I have recently returned to the UK following a two-week visit to Malta. I have a Maltese parent and have spent much time as a child and adult there. However, this visit was different as a result of a chance bus journey to Valletta and a conversation I had on it which has left a lasting impression.

I spent most of the journey talking to a beautiful, articulate and dignified Somali woman with a three-week-old baby and a four-year-old daughter. She arrived by boat three years ago on a “terrifying journey” she was unsure of surviving. Her eldest daughter was under a year old at the time. What parent would put a child through such dangerous, ghastly travelling conditions unless they were fleeing something really traumatic? She said life at the camp in Ħal Far is very bad but it is at least a life – most of her family members in Somalia have come to a gruesome end.

This woman was determined that I should know that she never wanted to leave her country; she dreadfully misses her family members who are still alive, and doesn’t want “to take from the Maltese economy”, but life is simply too dangerous there. All she wants is to return to a peaceful country. She said that as a child she would never, ever have imagined that she would one day have to uproot herself and her children to live in a country where people despised her very existence.

She was cradling her three-week-old who was sleeping peacefully. I couldn’t help but think of the fuss made of our newborns (by one’s family and health workers) at the same age, yet hers was being carted around in the stifling heat on a packed bus, in a shoddy-looking buggy designed for a toddler, the driver yelling at them with pure contempt in his voice.

What I saw of the camp from the bus was shocking beyond words. These people are housed in corrugated iron huts with tiny, filthy windows. The word “hut” is probably too generous. It must be unbearable in all weather conditions. Washing hangs limply from make-shift lines; children scramble around in the dust and dirt; their parents sit sombrely in the shade of the carob trees. I did not tell her I am half-Maltese. My children were with me on the bus and I felt a great, shameful need to protect them as I heard this woman’s story. Protect them from the horrors of this world and the bad, terrible hands people can be served.

I urge people to have more compassion and to learn more about these asylum seekers. I am not talking about economic migrants here (that’s a different story), but honest, genuine asylum seekers, like this woman, who have not come seeking a better life with more money and greater material wealth. They have come to escape the constant, suffocating fear of death fuelled by their war-torn countries. It is not their fault.

It is simple: if their country were peaceful, they would return. They did not want to leave. She repeated this message to me numerous times as if nobody had ever quite understood her or taken the time to listen properly.