We Are Displaced: List 4

We wound up in a sprawling, makeshift camp, a city of tents fashioned from plastic sheets and any other garbage that could double as shelter.

They also helped us relocate—we moved to a house, and while it was better than a tent, it was so dilapidated that whenever it rained, water fell inside the house as well.

Even though the government has declared the war over, the place I once called home is still considered guerrilla territory.

While women and children all over the world flee wars and terrorism, there are some regions where the violence and oppression are within the community, or within the home.

Meanwhile, my stepmother, who was frail to begin with, had become quite ill.

When her friend jumped on, she cut her leg badly. She bled so profusely that she died on the train.

I met Marie Claire in a nondescript room in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Resentment was brewing because my parents were making a decent living.

My mother and father had heard of these vigilante mobs terrorizing refugees, and now one was outside our home.

I spoke the language fluently, and Zambia began to feel less hostile, more like home.

He explained that his experience with refugees was that so many had missed so much school by the time they arrived that it was very hard for them to catch up and become acclimated.

In 2015, I was visiting my daughter to celebrate my granddaughter’s first birthday, and reveling in the joy of being a grandmother, when I saw the photo of a Turkish police officer carrying the limp body of a three-year-old Syrian boy out of the Aegean Sea.

He, his wife, and two children had made it out of Syria and into Turkey, where they paid smugglers to take them across the Aegean Sea to Greece, but their boat capsized just off the Turkish coast.

As I read about the thousands of refugees fleeing Syria, I realized this was the biggest humanitarian crisis in my lifetime.

The kids especially looked so emaciated and sickly that I was concerned.

And yet they had all dressed in their best outfits, the men in slacks and dress shirts, the women in colorful African dresses with their hair either wrapped in matching scarves or done in elaborate braids with beads.

I know now that Marie Claire will likely succeed in anything she does because of that focus. She manifests realities for herself.

She must get her determination and her moxie from her mother, as well as her tremendous sense of humility.

I imagine this is true for all refugees—the paradox of being grateful for a new life that is based on the painful loss of an old one.

I was in New York for the event and got to sit on the General Assembly floor, beaming proudly as Marie Claire shared her experience with the distinguished crowd of world leaders and diplomats, including the president of France, Emmanuel Macron.

She should have been at Naidina’s wedding; she married another refugee she met in Zambia who had landed in Utah. They reconnected, and we were all in the wedding party and procession, another highlight.

Jérôme is a French activist and humanitarian who cocreated the Love Army with several of his artist activist friends to mobilize young people to respond to emergent world crises in a more direct way.

The Rohingya have been escaping persecution since the 1960s.

The first refugee camp was set up in Bangladesh in 1990, where the numbers have since swelled to more than nine hundred thousand living in a no-man's-land of inhospitable mountains between Myanmar and Bangladesh that are prone to monsoons and floods.

Once the Rohingya arrive there, they can't leave the premises or get work outside the camps.

This area, where we have built a hut out of bamboo, is extremely windy and exposed to the elements.

These types of derogatory comments were not one-offs. My sister and I were once called pigs, which is ironic because we are Muslims, so we don't eat pork.

There, I distinctly remember a punk on his banana bike swerving up beside me to yell at me to “go back home."

I was excited because my parents were usually strict and overprotective; our friends were always welcome in our home, but my parents did not like the idea of our sleeping over at other people’s homes. I think they saw how thrilled I was and relented.

I was so happy to be there, but then I noticed immediately how dismissive my friend’s stepmother was of me. Then she said, “you people,” and I realized she was talking about me.

In 1972, Idi Amin, the president of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, decided that Asian Ugandans were no longer welcome. My family’s citizenship was revoked along with that of fifty thousand others.

As the plane taxied toward the Uganda airport, my worry ratcheted up, starting with Am I going to have a problem getting through customs?

The customs officer was wearing a full military uniform.

She had started working on a documentary about our family’s exodus.

That’s how I ended up working for a woman who offered me the opportunity to create a foundation in her name and to focus on the empowerment of girls in developing countries. Through that I created a program called G(irls)20 and eventually turned it into a standalone entity and began to work entirely in service to girls and young women—and this led me to Malala.