On Refugees: More Than Escape

Nothing seemed to bring about more rage in her than finding him with a newspaper; she’d rush at him in fury and snatch it from his hands. She used to be so tenderhearted–one of warmest people he’d ever met. She had welcomed him into her home and instructed him in his early reading lessons, but had become a stone–convinced by her husband’s warning against his learning.

“He should know nothing but to obey,” he reprimanded the boy and his wife, “and to do as he is told to do.” Anything more than that would make him unfit for them, and there would be no keeping him; for learning would make him immediately unmanageable, rebellious–even dangerous. Plus, he would grow terribly unhappy–a nuisance with which no one needed to be bothered.

The very decided manner in which the man spoke convinced the boy that he could rely confidently on the results of his learning. Whatever was kept hidden in books was to be sought because it would make him unfit to keep–the outcome the man most dreaded and the boy most desired. He was shown the door, the gateway to freedom from beneath the man’s tyranny. However trying the challenge, he decided to learn to read and write–his very life depended on it.

On his errands, he’d sneak a book and take a piece of bread along with him. He’d finish quickly, just in time to exchange a lesson for bread from one of the street boys who could read. With chalk, he’d scratch letters onto brick walls and pavement and copy the words from a spelling book until they looked just right.

It wasn’t long after he’d learned to read that the discontentment forecasted through his learning rushed over him. His bondage now had words, yet no remedy. He was tormented by the ache for freedom, yet all the more determined to have it one day.

At sixteen, he met two men who wanted to read and write, but like him, they weren’t permitted. He devoted himself to teaching them in secret. Friends got word of it, and in time, over forty people began to sneak weekly into their makeshift school, hoping with all their hearts to learn to read. The great light shed on their mental darkness was–to them–well worth a wretched beating should they be caught.

Decades later, this boy became one of the most prolific writers, orators, and intellectuals of his day, advising presidents and lecturing thousands both at home and as a diplomat. It was he who held the highest appointed public post in Washington. It was he who became the first African American citizen nominated for Vice Presidency. And it was he who was the most prominent abolitionist and civil rights advocate in American history.

His name was Frederick Douglass. And he was a runaway slave.

Out of all his accomplishments and positions, he recalled the humble days teaching fellow slaves in a makeshift school as the sweetest engagement to which his whole life was blessed; for it was his greatest privilege to make them fit to forge difficult passes into free states, as the illiterate and unlearned were left vulnerable and more susceptible to capture and torture. Likewise, his own education was the means to his own freedom–and later, the freedom of 3 million enslaved people through his paramount role in Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

"Proceeding to tell him who I was, and what I was doing, he promptly, but kindly, stopped me, saying, ‘I know who you are, Mr. Douglass [...] Sit down. I am glad to see you.’" 

-Douglass, on President Lincoln after their meeting

Douglass understood that the unlearned mind was an injustice that begot injustice. “It’s easier to build strong children,” he noted, “than to repair broken men.”  And, indeed, he is evidence of this–that education can shift an impossible current, free people, and change an entire nation.

It makes me stop and think. With the millions of people displaced and enslaved today by war, are we–as a well-intentioned international community–so attuned to meeting immediate needs with measurable results that we are blind to what might come in the next century?

Are we blind to the obvious repercussions of millions of children growing up without so much as a primary and secondary education? Are we blind to the power of education in shifting an impossible current, freeing people, and changing the future of nations? Education during displacement is not a new concern, but it is certainly an increasingly relevant one, as the world faces mass exoduses of people in recent years unlike any other time in history.

At the end of 2015, the U.N’s refugee agency reported that the number of displaced people, asylum-seekers, and those uprooted within their own country totaled 65.3 million people globally–or one out of every 113 people on earth, compared to 59.5 million people only one year prior. “It is the first time in the organization’s history that the threshold of 60 million has been crossed”–reaching its largest figure since World War II, roughly equal to the population of the United Kingdom. (UNHCR)

And in Iraq alone 4.7 million people out of the 10 million in need of humanitarian assistance are children–1 in 3 children–numbers that are rising quickly as the conflict there continues. From within the country, 3.3 million have been displaced, and virtually half of them are children (UNICEF). And children of war are the most vulnerable to abduction, enslavement, recruitment into fighting, and sexual violence.

Education has the power to fortify young refugees for their unforeseen future in the same way it did 19th Century American slaves as they forged dangerous passes to freedom. Regular engagement with committed teachers and peer relationships provided through schooling can be a lifesaving intervention for refugees right now, while also serving to guard their futures. Without a doubt, it is a personal catastrophe to forgo education during displacement, but millions–even hundreds–going without education creates a civil catastrophe and devastation that extends well past the current decade.

Of course, schools–specifically in Iraq–are not equipped to handle the ongoing influx of students because of the strain on their already limited resources. Schools and teachers are overextended. We have to give attention and commitment to the acute and assiduous work of educating children to strengthen the backbone of a country towards self-sustainment and needed change.

Lastly, it’s worth considering who among the children uprooted by war are the next national leaders, thinkers, doctors, scientists, and great poets...the Frederick-Douglass-types. They need only a hand and means to learn and grow despite their current circumstances. Perhaps it is they who are most equipped to lead and influence us all, not in spite of their current circumstance, but because of it.

Please consider giving to The Refuge Initiative in their efforts on this front. They have built a school in Soran, Iraq to educate up to 600 IDP children from Mosul, Fallujah, and the Sinjar region in Iraq.

“Books, not bombs, are tangibly changing the course of Iraq.”
–Tim Buxton Iraq Country Director, The Refuge Initiative."

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
by Frederick Douglass, 1845

What My Camera Made Me Do in Iraq

It was the first time I’d ever been to the Middle East.  Oddly enough, much of it felt familiar. 

I wondered at first if that was because perhaps I was numb or simply unaware.  Sure, a plate of kabobs was new and heavenly, but it wasn't nearly as exotic as I imagined it would be.  And a stroll through the bazaar felt unusually more normal than not.  Even in the photographs I shot, a sense of commonality was always present between the subject and me.  I don’t know what I was expecting of the people of Iraqi Kurdistan—if anything at all—but familiarity was absolutely not it.

The day I arrived, Tim Buxton drove the “long way” from Erbil International Airport to Soran because he said the Kurdish countryside at that time of the year was a sight no one should miss.  And goodness, he was right!  The mountains flaunted her coat of late April green.  

I met Tim’s wife Sarah, and their colleagues Billy and Dawn Ray, along with a few others for the first time that evening at a rooftop dinner overlooking what looked more like the American Southwest than the Middle East.  Together these good people are raising their families in Soran and running The Refuge Initiative, which is a division of World Orphans.  I had come to photograph and write stories about the town and the work they are doing in caring for the displaced Yazidi and Shabak people who fled ISIS two years ago.

Now, in my documentary work, I choose not to photograph anyone before I have engaged with him or her, and they have agreed it’s okay for me to shoot.  It’s my conviction that not doing so is to take that which is not given to me—or, to steal.  And stealing by no means authentically captures the person in front of the lens, which is always my goal.  I know it’s impossible to sit over chai before every shot; but it’s not impossible to open myself to them—if only for a few moments—thereby inviting them to open themselves to me.

Photography, then, can be intensely vulnerable—for the subject, and for me.  That is the kind of image making that interests me.

And as you can imagine, that was a challenge in Kurdistan.  One, I don’t speak Kurdish or Arabic.  Two, I’m a Westerner.  And the topper: I’m a woman—a 5’10” blonde one at that.  As if that weren't enough, the U.S. Department of State had even issued a warning against any of its citizens traveling to Iraq.  So, confession: I wasn’t totally confident “open” was necessarily a good idea…

What is more, the women there tend to be reserved on the front end, so they’re certainly wary of photographs.  Men came with another set of challenges.  For me to engage with a man, especially publicly, was not exactly minding my p’s and q’s in their society.  But if I planned to authentically photograph the people my way, I had to figure out how to engage both genders; I had to risk crossing social boundaries. 

The challenge was to somehow marry that which seemed mutually exclusive: holding back out of cultural respect and boldly moving in close—demonstrating they were safe with me, but also that I felt safe with them and they could let their guards down.  Though I had two incredible local translators, Hersh and Dilgash, almost always accompanying me, I was often nervous and sometimes I was afraid.

I found the challenge achievable only when I tapped in deeper to that sense of commonality I discovered between the subject and me.  Occasionally I’d begin by asking them their name—with literal distance between us—then tell them mine, and go from there.  Other times I got to move in real close and hear their story, as it is human to want to be heard and known.  A few times they even asked me mine, which was really special because I think it meant we were on the same page.

Now, I get it; they sit barefoot on the floor to drink tea instead of on a Rooms To Go sectional—that can be strange.  And the ladies wear substantially more clothing than I’d ever consider donning in the desert.  Not to mention the blowtorched chickens hanging in the bazaar—people buy them…to eat. 

 That’s different, Jessie.  That’s really different.  I get it—I wasn’t walking around with a bag on my head.

But that’s not the familiarity I mean.  Those aren’t the things that make us human, ya know?  We are human because we do things with our lives—we are lawyers and poets, doctors and teachers.  We invent and strive to make the good, better.  We all have thoughts about a god, or no god, and how we ought to respond to it.  Right and wrong, justice and injustice, war and peace innately matter to us.  Then there's the fact that we mess up; none of us always get things right.  We are human because we all want to fall madly in love and be a part of making something bigger than ourselves.  And when we have little ones, we want to send them off to school and not worry they won’t make it home safe for dinner.

You see, it matters not where you go in the world—these things are always true.  This is the kind of stuff we humans do.  And for that reason, we belong together.   

With that, a man I want to photograph who looks nothing like my dad—with his brown skin, billowing trousers, and foreign god—starts to look a whole lot like him.  He begins to feel unusually familiar.  He, too, remembers the way watermelon juice runs down his arm in mid-July, and how much it stings that same time every year when he remembers a loved one lost, or the shame he feels from the mistakes he’s made or when he can’t put food on the table.  This man who is walled into a conflict-ridden country hates war and death and corruption just as much as I do, perhaps more.

Now, you may write me off because I’m no champion of domestic or foreign policy any more than I am Martha Stewart with a glue gun.  And, honestly, I don’t know the political state of Iraq post Blair and Bush.  I don’t know how the troops are doing “over there.”  And I don’t know what to do with the millions of refugees and IDPs with no place to go—both here and there and everywhere.  I don’t know how not to be afraid—afraid of airports and nightclubs and crazies with guns.

But when I dive headlong into the reality that what matters to me, matters to most everyone in the world—including Kurds and Iraqis—I see people and stories before I see policies and problems.  And my God, it’s my prayer they don’t see just another Westerner with a camera out to take what is not given to her.  This challenges my fears, but I want to be the kind of person that wrestles the reality that my culture and my story are equally as imperfect and human as theirs, so that strangers—both here and abroad—become brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers I can’t help but hurt with and for.

It is my hope that you too are struck by the same sense of commonality with people in these images; and though you are separated geographically and culturally, they would be brought near.  And that you’d risk engaging: take time to pray for them; reach out and give your resources to care for them; and perhaps more than anything, go sit with people like them in your own neighborhood.  Because they belong to you, and you to them.  

therefugeinitiative.org, 
www.worldorphans.org, 
www.hearthecry.org

BACK TO TOP