The refugees are us

Today is the Bloggers Unite for Refugees day and here are my two little stories that helped me see who and what refugees really are.

1983, Sudan.

I was 17, no money, no direction, no goal, basically just following my own nose, running away from life that I found intolerable, hoping to find a meaning down the road. Alone, an alien in an alien land. I was a refugee of a sort. My second initiation into the adult life. I was already quite a few months on the journey and I found myself in Wau, a village in the forests of SouthWest Sudan. There were not many ways leading to or from Wau and I thought, having travelled to Wau on the roof of the train from the North, that the logical direction to proceed would be south, to Juba. The only way was the jungle track and the only means of transport were occasional trucks. I managed to get on the UNICEF truck driving refugees to Juba. So there were 45 of us, for five days on this truck through the jungle, sweating together and chasing away the tsetse flies during the days and sitting around fires, fighting mosquitoes and sleeping on the bare ground somewhere in the wilderness during nights. We were all without belongings, with our hopes only. Me, a young confused hippie wannabe and them, children, mothers, fathers, old people, youth, literate and illiterate, healthy and sick, merry and sad. We were all together in this. No difference at all. We were all in troubles and we were breathing as one. A community indeed. And this community took a good and loving care of me, the bewildered outsider with pale skin, long blondish hair, silently gazing somewhere distant.

2003, Iran.

On our way back from our magical overland family journey from Europe to India, me, my wife and our three kids stopped, for the second time, in the desert town Bam in the eastern Iran, at the beginning of the Baluchistan desert. We already knew the place and we enjoyed stocking up on yummy local cookies with dates (best cookies on the planet!), strolling around, talking to locals… We knew Bam and we liked it, although we have had a traffic accident there a few months before and our van finally lost it’s European shiny virginity. It was sad to know that this was our last time in this lovely and hospitable place.

After many weeks and many kilometres we finally arrived home and only a few days subsequent to our arrival, we woke up one morning in our warm and cosy apartment, and learned the shocking news: a massive earthquake devastated the city of Bam. 40.000 people died. 40.000!

Tears started to roll down our cheeks, hearts were pounding, we were crying. For us this was suddenly not only a number, one of the many numbers we hear on the news all the time: 15.000 died over there, 25.000 left without shelter on the other continent, 100.000 dying of hunger yet on another one… No. This was real for us, no way of shrugging with our shoulders and denying it. Yet, nobody else understood. For our friends here in Europe, the 40.000 killed people of Bam was just an abstract number. For us it was pain, sadness, awareness of our city being demolished, our people being killed.

After these and other personal experiences that have widened my horizons, I want to scream out into the world: “The refugees are us!” It is not them somewhere over there, it is us. It is our mothers, it is our fathers, it is our sisters and our brothers, it is our children… And yes, it is ourselves.

Refugees can not be disconnected from us, the lucky ones. They are us. How can we sleep peacefully and happily, knowing they are out there?

So, my question is: what do I do about that?