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The threat of climate change, the competition for resources, and ever growing global inequality have created deepening intractable conflicts. Whether it be Haiti, Darfur, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran or some as yet unknown crisis; mass migrations will be a feature of our future, and we must adjust to this living reality.
I will thus urge you to look beyond the simple numbers and look at the individual. Numbers can illuminate but they also can obscure. Refugees are not numbers, they aren't even just refugees; they are mothers, daughters, fathers, and sons. They are farmers, teachers, engineers, and doctors. They are individuals and most importantly survivors. Each one with a remarkable story that tells a resilience in the face of great loss. They are the most impressive people I have ever meet and also some of the world's most vulnerable. Stripped of their homes and countries, refugees are buffeted from every ill wind that blows across this planet.
While in Iran I got to know some of these young refugees; not only as the most vulnerable people but as the most resilient.
I was walking into the courtyard early one morning and I could hear a young girl running after me calling someone's last name. Not yet used to being called by a title that I had only used to address my grandmother, It took me a few minutes before I realized that she was calling out for me. I turned and immediately saw her whole right arm in a bright green cast. She asked to see me alone and as we walked to a more quiet corner she burst into tears. An Afghan immigrant, her mother was forced to go back to Afghanistan and thus had left her a few months back. She was left in the care of her eldest sister and her husband whom she had married a few months back in the hopes that he could be their savior. She went on to tell me that a few nights back her brother-in law had caught her speaking on the phone with a boy and as a result had violently beaten her, leaving noticeable scars far beyond the extent of her physical injuries. As she couldn't afford to seek medical attention she had quietly slept that night in excruciating pain until she had made it to the center where she was able to seek the proper medical care.
If you see the individual you see the scared young girl who lost her father to the conflict, forced to leave her country, was separated from her mother and had to learn to become independent at an age when most of us still played carelessly in the streets.
I met another amazing young girl whose story is forever engraved in my heart. She had been raped, made to drink her own urine and burned from the waist down in one of the refugee camps. All of that before even becoming a legitimate teenager. She came in hand in hand with her husband who had married her a few years after the incident and I was in awe. Simply looking at her you couldn't tell what she had endured. I couldn't understand how it was that she was still willingly breathing let alone standing as strong as she was having overcome an unimaginable nightmare.
As a post-revolution Iranian myself, I have experienced and know exile, immigration and loss far too well, but that young girl had a depth and strength I will never know.
When i set out on this self seeking journey, I went to Iran to work with these girls selfishly just for me. But these girls have profoundly changed my life. The young girl who overcame the unthinkable abuse; taught me what it means to be brave. Marjaneh Halati the founder of Omid-e-Mehr a strong, selfless and compassionate women who has adopted each and every one of these girls as her own, taught me what it is to be a mother. And the girl with the broken arm in the green cast with a huge smile on her face showed me the strength of an unbreakable spirit. So today I thank them for letting me into their lives.
