Welcome

Questions

 

I've been fortunate, I will admit. 

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I am not sleeping on a sidewalk with gravel as my pillow, nor am I walking for miles on end to find a piece of bread or a bed or a shed in which to rest for a few minutes from the sun that feels too bright on our darkest days.

Well, not anymore at least.

And that’s not to say that sleeping on the streets because your home has been stolen from you is not respectable

Or courageous

Or equal to those that have a fire on the winter nights and a table filled with food at supper

Because it is. It is so admirable and strong that such strength surpasses the comprehensible.

 

But while I know that life like the back of my hand, I have come into a new life.

I like to call it A Life Of Questions.

Interviews and lunches and photographers and sometimes even TV reporters!

All because of my story.

A story worth sharing and a story about struggle and pain, but I think it is sought after for the hope that I have and the so-called “happy ending” that I have encountered. And yes, I am lucky. People write to me and they come to my home and they call me and they invite me to their studios to ask me about my story. To ask me questions. What is it like being a refugee? What was the hardest moment? Are you feeling happy now or lost? Why are you a refugee? What advice would you give to other refugees? Questions questions and too long of an answer.

 

So today, if it is acceptable to you, I would like to escape my story for a bit and fly away from the questions i continually receive, and I would like to ask you a question. One that I have never been asked but think about every day.

 

If you had to leave right now, to uproot your current life from the tree it so comfortably relies upon, and escape, what would you take with you?

You can take one thing.

What would it be?

 

One might grab a locket from their grandmother

Or a favorite book

Or a toy from their childhood memories.

Someone might take a loaf of bread

Or a Passport, definitely a Passport.

 

But others might take their love

Their patience

Their tears

Their outrageous laughter

Or their smile.

 

They might take the hope that unites my people in a bond so tight and brave and fearless that not even a government or a gun could break it.

They might take their intelligence, for my people are educated. They are so smart and their knowledge is not limited by their journey, but is increasingly powerful.

 

We gather up the seeds dropped by this world and create the most beautiful, complicated, incredible flower of belief.

 

War may flow from the arms of our borders, but we find peace in our fingertips.

 

What we bring with us when we must leave is just as important as what we left behind. It is just as important as our footsteps in the sand and our durable lungs that bring us to our destinations. Because whatever we choose, whatever you choose, to bring with you on your journey into the unknown becomes and shapes your journey towards what eventually becomes known.

 

So i ask you to think of what we bring with us, rather than what we leave behind. What we can offer, rather than what we could take away. Whether you think of the brains and the talents or the cigarettes cases and photographs, think not just of our struggle, but of our hope for we, just as you, are human beings.

 

And lastly, I think that if you compared what you might bring to what we have, you would find similarities. This issue, “this crisis” as many like to call it, is about stripping away your fears and doubts and pressures of society and visiting what makes you human. What makes us all human. For we are one in the same world.