Viet Nam Human Rights
A Refugee Dream of a Place Called Home
22/6/19
On World Refugee Day, personal reflections of a young Palestinian from the Gaza Strip Mohammed Eid* is from Rafah Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip.I am a refugee, born to a refugee family. I was granted that status on the day I came into this world. I was not aware of what had happened before then. I did not fight any battle, I did not threaten anyone. I did not even choose my own race or ethnicity. I just came to this world to find myself a displaced person.
Being a refugee means, I am a stranger on every spot on this planet. Some see me as a burden on the people of the hosting country. I drink their water, I eat their food, and I breathe their air. Day after day, their resources are less and less because of me, the alien person who came from outside. Maybe that explains why I never had access to education or healthcare, and I will never have access to work in the future.
Not being welcomed at one place, my family decided to travel to another. One expulsion after another, one deportation after another, we roamed the planet looking for one spot to claim. We found none.
Very often, I felt as if we came to the wrong planet, but it was the only one. We decided to return to the place we once called home, we were stopped at a man-built wall called a border and sent to a refugee concentration camp. We were told it was a temporary solution but we learned that temporary solutions can often last forever.
As internally displaced people, we were assigned a monthly food package by a United Nations agency. It allowed us to survive, thanks to donors who shared their money and food with us. My childhood memories? Standing for hours in food lines, moving from one shelter to another, burying loved ones and struggling with disease and health problems.
Life for me has never been stable. Yet I have always dreamed of a place called home. I have often stood by the walls that keep us inside the camps and peeped through holes in them. What my eyes took in was another world. I saw open space and fields. I felt the fresh breeze on my face. I imagined myself at home – in a place where I belonged to the earth, to the sky, to the rocks, to the sand, to the trees, to the hills and to the breeze. A place where I would be welcomed as a human being. To me, home is like nothing else. Today, the world observes World Refugee Day. On this day, we do not celebrate. We are reminded that there is no place for us in this world. We just remember the moral failure of our human race. On the World Refugee Day, I will only make one wish: that all those around the world forced from their homes, longing for home, will be refugees no more. Footnote: I've just graduated my double major master's program in Global Studies from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and International Development from Duke University. I'm now still in Chapel Hill, North Carolina waiting for my certificate and transcript to be issued and at the same time I'm working on a temporary job with Duke University on designing programs on training youth from the Middle East and North Africa on leadership and democracy.
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All comments [ 20 ]
Outside each plastic-panelled shelter, you see pairs of shoes. Many are muddy and dusty, evidence of the long journey taken to get here. They sit lined up outside door after door, a glimpse of the people within – parents, children, aunts and infants, who fled their homes in fear.
Taking off your shoes at the door is a familiar custom, one many of us share. And here in a refugee camp, it demonstrates something powerful – a deep respect for the idea of home, however tenuous or temporary.
For many refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war – a conflict that has raged since 2011 – home is a flat-pack shelter.
Moving into a shelter means this might be your home for a while, and being able to close a door behind you – and lock it – means so much
Being able to be alone or with your family inside a controlled space is important, especially for people who have experienced such trauma
They need to feel safe, be able to close that door, and just relax for a bit.
Since 2015, UNHCR has ordered about 15,000 Better Shelters, which have been delivered to seven countries. But two of those countries – Greece and Iraq – particularly illustrate the ways in which Syrians have responded to the crisis and how these shelters are housing refugees from just a few days up to many years.
There are currently about 65 million forcibly displaced people in the world, and about half of them are children.
During the ongoing Syrian conflict, many Syrians have escaped to neighbouring countries. Hundreds of thousands end up in refugee camps, waiting for the war to end.
They live in limbo, with little freedom to move around and no access to jobs or education. And while they wait, they do what any of us would – they make their Better Shelters feel more like home.
Of course, we can’t compare this housing unit with our real home back in Syria, but there is a huge difference compared to living in a tent
All of these symbolic actions and items really make you feel more at home
These might be specific to certain families or cultures, but I think they’re very essential. They wash the shelter. A lot of people put rugs or carpets outside to remind themselves of home – and safety. They take pride in their home, even if it’s not one they chose.
In Syria when the planes came, the kids woke up and cried and screamed. This was from the war.
Even though they stay just a short time, they make an effort to carve out personal space for their family – likely the first safe space since their escape
Could you offer temporary shelter to someone forced to flee their country who does not have the means to support themselves? If so, you could be a host with Room for Refugees.
We promote opportunities for refugees around the world to become self-reliant and achieve a better quality of life.
Most refugee households desperately want the opportunity to provide for themselves and their families – to work, to use their skills, and make decisions about their finances, their lives, and their futures.
The Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative aims to change the way that refugee assistance is designed, funded and measured, creating the opportunities for refugees to transition more quickly from emergency aid to socioeconomic inclusion.
For those who have been forced to flee, Better Shelters help families to create a safe space with the feeling of home, and begin to build the foundations for a better future.
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