AN ASYLUM seeker who fled war-torn Sudan in a perilous journey through eight countries is now living in Barnsley and surviving on just £15 a week.

Jaber Mohamid Abdullah, known to his English friends as Jimmy, receives £36 a week from the Home Office to live on. But he is so determined to improve his English that he spends £21 of it to travel by train to Sheffield five days a week to take free English classes.

He is not allowed to work and said he can’t just sit and do nothing. He said: “I must improve myself because I want to help others, I have a power in me and I must do something.

“I need people to know what happens to asylum seekers. An asylum seeker is a human man like anybody else. He has a life, he has a wife, he has a family, but when the situation changes he has to make very difficult decisions to go away and leave his country.”

He has left his wife back in Sudan which is something he found extremely difficult, but he says it is men who are in most danger there.

He said he suffered intolerance and discrimination in Russia, but a lot of it probably went over his head because he did not understand the language. In France, he was even attacked by someone who hit him around the head with a chair.

"In France I feared for my own safety. I spent one month in a hanger with many other refugees and asylum seekers. Many people were fighting. I felt afraid to be by myself there."  

Read more in this weeks Barnsley Chronicle