Exploring Life as a Refugee

Imagine not having a safe spot. A place where you don't feel protected. A place where you're not frightened. A place where you're not scared of dying if you don't leave immediately. In Refugee by Alan Gratz three characters are refugees in different times, going through the same experience of fleeing the life they knew. The 1930’s: Josef, a Jewish boy living through the Holocaust, must flee Germany on a ship headed to Cuba. 1994: Isabel, a Cuban girl living through riots and protests, flees Cuba on a makeshift boat after the Soviet Union collapsed. 2015: Mahmoud, a Syrian boy living through the Syrian Civil War, must leave Syria with his family after his home is bombed. All three of these realistic characters are experiencing the same journey,

‘The Happiest Refugee’ discusses various concepts including the effects of war, the trauma that refugees experience, their desire to contribute to society and our negative attitudes towards them. After the war, South Vietnamese soldiers and their families were captured by the North Vietnamese Communists and held in labour camps. Some of these prisoners were eventually released (after 1976), however, they had no right to education, employment or government supplied food rations. If Ahn had not left this oppressive environment, he would have grown up in extreme poverty and would be a very different person due to the trauma that

No one is prepared for war and the most challenging decisions you will have to make to survive. Although each character in Refugee, by Alan Gratz, is from a different time and place, they each share similar hardships and challenges in their experiences, such as they were all forced from their homes, they all lose a family member, and their problems begin in their own country.

It is a warm day in Tegucigalpa, the sun peeking through the cracks of the beat down building Lourdes calls home. But today begins a new chapter of her life, a life in the United States. It is January 29, 1989. Lourdes is a divorced single mother of two. She works hard to provide an income for her family, but it is not enough to purchase education and food for her kids. Like countless other women in the same situation, she decides that she will go to America and make money to send home to her children. Although she plans to leave for only a year, she will not return.

Similarily examined in GBTWYCF, the participant’s genuine “refugee experience” allows them to identify social understanding about the fact of other people’s lifestyles and how they withstand the most severe of individual adversities. An extensive structure taken of Raye weeping followed by a remote taken of the moon enhances her concern towards Maisara “I’ve had issues holding child birth through…I do know where she’s arriving from…” examines how by your same circumstances as others, people are able to empathise.

Many people are from war stricken areas overseas looking for refuge in the United States. In numerous ways the reader can see a cultural difference in the way that Americans feel about the way that folks from overseas fit in here in the United States. Luma’s friends were afraid because, “a Muslin women from Jordan wouldn’t fit in Down in Dixie” (24). This shows the reader how a large amount of people may view those from across the sea. In a different instance, the author switches to a different family and the reader sees more insight on how the world is disconcerting those trying to start a new life. Just as Beatrice, a newly single mother of three sons, is walking home from work, “A man was following her…she felt the man’s hand on her arm…Beatrice let go of the bag…and she took off running herself in the opposite direction” (31). The reader also sees an instance of police brutality towards a Nigerian immigrant. All of these instances show the trouble that those from overseas may be experiencing. Now as the book goes on the reader gets a sense of the community around those and how those first settled

The second reason is simply a generation difference. One might assume that due to the very different upbringings and the societies that the two were brought up in, that very conflicting morals and values may have been molded. Celia grew up in a Cuba under the rule of a dictator-like, oppressive leader. Celia saw Cuba’s true poverty stricken state and long for a new regime. Reasons for Lourdes’s rebellious attitude toward her mother and Cuba in general are much more abundant and clear. Though Lourdes was raised in a very similar society as of that of her mother’s upbringing, but the severity of the government that ruled during her childhood produced a different view of the country all together. Lourdes is a very strong, independent woman whom has man complaints of the method of rule in Cuba. “Lourdes never accepted the life designated

This essay is about the universal refugee experience and the hardships that they have to go through on their journey. Ha from Inside Out and Back Again and other refugees from the article “Children of War” all struggle with the unsettling feeling of being inside out because they no longer own the things that mean the most to them. Ha and the other refugees all encounter similar curiosities of overcoming the finding of that back again peaceful consciousness in the “new world” that they are living in .

For the podcast, I interviewed Lina Abdulnoor, with the intention of exploring the intricacies of refugeehood by analyzing Lina’s refugee experience. Lina lived in Iraq with her family until they began receiving death threats due to their religious beliefs. Convinced that they needed to flee the country to survive, they left Iraq as refugees. After leaving Iraq, they settled in Jordan, where they waited two years until the U.N. to approve their request to move to the U.S. in 2012. Lina and her family initially settled in Virginia, where she experienced culture shock as she adapted to American culture and the English language. However, Lina did not feel accepted in Virginia; her experiences in the state led her to think that Americans treated her according to negative stereotypes of Iraqis. After living in Virginia for several months, Lina and her family chose to resettle in San Diego, California, which harbored a larger Iraqi population than Virginia did. Supported by San Diego’s Iraqi community and various refugee organizations, Lina flourished, and she currently studies at UCSD while holding a stable job.

The entire time I was reading Enrique’s Journey, I kept asking myself, “What would I do?” If my mother left me to go to another country when I was five, would I try to find her years later? Would the abandonment and neglect by my family members lead me to resort to drugs? Would I make an eighth attempt to cross the border of the United States after my first seven attempts failed? These, and many other questions, ran through my head as I read Enrique’s Journey, the story of a Honduran teenage boy’s attempt to reunite with his mother, Lourdes, after she leaves him for the United States. Lourdes, a single mother, leaves her children with obviously good intentions— she wants to get a better job and send money back to her children, but it is hard not to resent her a little. As I was reading, I kept trying to think of ways Lourdes could have stayed with her family in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and still have sufficiently provided for them. Maybe there could have been a way, but Lourdes obviously did not think there was. Leaving her family is not easy for Lourdes; she cannot even take a picture of Enrique with her because it would make her too sad, but she feels that this is the only way to give her children more than she had.

“ She can barely afford food for him and his sister Belky who is seven. She’s never been able to buy them a toy or birthday present.” Nazario 4 This detail is important because it shows us how urgent their situation is. It gives us insight to why should would abandon her children and make the dangerous journey to the United States. Although, it seems harsh to leave your children behind we, as readers, now understand how it tough the situation is. This is heart-breaking because Lourdes has to leave her loved ones to survive because her children feel abandoned.

Finally she felt that she was treated horribly “I was always well employed, but never allowed to feel part of the local Quebec or larger Canadian society”(71). all of these things made one of the sisters feel upset about America, even though the other one liked

Ha’s life as a refugee is a life experience is something that only the strong can go through, and her entire family made it. When refugees flee home, it is because of fear that their family will be torn apart by the war when they leave home, family, friends, memories, basically the perspective of the person is leaving what they desired. Then when they finally do find a home, (not all), they are greeted with new challenges, one of many is that acceptance in their new home, some people probably don’t want to make a living in their new home, “But life happens wherever you are, whether you make it or not”. But when people turn “inside out” they feel empty inside and everything is useless, they have to start over from square one and become “back again”. When they become happy again and accept what has happened to them, so they can move forward in life. This book is mostly about a girl with her family who was in a war, so they left of fear of being torn apart by the war because they will be safer than where they are at in the moment, Saigon Vietnam, but are greeted with challenges in the Alamba U.S.A.

The subject of this interview is a 56 years old woman from Cuba. At the age of 22 she left her native country to start a new life in the U.S. Before her arrival in the US, the interview subject

From 1991 over one-sixth of Bhutan’s people flee their country and take a shelter in Nepal, India and other countries around the world. The large populations of Bhutanese refugee are called lhotshamps, an ethnic group, who were forced to leave their country in the early 1990s. Among 105,000 Bhutanese I’m one of them. I was born in a hut made of bamboo, food rations, and dirt roads. We are hostile, unsettled, unsure of who we are and what future held for us. I often think can we ever able to get rid out of the tag called “refugee” would my life ever changed, while ongoing tussled between mind and outside world finally in 2008 United States open a door for us to settled in the United States a “promised land” with full of struggle in 2009 we came here at Grand Forks. As I was growing up in the refugee camp I have seen a countless number of violence, crimes, injuries, and rebuff that words can’t be described. Most importantly death of people from a disease that can be a cure if, we have enough facilities such as, advanced medical training and hospitals. Although during my early childhood I have seen so much of maltreatment and practices, I always thought of having a career in health-related profession because I wanted to invest and improve the lives of individuals so that their children don't have to orphans, forced to work when their parent died, nor they have to beg for food. When I was 10 years old, my friend and I were trying to climb up the mango tree and I step in