Meera Kaul | Nov 8, 2018
In the cold winter night of January 19, 1990, my life changed forever.
I was in the middle of my school exam and not expecting to go anywhere. My mother woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me to get ready to travel.
I was dressed with all the important documents and jewelry under my clothes; hidden under several sets of layers of jumpers. I was then finally seated at the back of a car so that my life could be saved from gun-wielding terrorists. This was the start of my journey as a refugee.
For most people fleeing wars and violence, the most complicated decision is whether fleeing to save their lives is worth the chance. Not all are lucky to have the resources that I had.
My family is highly educated. Both my parents and my grandparents were college educated. My family was politically mobilized, My extended family was highly educated. They were doctors, engineers, and lawyers and well connected globally. This was resourceful. We had homes, savings, and access. There was indeed still an arduous path to rebuild. But our education did not suffer. We did not have health issues. I was indeed a privileged refugee.
We grew up overnight. We saw life and learned lessons of life first hand. We learned to be ready for all eventualities. We were not in our palatial home anymore. Nor did we play in our beautiful garden or pluck fruits from our trees. It was hot. There were strange insects and environs. In those environs, we were misfits. But we were grateful. We had each other. Because we could have lost our lives.
My mother was a witness to a cold-blooded shooting of 4 men in uniform, the stark images of which she still carries with her. For my brother and I, we were separated by cities for the sake of our education, only to finally meet 12 years later. We have memories of home in stories we tell each other on video chats ever so often. The little words, the sentences, the episodes between us when we were growing up; that is what binds us since we have nothing else in between.
There were many other people who left the terrorist violence we were escaping, not all of them were as lucky as we were. Thousands of them did not have homes to go to. They did not have education or skills as backups or families who could support them. They did not have the avenues to pursue we could. Many of them stayed in camps for more than 25 years trying to stabilize themselves and find a way to address the trauma of losing their home, their loss of livelihood, their future and the complete loss of direction.
Exodus due to a threat to life has a deep-rooted psychological impact on people who flee such places.
Contrary to the belief of people who are anti-migrant; the state of mind of immigrants and refugees who are fleeing the violence, regardless of their homelands, ages, genders or backgrounds, is actually that of loneliness, missing, longing, sorrow, and feeling like a stranger or outsider.
Refugees are not happy leaving their homes. They just have to. They need a chance to live their lives safely. Educate their children. Save their lives.
Link source:http://bit.ly/2Wqnq3V
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