text-based chat facility to the simultaneously-connected users. But this was limited by the number of telephone lines — many smaller systems only had a single phone line at their disposal, making such thing impossible (except for chatting with the System Operator, who could use the local keyboard on the computer running the BBS.)While there were commercial BBSes, too — some of them only allowing paid access — most BBSes were generally free to use. That is, except for what you paid to the telecom company for a landline subscription and the call minutes. (But data calls were charged the same as voice calls — the telephone network did not see a difference between these two modes of communication. That was the very operating principle of dial-up modems, which utilized a system originally designed only to carry voice for transferring data.)Most BBSes were hobbyist-run. Anyone with a spare landline, computer, and modem could establish a new BBS, and many did. SysOps typically considered running a BBS their hobby. Many such systems were run out of the corner of the owner’s bedroom, or study. Although awkward, some SysOps on a budget even ran their system on the same phone line they also used for their daily voice calls — maybe limiting the operational hours of their BBS to evenings and weekends. However, getting a dedicated landline for running a BBS was a much more convenient arrangement for the SysOp.In some cases, some SysOps accepted voluntary donations from the users, letting them participate in the running expenses, or support the SysOp with purchases such as a larger HDD, or a new PC, or a CD-ROM drive, or another landline and a faster modem. In some countries, such as my native Finland, local telcos also commonly sponsored hobbyist-run BBS systems in their area — by providing hobbyist SysOps with modems and phone lines for free. This was because a popular, busy system would generate lots of chargeable call minutes in the network.In the age of the ubiquitous, always-on Internet and mobile data, it is maybe hard to fathom how big a change of perspective it was to go from an isolated hobbyist-computer system — sitting on your desk and never having exchanged any data with another computer, except by reading data stored on floppies — to one that could, with the help of a dial-up modem, suddenly connect to other computers and computer users over vast distances, utilizing telephone lines.Even if many of the dial-up BBSes were kind of isolated information exchange hubs themselves (due to the fact that they relied on a circuit-based, connection-oriented telephone network and could not offer all the perks that an “always-on”, packet-switched network later would) they opened up new perspectives to digital communication and collaboration in a very real way, and they really had their own sense of “magic” and “community”.This was because, for the first time, there was this virtual space where common people could meet and express complicated ideas to large audiences in a textual form, with no editors censoring or shortening the text. A regular caller to a BBS could have lively conversations going back and forth, with responses coming in in hours, or the next day, exchanging ideas with people who have shared interests and who they might get to know very well over the years, but possibly never get to see live in person.You could compare the early days of dial-up BBSes to being part of the radio amateur community. Using a dial-up modem was by no means as complicated or involved, and certainly did not require the passage of any certification, but it took some technical knowledge and willingness to learn something new to get online. Only a subset of the computer users or hobbyists of the time ever got around to buying a dial-up modem or saw the potential in it. In order to become a BBS user, you were usually “initiated” by someone more versed in these things. While there were business, educational, or research applications to modems — and some forms of online banking as well — it was primarily only computer hobbyists among the ordinary people who bought modems, and it was also primarily computer hobbyists who were running the BBSes.Commercial online service providers with their huge modem banks and servers would follow later, but for me, it was never about those. I personally only ever used the hobbyist or community-run BBSes, and they formed the majority of dial-up modem-accessible online systems built for the general public.There are some videos on YouTube which show a computer system connecting to an “old-timey” dial-up BBS. Here’s just one of them: