Do You Stand With Refugees?
If you had to flee your home, what would you take? Food or water for the uncertain journey? Photos of your loved ones? A keepsake of your homeland? Your phone? Your passport?
Each day, war, violence, persecution or oppression force thousands of families to flee their homes. These are people like you and me who leave everything behind -- everything except their hopes for a safer future.
As part of its #WithRefugees campaign last year, UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, produced videos about the heart-wrenching experiences of those forcibly displaced. One of their videos featured a spoken word poem listing what these refugees took with them and why they carried these objects on their search for survival. (To watch this video, go to bit.ly/2cEnmbr.)
When listening to the items, I could imagine children, teenagers, mothers and fathers, grandparents carrying what they could to survive or to give them some solace. It made me remember a post on social media that showed a young teenager, called Eslam, from war-torn Syria, who carried a backpack while fleeing that contained three shirts, jeans, a bracelet and a little teddy bear she later had to leave behind.
I also thought of Rawan Batal, another Syrian teenager, who fled her home with her mother and two siblings. She had to leave everything behind.
"There was no time to grab anything," she told UNHCR. "We had just the clothes we were wearing."
She was 16 years old when she became a refugee in 2013. Later, she reunited with her father and brother and the family walked for several days, crossing into Turkey.
Rawan and Eslam are only two examples of the young people who flee their countries every day. Worldwide, there are about 65 million forcibly displaced persons (including refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people). Of the 21.3 million refugees in the world, the United Nations states that roughly half are under the age of 18.
Teenagers are among the most vulnerable to violence in any refugee population. They sometimes continue experiencing hardships and dangers. Other times, they can recover a semblance of normalcy by studying in refugee camps, while they wait for home to be safe enough to return. They keep their dreams, hopes and will to survive.
On June 20, the United Nations called the global community to observe World Refugee Day "to honor the courage, strength and determination of women, men and children who are forced to flee their homeland under the threat of persecution, conflict and violence."
How can you stand in solidarity and help refugees in their plight? Catholic organizations like Catholic Relief Services, Caritas and Jesuit Refugee Service that provide support in refugee camps and communities around the world suggest some ways to help.
These include learning more about the refugee and migrant crisis, advocating for refugees, using social media to raise awareness and dispel myths, fundraising to support organizations that help refugees locally and abroad, praying for the protection of refugees and for an end to the root causes of violence forcing families to flee, and volunteering at resettlement agencies to help refugees in your area.
"Refugees are people like everyone else, but people who have lost their homes, jobs, relatives and friends due to war," Pope Francis said last year on the eve of World Refugee Day. "Their stories and their faces call us to renew our commitment to create peace in justice. For this reason, we want to be with them: to meet them, welcome them, listen to them, so as to become peacemakers together according to God's will."
The Book of Leviticus called the Israelites to love migrants and refugees and treat them no differently than their neighbors "for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt." As Christians, we have the same call to extend a helping hand to refugees and vulnerable people on the move, for when we do, we meet Jesus -- who himself was part of a refugee family in Egypt.
Maria-Pia Negro Chin is bilingual associate editor at Maryknoll Magazine.
