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Image of a drowned Syrian boy reveals the sad plight of refugees

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Chinki Sinha
Chinki SinhaSep 04, 2015 | 13:40

Image of a drowned Syrian boy reveals the sad plight of refugees

I also know there are timeless waters, endless seas, and lots of people in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves. 

- Children of the Sea, Edwidge Danticat

A body of a Syrian child washed up on the shores of a Turkish beach. I don't want to know his name but I know he was called Aylan Kurdi. It is a travesty. This death, and his father saying he would sit by the graves until he dies.

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It is the picture that makes me sad. Of the little boy, his face buried in sand. In its absence, freedom becomes even more compelling. They were fleeing Turkey, and were on way to Greece. On a small boat.

The waters of the sea are like an illusion. The skies and the sea meet, and there is no land, and no light. If you ever watched the sea at night, you'd know what I am talking about.

Hope often dismisses reality. Death by the sea is a reality. The sea is endless. Like love. Like hate. It kills.

Someone said the water was thought to be safer than the land. They were on their way to an imagined life free of the curse of war.

They say their asylum papers had been rejected, and they were trying to escape to Canada via Greece. Europe had denied them a chance.

They say the boat capsized in calm waters. But the sea is deceptive. Much like the world. Much like home.

The refugees are people of nowhere. Many years ago, I lived in a town of refugees in upstate New York, and wrote for a newspaper called the Observer-Dispatch. My first assignment was to measure the impact of 9/11 on refugee resettlement programme in the United States, and through this town full of refugees from at least 20 countries, I had decided to tell the story of migration. I was a migrant too, and in a self-imposed exile.

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I had left half-finished stories in Utica.

I went through my journals. And in the winter of 2007, I had written this. In hope, and in dread of the brutal winters here.

"So San Win and Oh Mar will start work next week. The daily drudgery will earn them minimum wages with which they will buy all they want, all they can. But $7.50/hour for 40 hours/week will not take them too far into the aisles....

I am happy for them too. And relieved too. Now at least they can buy shoes and some warm clothes.

In the chilly November months, they wear sandals. When I ask them, they smile. Then they tell me they will buy shoes when they get their first salary.

Sometimes, I wonder if they negotiated for this life.

...

Often I wonder what makes us leave our countries. Often it is war, persecution... Sometimes it is the lure of a better life, free of wants, free of expectations that society heaps on us.

...

I hope Oh Mar and San Win got shoes to get through the harsh winters here.

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And so did Mar Met and his wife and his little kids.

It is their first winter here and they have no idea what they are in for. Today, the first big storm hit us."

Utica is a nowhere place, a city of castaways.

Basically, you could miss the city of Utica. It's Exit 31 A on the Interstate, and once you manage to catch the road, you would come upon the gold dome immediately and on North Genesee Street. From there, you could take any of the streets and enter neighbourhoods that belong to some other faraway place and filled with those who carry the idea of home within, and get packed to distant shores for asylum.

When I had started documenting the refugee experience, I had known little about the complications of integration and assimilation, and the poetic idea of home that could stick to you forever, especially when you were forced out. I had also known little about the resistance to the others coming in. This, I witnessed here. The fear of the other was paramount.

The Somali refugees had taken me to their ramshackle apartment in 2006. They had spoken about the journey to Kenyan refugee camps, and the deaths they witnessed on the way to freedom. To survive, they had to do the unthinkable.

"It was a hot Saturday afternoon. Brazil was playing Australia in soccer world cup. Five of them huddled in front of the small TV in the two-bedroom apartment at 109 Nielson Street. The Somali Bantus were hooked to the game. The year was 2006 and it was summer in Utica.

Utica is home to many such ethnic groups fleeing the war in their countries.

The refugees from at least 23 different countries in 27 years that the refugee centre has been in existence have changed the social fabric of Utica.

They killed Jeylani Hassan's mother after they raped her. And then the soldiers raped his sister and shot his younger brother, seven at the time, because he happened to offend them. As Hassan recalled the days of terror that made escape from Somalia the only option, his eyes seemed to reflect the horror that he witnessed.

The soldiers from Mogadishu, who roamed around killing and raping, had guns.

"You could not even cry. They (soldiers) were scary," he said. As he spoke, his friend Amjad, folded his pants to show bullet marks on his right thigh. He saw his seven brothers being shot at the same time by the soldiers. They had left him for dead in a carnage that left around 5,000 dead in his village. Ahmad, bleeding, crawled 500ft to safety where people rescued him.

There was no escaping the soldiers but by travelling to Kenya. The travel would take days. They had to walk through the deserts, the swamps and fields - without food or water.

"It took seven days. No food, no water. We had like one gallon and 700 people," he said.

Sidi, another refugee from Somalia, said he had no choice but to drink urine as that was the only way to survive.

When the time to leave came, there were no goodbyes even."

I wrote this in my journal. Not every sentence we write make the final cut. Some nights, you go through them, and think about the leftovers.

When the city of Utica got onto its feet, it did so because the refugees stayed.

At one point the bumper stickers had read, "Would the last person to leave Utica please turn out the lights". Only 65,000 remained in the city to turn on the lights every evening.

Out of these, 15,000 had come from all over the world through the refugee centre. The population had already halved when the revival began. Slowly, the economy felt the surge of blood.

With all this Utica's identity too underwent a cosmetic change. It became a town of refugees.

Refugees kept pouring in... At least till the twin towers were struck.

There was the "others" factor fuelled by 9/11 and added to by the outsourcing debate and peoples' ideas that refugees were a drain on America's resources.

The numbers of refugees coming into the city dropped suddenly after the government passed the Patriot Act and the Material Support Provision, which makes screening very strict and thus limits the number of refugees coming into United States.

More than two million refugees were taken in by the United States since the Refugee Act of 1980.

Many people don't understand the way third country resettlement programmes work, and now when we live in a climate of fear, and wars, and economic volatility, humanity is the last thing on our minds. I know the picture that is prompting too many reactions will be forgotten soon.

It is an opportunity at best. For those that want to sound responsible, and angry. But this anger is misplaced, and so is the audience.

The question is if we will ever let others in. They say Britain took only 50 Syrian refugees. They say the US took none.

To me, it is abandonment. It is like standing on a boat in the raging seas and seeing no horizon. Abandonment is a verb. No one will ever fully understand abandonment. It happens to all. It remains inexplicable. It is the response which this story consists of. Emotional and physical.

The refugees taught me many things. I stumbled upon the Palestinian poet in exile one evening when I missed home.

"Nothing carries me for a while, or makes me carry an idea: not promises, nor nostalgia. What am I to do, then? What am I to do without exile, without a long night staring at the water?"

They made me understand that beyond the language, and its limitations, there are smiles and tears.

...

In 2014, I made the journey back. The train passed by abandoned warehouses, and other spaces like the shuttered Harmon & Electric Diesel Shops. Red brick buildings boarded up, abandoned.

Grass grew tall here. Wild, and abandoned. I have learned that wild things are often abandoned.

From the hotel window, I regarded the city of Utica. I walked out, and took a turn on Rutgers Street, and found the house where the Afghan family had lived. In the last six years, the house had been through a transformation. The youngest daughter was now in school, and the two brothers had grown up, and joined the army and had just returned from spending months in Afghanistan. Bas Bibi was now in college and drove her own car. The younger son offered to drive me to the Bosnian cafe where I spent many evenings listening to songs playing from an old jukebox, and drinking coffee.

He fetched two beers, and we sat outside and he told me his story. From where I had left. He went back to his country, and he saw the streets and the mountains, and he tried in his own capacity to build bridges. He was the other. He will always be the other. No matter where he went, he said.

I heard their stories once again. The stories of death, and courage, and survival, and of unbelonging as they sang the obituary of home. When they are at sea, they don't know if they will find a shore. I think I understand disappointment now.

Betrayals always hurt. Of the state, of home, of the people, of us.

Yes, we are all responsible. But what are you or I going to do about it?

And I remember the story of the Haitian boy on the boat to another shore away from his country fleeing persecution that Danitcat writes in Krik? Krak! It is called "Children of the Sea". The boy dies.

"I'll go to them now as though it was always meant to be, as though the very day that my mother birthed me, she had chosen me to live life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, those who have escaped the chains of slavery to form a world beneath the heavens and the blood-drenched earth where you live."

The three-year-old boy became the child of the sea. Because the world abandoned him, and the sea took him in.

Last updated: September 08, 2015 | 12:27
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