Schlagwörter
Background: Recently I met with the UNHCR spokesperson who told me she met an inspiring young man in one of the refugee camps in Lebanon. The situation there is tense, the little country in the Middle East with four million people has taken in over one million Syrian refugees. We are facing now the most severe refugee crisis since the Second World War. But I don’t want to bore you with numbers, I want to tell the personal story of one young refugee and I decided to write him a letter.
Dear Hany,
You will probably wonder who’s this strange person that’s writing you. I know we haven’t met and maybe we never will. We come from two different worlds: I am a 22-year old Austrian woman living in Vienna and you are a young man from Syria living in a refugee camp in Lebanon. The realities we face every day are very different. I am living in one of the countries with the highest quality of living and I am able to study what I want.
I am passionate about what I am doing, full of ideas and plans for a career and hopefully one day finding a job that I love. Often I get upset about the little things and rant for hours about topics that I cannot even remember the next day. You on the other hand have to struggle everyday to cope with the harsh reality of being driven out of your nation, your home and losing the easy-going life and the prosperous future every young person should have. From what I heard about you, all you want to have is the opportunity to learn, to study, to have a future.
I am not telling you this to make you feel bad, I am telling this to you because I want you to know that you are not forgotten. You are not one of the statistics that the media presents us everyday when they talk about Syria. You are not a faceless, nameless person that many western people pity for a moment when they turn on the evening news. Everything you are and everything you go through inspires me. You may think you haven’t gotten much and what is this silly girl talking about that doesn’t know you a bit?
Maybe I am out of line, maybe this is not my place, but today somebody told me your story. It touched me deeply, it shook me to the core and I knew that I had to tell your story to other people. From what I’ve heard you risked your life to get something that is totally normal for me: a school education. Threatened by bombs and danger you still attended school. Asked what one thing you took with you when forced to flee you answered “my high school diploma”.
Having the possibility to go to school and enjoy education freely and safely is something that many schoolkids here don’t value, because they just can’t imagine it differently. I am grateful for living in the very safe country of Austria, but also I know that many people (me sometimes included) take important things for granted.
We are used to stroll around the streets even at night, go grocery shopping to find everything we need in a store or reward ourselves with a little luxury sometimes. We worry about how we can afford that new car we are sure to need so badly, we complain about our neighbours that are too loud and are very often dissatisfied with the weather. Sure there is also poverty and inequity in our country. But the problem is that our society is often numb to the problems people like you face in the world. We cannot imagine a life in fear, we cannot understand what you are dealing with on a daily basis.
It is not always out of ignorance, it is because we are swamped by catastrophic headlines and we only have access to certain information that doesn’t reflect the person behind a war in a conflict area. But here are you. And you are fighting every day against the difficult perspective of living in a refugee camp together with hundreds, no thousands of other people.
“If I am not a student, I am nothing” is what you said to the UNHCR spokesperson that met with you and you said it in good English that you learned yourself out of reading excessively Dan Brown novels.
I so wish I could help you. I know it sounds naive, but if I had the money and the possibility there would be nothing more rewarding for me to hop on a plane right now and try to enable you of getting the education that you deserve. It is not out of pity, it is your right to demand a future. How is it fair that two young energetic people have such different opportunities in life? How is it possible that the random factor of where I am born determines what life I can live – if I can live a life in dignity. You shouldn’t worry about getting the education you so desperately want, you shouldn’t even have to ask for it, it should be granted to you as a human right. Why do we officially have human rights for everyone, if the majority of the world is always excluded from their basic rights?
I know you are not the one to answer all my questions, it is not your fault that your country is torn apart by war and mine isn’t. What I want to tell you is – you are not alone. There are people thinking about you, sending their hopes and messages to you from another part of the world. They care about you although you never met them. I care about your future. I care about the future of all refugees with so much potential that is wasted due to stupid bureaucracy, discrimination and inequality.
Until I can actually afford helping you to reach your dreams, all I can do for the moment is to send you my message and my support. I know it is not much, but it is what I can give you in a first step.
Thank you Hany, for being brave. Thank you for being an example. You are an everyday hero.
Yours,
Julia
Photo credit: UNHCR
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