Giving a voice to the families fleeing death and despair
A one-year-old Syrian baby dies in a forest where his desperate parents have been hiding for six week, the youngest victim of the refugee crisis playing out on the eastern doorstep of Europe.
Thousands of men, women and children seeking asylum have been trapped in freezing conditions on the Polish border as the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, is accused of deliberately engineering the crisis in retaliation for sanctions imposed on his regime.
The refugees? They are fleeing poverty and conflict in places such as Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq but are now political pawns. While the headlines focused on the political wrangling, all I could think about was the individual stories of these people, and why they took the harrowing journey to such an uncertain fate.
Some would tell you they are here to take our jobs, benefit from our freedoms, while refusing to give up their religions and cultures in contradiction of our own.
In most cases, though, this could not be further from the truth. I know because I have sat with them in refugee camps and heard their stories.
However, my first experience of refugees was much closer to home. My mother is from Aberdeen and my father is Lebanese Kurdish, but I grew up in Australia. Five of dad’s brothers and sisters came to live with us in our tiny house because they had to flee from the Israeli-Lebanese conflict. Their apartment was bombed. They lost everything.
I had a passion for the arts, especially theatre, and began a career as an actor. But the pull to go to the Middle East was strong due to these early experiences, so I joined The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Naively, I thought I was going to go save people. I went over in 2008, later working for Médecins du Monde in 2010. I was there when the Arab Spring started. People in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain and Syria were rising up against regimes that had robbed them of their basic human rights. What we saw was some leaders killing their own people for protesting.
I moved from country to country and visited many camps during that time, including one on the Libyan and Tunisian border where women and children were seeking safety from Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal soldiers, who were raping and killing. My job was to sit with these people, understand what had happened to them, determining what they needed in the hope we could get them medicine and food. There’s never an easy way to prepare yourself to listen to the traumatic events that come with having your house bombed, your family killed in front of you. There was a real disbelief combined with fear, loss and grief of watching whole villages go up in flames.
The impact started to have a detrimental effect on me, physically and mentally. Their stories stayed with me long after I returned to my home which was, by then, in Scotland and I felt a duty to share them the best way I know how – through art. My new play, Revolution Days, which opens in Edinburgh this week, is an opportunity to create more understanding about why people leave their beloved homelands in search of safety.
It’s so easy to paint a picture of a victim, but these brave people are searching for equality, human rights, democracy and freedom. Too often they find nothing but more death and despair.