‘It was a nightmare that you cannot wake up from, and it will never leave me,’ 15-year-old Iftu Omar from Ethiopia says about the journey he undertook by boat to Yemen. What he describes indeed is a nightmare full of deprivations, nasty smugglers, an overcrowded boat, abduction and hunger.
Omar’s is only one of the many stories collected on the UNHCR website. Reading the horrifying stories of ordinary people who fled war only to fall in the hands of brutal criminals (read Ahmed’s story, from Syria) or enduring other hardships (Kanyarugari’s Story, Rwanda) makes you very humble. Real stories from individual refugees are actually much more impressive than all the pictures we’ve seen of boats packed with people and rows of men, women and children trudging through Europe. Such pictures reduce refugees to a group of people or maybe just a problem that has to be dealt with.
The start of any research
Any research for this challenge should start with reading a fair amount of personal refugee stories to better understand why people flee, what they leave behind, what they have to endure and what their needs, wishes and potentials are. That’s why we we opened a platform for the collection of such personal accounts: sharerefugeestories.tumblr.com. Stories can be uploaded through the free app ExperienceFellow that can be found in the Google Play and Apple App stores.
Here are a few other sites that collected refugee stories too:
in English
www.refugee-action.org.uk
www.redcross.org.uk
www.amnesty.org.au
www.washingtonpost.com
time.com
in French:
www.amnesty.fr
www.france-terre-asile.org (video)
www.lemonde.fr
in Dutch:
www.vluchtelingenwerk.nl
Helen and Yasser
The Guardian recently published a great story in which a young British woman, Helen Pidd, describes her experiences with offering a spare room to Syrian refugee Yasser Al Jassem.
Al Jassem describes his experience too: ‘Another thing that was unusual was the cookery books Helen has in her kitchen. In Syria your mum tells you how to cook, not a book. I also noticed people here wear their outdoor outfits even when they’re home. Why would anyone want to be in jeans when they don’t have to?’
Read the whole story on www.theguardian.com