I’m lucky. I get to travel the world with Refugees International,
and I return home.
The people I meet make me laugh and cry,
fill me with all kinds of emotion and are displaced.
As a journalist,
I was trained to stand apart not to become part of a story.
I find that almost impossible, to do that now.
Let me tell you why.
In November 2014,
I visited both the Kurdistan part of Iraq and Jordan,
to meet with Syrians who were the part of the diaspora of war.
Some carefully planned their exit,
others took flight carrying whatever they could
as cluster bombs fell like rain around them.
And for others, there was no choice.
I will call her Amina.
I met her in Oman, Jordan at a hospital run by Syrian doctors and staff
who were also refugees.
Amina, 27, lay paralyzed from the neck down,
all because she had reached out to save a 14-year-old boy
from being taken away by a soldier at a checkpoint inside Syria.
As she tried to grab the boy, she felt the butt of a rifle,
cracking several vertebrae in her spine.
She was eight-months pregnant at the time.
The baby arrives safely,
and is living back in Syria with Amina’s husband.
When I met Amina she was in the hospital for seven months already.
Doctors were trying to convince her to have plastic surgery
to cover up her severe bed sores, but she was not ready.
Yet, it is Amina’s dream that when she gets better,
that she’ll become a nurse to help other Syrians.
Said her doctor, “Amina is a determined young lady, and brave.
She did not even know the name of the boy she reached out to save.”
“Here’s a toast,”
says Syrian clarinetist, Kinan Azmeh at a ‘Save the Children’ concert,
“Here’s a toast to all those young people who have managed to fall in love and marry
during the past five years of war.
For love, after all,
is one of the human rights that no one can take away from you.”
Kinan is right.
At Jordan Zaatari camp,
there are 80,000 Syrians living there now, 3,000 new businesses.
An economy that generates 30 million a month
for refugees and the local Jordanians.
They are pizzerias and auto-part stores;
they are bakeries and barber shops;
but the most popular of all are the wedding shops.
Fancy dresses, adorned with crystals,
and crinolines rent for 12 dollars a piece,
and even local Jordanians come by to shop there.
With about 80 babies born a day and ten weddings a week,
the camp surges with life,
and you feel the pulse when you’re there.
Yet, there is a sad underbelly
to the high number of younger and younger marriages.
Parents force their daughters into marriage because they fear
for their daughters future and their own uncertain lives.
In all, about 23% of female Syrian refugees are child brides.
But look, in another corner of the camp,
there’s a production of King Lear going on,
with 100 youngsters in the cast, and hundreds more coming to the show.
The last production brought the house down
and brought many to tears.
So here’s my toast to many Syrians
who are making the most of their lives on the run
that they may also be able to go home someday.
I’ve been at this a long time.
My first trip with Refugees International
was in 2001 to Mondol Kiri, in the eastern portion of Cambodia
to help returning Pol Pot era refugees.
Last year at this time,
I was standing on the shores of Lesvos Greece,
as deflated dinghies crammed
with 40 to 50 men, women, and children edge closer, reaching out
for outstretched arms to save them.
But most of all, I remember my trip in 2001,
where I met a Madonna in the desert,
a woman regal and beautiful,
carrying a baby, wearing a thin, blue shawl
in the sands of Darfur, Sudan.
She had no home.
The Janjaweed had burned that.
She had no idea of her future.
No one around her did.
But she was proud, brave, and trusting that she too would go home someday.
It’s time to recognize
the dignity and resilience of those who are displaced.
It is our shame if we forget.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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