Refugee Camp Quotes

Your daughter is ugly. She knows loss intimately, carries whole cities in her belly. As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her. She was splintered wood and sea water. They said she reminded them of the war. On her fifteenth birthday you taught her how to tie her hair like rope and smoke it over burning frankincense. You made her gargle rosewater and while she coughed, said macaanto girls like you shouldn’t smell of lonely or empty. You are her mother. Why did you not warn her, hold her like a rotting boat and tell her that men will not love her if she is covered in continents, if her teeth are small colonies, if her stomach is an island if her thighs are borders? What man wants to lay down and watch the world burn in his bedroom? Your daughter’s face is a small riot, her hands are a civil war, a refugee camp behind each ear, a body littered with ugly things but God, doesn’t she wear the world well.

Your daughter’s face is a small riot, her hands are a civil war, a refugee camp behind each ear, a body littered with ugly things, but God, doesn’t she wear the world well.

Palestine. For most of us, the word brings to mind a series of confused images and disjointed associations-massacres, refugee camps, UN resolutions, settlements, terrorist attacks, war, occupation, checkered kouffiyehs and suicide bombers, a seemingly endless cycle of death and destruction.

The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures...They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling.

the humanitarian workers [in refugee camps in Goma} were treated rather like the service staff at a seedy mafia-occupied hotel: they were there to provide-food, medicine, housewares, an aura of respectability

You are her mother. Why did you not warn her, hold her like a rotting boat and tell her that men will not love her if she is covered in continents, if her teeth are small colonies, if her stomach is an island if her thighs are borders? What man wants to lie down and watch the world burn in his bedroom? Your daughter ’s face is a small riot, her hands are a civil war, a refugee camp behind each ear, a body littered with ugly things. But God, doesn’t she wear the world well?

wish I could just run barefoot in every refugee camp and hold every child, cover their ears so they wouldn’t have to hear the sound of bombing for the rest of their life the way I do..

If, in the face of genocide, governments fear placing their soldiers at risk, he said, "then don't send soldiers, send Boy Scouts" - which is basically what the world did in the refugee camps [in Zaire].

People are so obsessed with that these days. As long as you're healthy, what difference do a few pounds make? Crazy diets. Thirteen-year-old girls on magazine covers who wind up in hospitals because they're so anorexic. Real women don't look like that. And who wants them to? No one wants a woman who looks sick or like she;s been from a refugee camp.

Treat all people-even the most unsightly beetles-as though they were angels sent from heaven.

All of her adult life people have asked Rena why she goes to such dangerous places, and she has always wanted to ask them where the safe place is. The danger is in chemicals and airports and refugee camps and war zones and regions known for sex tourism. The danger also sometimes took their trash out for them. The danger came over for movie night and bought them a popcorn maker for Christmas. The danger hugged her mother and shook her father’s hand.

It is the story that lies around the edges of the photographs, or at the end of newspaper account. It's about the lies we tell others to protect them, and about the lies we tell ourselves in order not to acknowledge what we can't bear: that we are alive, for instance, and eating lunch, while bombs are falling, and refugees are crammed into camps, and the news comes toward us every hour of the day. And what, in the end, do we do?

They only see us when we do something they don't want us to do, Mahmoud realized. The thought hit him like a lightning bolt. When they stayed where they were supposed to be - in the ruins of Aleppo or behind the fences of a refugee camp - people could forget about them. But when refugees did something they didn't want them to do - when they tried to cross the border into their country, or slept on the front stoops of their shops, or jumped in front of their cars, or prayed on the decks of their ferries - that's when people couldn't ignore them any longer. Mahmoud's first instinct was to disappear below decks. To be invisible. Being invisible in Syria had kept him alive. But now Mahmoud began to wonder if being invisible in Europe might be the death of him and his family. If no one saw them, no one could help them. And maybe the world needed to see what was really happening here.

Those who find ecstasy do so not by visiting the shrines of civilization but by trudging in the swamps of human destitution and misery. Our literature of ecstasy recounts the dark nights of the soul and encounters with mystics in the slums and in the refugee camps of genocidal wars.

It was like wanting ice cream instead of meat loaf, and being told that children in refugee camps would be grateful for the meat loaf. Yes, of course she had nothing to complain about, compared to so many people, but when had that ever stopped anyone from complaining? Happiness was a balloon that always hovered just out of arm's reach.

HOME no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay. no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet hot blood in your belly it’s not something you ever thought of doing until the blade burnt threats into your neck and even then you carried the anthem under your breath only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back. you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land no one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled means something more than journey. no one crawls under fences no one wants to be beaten pitied no one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer than a city of fire and one prison guard in the night is better than a truckload of men who look like your father no one could take it no one could stomach it no one skin would be tough enough the go home blacks refugees dirty immigrants asylum seekers sucking our country dry niggers with their hands out they smell strange savage messed up their country and now they want to mess ours up how do the words the dirty looks roll off your backs maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble than bone than your child body in pieces. i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore unless home told you to quicken your legs leave your clothes behind crawl through the desert wade through the oceans drown save be hunger beg forget pride your survival is more important no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now i dont know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here

It bothered them [humanitarian aide workers] that the camp leaders might be war criminals, not refugees in any conventional sense of the word, but fugitives.

Still, the refugee camp of Jenin remained as it had been, a one-square-mile patch of earth, excised from time and imprisoned in that endless year of 1948

This is what it means to be Iraqi under ISIS, I thought. We are homeless. Living at checkpoints until we live at refugee camps.

But in our camp, his story was everyone’s story, a single tale of dispossession, of being stripped to the bones of one’s humanity, of being dumped like rubbish into refugee camps unfit for rats. Of being left without rights, home, or nation while the world turned its back to watch or cheer the jubilation of the usurpers proclaiming a new state they called Israel.

If, in the face of genocide, governments fear placing soldiers at risk, he [UN General Romeo Dallaire] said, "then don't send soldiers, send Boy Scouts" - which is basically what the world did in the refugee camps. Dallaire was in uniform when he faced the camera; his graying hair was closely cropped; he held his square jaw firmly outthrust; his chest was dappled with decorations. But he spoke with some agitation, and his carefully measured phrases did nothing to mask his sense of injury or his fury.

If, in the face of genocide, governments fear placing soldiers at risk, he [UN General Romeo Dallaire] said, "then don't send soldiers, send Boy Scouts" - which is basically what the world did in the refugee camps. Dallaire was in uniform when he face the camera; his graying hair was closely cropped; he held his square jaw firmly outthrust; his chest was dappled with decorations. But he spoke with some agitation, and his carefully measured phrases did nothing to mask his sense of injury or his fury.

In a hospital. In a refugee camp. In their beds. While making dinner for their children. While holding their siblings. While cycling. While playing on a beach. In a market. In an incubator. Struggling to breathe, under the rubble. While trying to drag a loved one from the middle of the road. While burying the dead. While scavenging for food. While selling vegetables. While swimming in the sea, trying to catch fish. While playing soccer. While waving a white flag. With their hands raised in surrender. With their hands tied. While running away. At a checkpoint. In a torture camp. In a safe zone. In a school. While delivering aid. While waiting on aid. While performing surgery. While sitting down in a chair. By drone, from the safety of great distance. Live on air. Away from sight.

My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps. "Sometime me cry alone at night." "That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday you talk pretty. People start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay.

These displaced persons are mostly unwanted where they fled from; unwanted where they are, in refugee camps; and unwanted where they want to go.

There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad...To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.

Marial and Uncle were no longer by his side, and they never would be again, but Salva knew that both of them would have wanted him to survive, to finish the trip and reach the Itang refugee camp safely. It was almost as if they had left their strength with him, to help him on his journey.

Why are some countries able, despite their very real and serious problems, to press ahead along the road to reconciliation, recovery, and redevelopment while others cannot? These are critical questions for Africa, and their answers are complex and not always clear. Leadership is crucial, of course. Kagame was a strong leader–decisive, focused, disciplined, and honest–and he remains so today. I believe that sometimes people's characters are molded by their environment. Angola, like Liberia, like Sierra Leone, is resource-rich, a natural blessing that sometimes has the sad effect of diminishing the human drive for self-sufficiency, the ability and determination to maximize that which one has. Kagame had nothing. He grew up in a refugee camp, equipped with only his own strength of will and determination to create a better life for himself and his countrymen.

There is a lesson in [Terezín] for those who conduct inspections in our day, whether in prisons, sweatshops, refugee camps, polling places, or nuclear facilities: do not trust––push; control your own schedule; do your homework. Remember the adage that a little knowledge can be dangerous. The truth is more likely to be served by a canceled or aborted inspection than by a whitewash.

The refugee card was and continues to be an insult to remind us of the little that refugees get in comparison with what they have really lost. Would a bag of flour compensate for the farmland they once had? Would a bag of sugar make up for the bitter misery those people have always felt after losing their sweet homes to dwell in refugee camps? Would the two bottles of oil make them forget their olive trees, which had been mercilessly uprooted as they themselves were? Or maybe it is simply a declaration that they are temporary refugees who once had the land which, as long as this card is still in their hands, would still be waiting for them to return. Only a shot of sharp pain brought me back to the present.

War crimes, you say? No matter how many policies you put on paper, in reality, there are no rights and wrongs in war. War itself is a crime. War cannot be justified. I believe, the only people, in this world, whose opinions matter, are the ones who go the extra mile to help other people expecting nothing in return. Soldiers who fight fiercely for their country, the doctors in Sri Lanka's public hospitals attending to hundreds of patients at a time for no extra pay , the nuns who voluntarily teach English and math to children of refugee camps in the north, the monks who collect food to feed entire villages during crises, they are the people worth listening to, their opinion matters. So find me one of them who will say: they wish the war didn't end in 2009, that they wish Sri Lanka was divided into two parts. Find me one of them who agrees with the international war crime allegations against Sri Lanka, and I will listen. But I will not listen to the opinions of those who are paid to find faults in a war they were never a part of, a war they never experienced themselves. I will not listen to the opinions of those who watched the war on tv or read about it on the internet or were moved by a documentary on Al Jazeera. The war is over. The damage is done. Let Sri Lanka move on. So our children will never have to see what we've seen.

I placed my niece at her sleeping mother's breast and watched my brother, turgid with affection, look back and forth from his wife and to his newborn daughter. In that refugee camp, which Israel would label a "breeding ground of terrorists" and "a festering den of terror," I bore witness to a love that dwarfed immensity itself.

Today's small act of kindness can become tomorrow's whirlwind of human progress

The future can’t breathe in a refugee camp, Amal. The air here is too dense for hope.

A big refugee camp governed by real terror and artificially pumped-up optimism - like the bastard child of Butlins and Colditz.

People who want to put up walls and turn refugees away today are not acting all that differently from the Nazi collaborators who, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, embodied the “banality of evil.” Anyone willing to countenance thousands of children dying at sea or living in subhuman conditions within the confines of refugee camps is just as cruel as they were.

My father says that in our part of the world this idea of jihad was very much encouraged by the CIA. Children in the refugee camps were even given school textbooks produced by an American university which taught basic arithmetic through fighting. They had examples like “If out of 10 Russian infidels, 5 are killed by one Muslim, 5 would be left” or “15 bullets – 10 bullets = 5 bullets.

Gaza 1948: "Gaza was not a refugee camp yet, just a place designated for Palestinian people when the state of Israel came begin. But day by day it filled up with people who had no place else to go to.

It’s cruelty that gets to me. Still, it’s important to read about cruelty. “Why is it important?” Because when you read about it, it’s easier to recognize. That was always the hardest thing in the refugee camps—to hear the stories of the people who had been raped or mutilated or forced to watch a parent or a sister or a child be raped or killed. It’s very hard to come face-to-face with such cruelty. But people can be cruel in lots of ways, some very subtle. I think that’s why we all need to read about it. I think that’s one of the amazing things about Tennessee Williams’s plays. He was so attuned to cruelty—the way Stanley treats Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. It starts with asides and looks and put-downs. There are so many great examples from Shakespeare—when Goneril torments King Lear or the way Iago speaks to Othello. And what I love about Dickens is the way he presents all types of cruelty. You need to learn to recognize these things right from the start. Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.

With the exception of those born in refugee camps, every refugee used to have a life. It doesn’t matter whether you were a physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo: what matters is that a thousand little anchors once moored you to the world. Becoming a refugee means watching as those anchors are severed, one by one, until at last you’re floating outside of society, an untethered phantom in need of a new life.

The Jews here are actually a single big refugee camp, and so are the Arabs. And now the Arabs live day by day with the disaster of their defeat, and the Jews live night by night with the dread of their vengeance.

When I think back on all the refugee camps I visited, all over the world, the people always asked for the same thing: books. Sometimes even before medicine or shelter--they wanted books for their children. (quoting his mother)

The Palestinian refugee problem could have easily been solved in 1948, just as virtually every other refugee problem in the world has been; and just as the refugee problem of the 800,000 Jews who fled Arab countries during and after 1948 was solved. But, since 1948, Arab countries have deliberately mistreated the Palestinian refugees by refusing to integrate them into their countries and by keeping them in refugee camps—the only refugees in the world to be kept in camps for three generations. The Arab countries did this so as to keep the world’s attention focused on the plight of the Palestinian refugees and to use them as a way to defame and ultimately, they hope, delegitimize and de-Judaize Israel.

It was ironic that the same people who had enacted nuclear war on the Homeworld, who presided over the refugee camps and rotted the ecosphere, had balked in the face of blood sport. Would they call us barbarians, those men of ancient days?

Family and home are the bedrock of everything we've gone on to do. It's out base camp. Our refugee. Our only place in the world where we feel completely safe and wholeheartedly ourselves.

Of course, you’ll have to fly to the refugee camp at Dadaab,” Will observed thoughtfully at one point. He glanced at me. “To avoid the bandits,” he explained. Dan and Nick nodded gravely. “I beg your pardon?” I said, taking a sudden interest. “It’s bandit country all round there,” Will said. “Where?” I asked, peering at the map for the first time. “Oh, just there,” Will said, waving a hand vaguely across most of east Africa. “But you’ll be fine in a plane.” “They only rarely shoot at planes,” Nick explained.

I thought I could hear movement in the kitchen, perhaps a voice murmuring, but it was a matter of urgency that I should get to sleep before two, the hour at which the drought, the refugee camps, the dying planet and all the faults and meannesses of my character would arrive to haunt me.

Here, in the camp, she could tell any old story, these people would have no choice but to believe her. That is not to say that refugee women like her lie, merely that they are uprooted. Their stories barely mean anything even to themselves now. No one listens to them, which is almost like not existing at all.

The boy went back to his family there, in the distance, in a distance he did not find there in the distance. My grandfather died counting sunsets, seasons, and heartbeats on the fingers of his withered hands. He dropped like a fruit forbidden a branch to lean its age against. They destroyed his heart. He wearied of waiting here, in Damur. He said goodbye to friends, water pipe, and children and took me and went back to find what was no longer his to find there. Here the number of aliens increased, and refugee camps got bigger. A war went by, then two, three, and four. The homeland got farther and farther away, and the children got farther and farther from mother's milk after they had tasted the milk of UNRWA. So they bought guns to get closer to a homeland flying out of their reach. They brought their identity back into being, re-created the homeland, and followed their path, only to have it blocked by the guardians of civil wars. They defended their steps, but then path parted from path, the orphan lived in the skin of the orphan, and one refugee camp went into another.

The immigrant artist shares with all other artists the desire to interpret and possibly remake his or her own world. So though we may not be creating as dangerously as our forebears—though we are not risking torture, beatings, execution, though exile does not threaten us into perpetual silence— still, while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere. People are buried under rubble somewhere. Mass graves are being dug somewhere. Survivors are living in makeshift tent cities and refugee camps somewhere, shielding their heads from the rain, closing their eyes, covering their ears, to shut out the sounds of military “aid” helicopters. And still, many are reading, and writing, quietly, quietly.

Our children will be told what Israel has done.’ graffiti on the Wall in Bethlehem, opposite Aida refugee camp, 2008

Well, for me alone, coffee shops are like refugee camps

America. The United States. The rumor was that about three thousand boys and young men from the refugee camps would be chosen to go live in America!

My father says that in our part of the world this idea of jihad was very much encouraged by the CIA. Children in the refugee camps were even given school textbooks produced by an American university which taught basic arithmetic through fighting. They had examples like, ‘If out of 10 Russian infidels, 5 are killed by one Muslim, 5 would be left’ or ‘15 bullets – 10 bullets = 5 bullets’.

I read about how Europe and America no longer want to allow people who come from my country to move to their shores for safety. I read about families stranded on shaky boats, trapped in refugee camps.

The kingdom of God dawns in trailer parks and refugee camps. That shouldn’t surprise us. The kingdom came to us not from a boardroom or a literary guild, but from a feeding trough and an execution stake.

On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon’s army circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and Falasteen slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints, barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops, watched through their binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later, the first western journalists entered the camp and bore witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it in Pity the Nation: They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses—women, young men, babies and grandparents—lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave. Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves. Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the top of the tower block to the west, we could see them staring at us through field-glasses, scanning back and forth across the streets of corpses, the lenses of the binoculars sometimes flashing in the sun as their gaze ranged through the camp. Loren Jenkins [of the Washington Post] cursed a lot. Jenkins immediately realized that the Israeli defense minister would have to bear some responsibility for this horror. “Sharon!” he shouted. “That fucker [Ariel] Sharon! This is Deir Yassin all over again.

I want to tell him that when we were in the camps waiting for a boat we spoke about what we imagined Australia would be like. Kangaroos, koalas, wide open spaces. Then, when we arrived, we were locked up and the images we had shrank smaller and smaller until Australia became tiny patches of sky beyond the barbed wire.

...he couldn’t help wondering how it had felt: refugees turning up from concentration camps, from a broken Europe, to find this bleak estate; its squat huts their new homes. There’d been watch towers and barbed wire fences. It can’t have looked like freedom. But freedom was measured, he supposed, by what you were leaving behind.

Consider also the special word they used: survivor. Something new. As long as they didn't have to say human being. It used to be refugee, but by now there was no such creature, no more refugees, only survivors. A name like a number -- counted apart from the ordinary swarm. Blue digits on the arm, what difference? They don't call you a woman anyhow. Survivor. Even when your bones get melted into the grains of the earth, still they'll forget human being. Survivor and survivor and survivor; always and always. Who made up these words, parasites on the throat of suffering!

The moon was always a brilliant white, and once in a while the night wind brought the hooting of owls and the rise and fall of voices from the refugee camp. Baby slept on a mat with Olanna’s wrapper over her to keep the mosquitoes away.

It is amazing that the refugees stay sane. First the bombs, perhaps the "battle" around them, their casualties, their naked helplessness; then the flight, leaving behind everything they have worked for all their lives; then the semi-starvation and ugly hardship of the camps or the slums; and as a final cruelty, the killing diseases which only strike at them.

I have never understood why people are lucky enough to be born with the chances I had and why across the world there is a woman just like me with the same abilities, same desires, same work ethics and love for her family…only she sits in a refugee camp and has no voice.

That’s life in a refugee camp: You’re not moving toward anything. You’re just in a horrible groove. You learn skills that you wish you did not know: how to make a fire, how to cook maize, how to do laundry in the river and burn the lice on the rocks. You wait, hoping the trucks will bring something other than corn and beans. But nothing gets better. There is no path for improvement—no effort you can make, nothing you can do, and nothing anybody else can do for you either, short of the killers in your country laying down their arms and stopping their war so that you can move home.

Want to find your friends sitting under a tree for a picnic? Use a what3words address. Need to pin exactly where on a sidewalk you took that picture? Or find your Airbnb tree house in Costa Rica? What3words can help with that, too. The technology has more serious uses. The Rhino Refugee Camp in Uganda is using what3words to help people find their way to the camp’s churches, mosques, markets, and doctors’ office. The Mongolian postal service is using the addresses to send mail to nomadic families. And Dr. Louw now uses the three words to find patients in the townships of South Africa.

But that so rarely works. And if our hearts and brains don’t acknowledge these kinds of truths, they don’t just go away. They burrow into our bodies. For me, any truth I try to push aside seems to seek asylum in my lumbar curve. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away; it just makes it a refugee. And the refugee camp that establishes itself in my low back grows and gets more and more painful over time. There is a cost to trying to deny pain, to trying to deny ourselves the process of grieving. Eventually our bodies must process it, and there will be, in the end, an emotional balloon payment that comes due.

What do these decades-old international organizations see in an arcane digital technology built by the crypto-libertarians and Cypherpunks who gave us Bitcoin? It’s the prospect that this decentralized computing system could resolve the issue of social capital deficits that we discussed in the context of the Azraq refugee camp. By creating a common record of a community’s transactions and activities that no single person or intermediating institution has the power to change, the UN’s blockchain provides a foundation for people to trust that they can securely interact and exchange value with each other.

raving maniacs, half paralysed with hunger and fear’. In collaboration with an UNRRA team, the soldiers took over a former Napola School at Feldafing, drafted many of its German staff, including cooks and medical personnel, and turned it into a refugee camp, with a nearby hotel requisitioned as hospital accommodation. The number of inmates rapidly grew to some 4,000. By the end of May 1945, the camp had experienced its first survivor wedding and those in the hospital – now moved to a former monastery – had been treated to a concert by the Kovno Ghetto orchestra, dressed in their striped concentration-camp pyjamas.

After the war, humans upgraded Paradise Lot from an unofficial Ellis Island of sorts to an official Ellis Island cum refugee camp cum Gaza Strip where all the Others got official-looking documents, which did not allow them to travel, vote, own land or legally marry. They could, however, use the ID to pay taxes.

I hold the door to the post office open for a weathered man in a wheelchair. He is gracious, thanking me. One leg is missing, and just as I notice this, I see the sticker on the back of his chair: VIETNAM VETS. My thoughts jumble as an ache brews in my heart. I think of war and how it destroys, divides, and damages. I see the faces of those in the refugee camp and those who found their names on The List and are now in America. I want to tell this wounded soldier that I am sorry for his loss and for the abandonment he may have felt upon his return. I want to say other things, but right now I'm just honored to hold the door for him.

What about all the poor brothers and sisters across the city and the shit they had to deal with? Fuck, what about all the poor brothers and sisters in Syria for that matter? They sure had their hands full. What do you even call depression in a refugee camp? Depression felt as much a luxury as veganism and fair trade coffee.

Although we witnessed the worst of human nature in Utange, we also witnessed the best of it. The greatest lesson I came away with from my time in the refugee camp is that your today doesn’t get to determine your tomorrow. Everything in life is fluid. Pride, strength, and responsibility—all of those notions are the domain of people in comfort and safety. When you’re facing death, you’re not guided by your importance or your past, and you certainly don’t worry about whether your pride is intact. Again and again, I witnessed that if you can push through whatever is happening today, tomorrow might be worse, but it could also be better. The only option for the human spirit is to keep going.

When Israelis were indirectly involved in the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, the story was front-page news for weeks. When Lebanese Shiites were directly involved in killing Palestinians in the very same camps from 1985 to 1988, it was almost always back-page news—if it was reported at all. This

Democratic citizenship requires a degree of empathy, insight, and kindness that demands a great deal of all of us. There are easier ways to live. For example, we can reduce our public engagement to consumption, viewing our labour as whatever we need do to enter the consumer marketplace with money in our pockets, free to choose our widgets, to shape an identity based upon consumption. Or we can go global and expand our understanding of “us” by wandering the world and appreciating its cultures and wonders, considering both the people living in the refugee camps of the world and the residents of small towns of Iowa to be our neighbours, while maintaining a connection with our own local traditions and duties.

Today over half the world's refugees are in 'protracted refugee situations' and for them the average length of stay [in camps] is over two decades.

A refugee saved is a world saved.

Paris had by now extended its internment decree to include Austrian and Czecho-Slovakian refugees, so in the days that followed hundreds of new arrivals appeared in our camp.

Rohingya Photographers, don't trade dignity for attention. Be the storytellers who inspire change, not cheap sympathy.

I learned lots of things those first few weeks. First and foremost, I learned what it meant to be a refugee. From the moment I stepped into Kakuma, I became a boy without a country. A refugee camp is a kind of no-man’s-land. No one lives there by choice. You end up in places like Kakuma when you have no better option. Everyone who lived there just wanted to go home.

I thought about all the people who'd had to do this through history. The millions taking flight from disasters, fleeing tyrannical despots, making exodus from pogroms, escaping waring soldiers and pouring out of bombed cities. What had kept them going was the promise of safe haven, whether in some sprawling refugee camp or under the protection of a friendly army. We didn't have that.

Its basic axiom is to be followed by individuals as well as great nations, by Losers and Winners alike. We have demonstrated the workability of the axiom in Vietnam, in Bangladesh, in Biafra, in Palestinian refugee camps, in our own ghettos, in our migrant labor camps, on our Indian reservations, in our institutions for the defective and the deformed and the aged. This is it: Ignore agony.

Life may have been hard, but we were happy. Yes, boys died and food was difficult to come by, but at least no one was shooting at us. We only ate one meal a day, but for me, coming into the camp at the age of six, I accepted this as normal. I never thought that life was unfair because I had to eat garbage. Instead, I looked at the scraps of food from the dump as a blessing. Not all the boys in the camp could do this. I knew some who chose to feel sorry for themselves, who complained constantly about their lot in life. What is the point of such complaining? After all the whining and complaining is over, you still live in a refugee camp. All the complaining in the world will not make your life any better. Instead, you must choose to make the best of whatever the situation in which you find yourself, even in a place like Kakuma.

That concentration camps were ultimately provided for the same groups in all countries, even though there were considerable differences in the treatment of their inmates, was all the more characteristic as the selection of the groups was left exclusively to the initiative of the totalitarian regimes: if the Nazis put a person in a concentration camp and if he made a successful escape, say, to Holland, the Dutch would put him in an internment camp. Thus, long before the outbreak of the war the police in a number of Western countries, under the pretext of "national security," had on their own initiative established close connections with the Gestapo and the GPU [Russian State security agency], so that one might say there existed an independent foreign policy of the police. This police-directed foreign policy functioned quite independently of the official governments; the relations between the Gestapo and the French police were never more cordial than at the time of Leon Blum's popular-front government, which was guided by a decidedly anti-German policy. Contrary to the governments, the various police organizations were never overburdened with "prejudices" against any totalitarian regime; the information and denunciations received from GPU agents were just as welcome to them as those from Fascist or Gestapo agents. They knew about the eminent role of the police apparatus in all totalitarian regimes, they knew about its elevated social status and political importance, and they never bothered to conceal their sympathies. That the Nazis eventually met with so disgracefully little resistance from the police in the countries they occupied, and that they were able to organize terror as much as they did with the assistance of these local police forces, was due at least in part to the powerful position which the police had achieved over the years in their unrestricted and arbitrary domination of stateless and refugees.

The world powers made it clear in 1994 that they did not care to fight genocide in central Africa, but they had yet to come up with a convincing explanation of why they were content to feed it. The false promise of protection represented by the camps placed Hutu civilians, as well as Tutsis and everyone else in the region, in mortal peril, and it was no comfort that this state of affairs was not brought about by a malevolent international policy in central Africa but by the lack of any coherent policy.

Twelve million people were displaced as a result of Partition. Nearly one million died. Some 75,000 women were raped, kidnapped, abducted, forcibly impregnated by men of the ‘other’ religion, thousands of families were split apart, homes burnt down and destroyed, villages abandoned. Refugee camps became part of the landscape of most major cities in the north, but, a half century later, there is still no memorial, no memory, no recall, except what is guarded, and now rapidly dying, in families and collective memory.

The Palestinians were deliberately forced into refugee camps by their fellow Muslims and not permitted to integrate in any way into the society of their unwilling hosts. Their own people didn’t even try to help them; instead they prevailed upon the United Nations and gullible Western charities to supply the refugees’ needs. They have been kept in these camps for more than sixty years—like an unhealed wound by their own people—just to be used as political pawns by Muslim negotiators to charge their plight as “Israeli aggression.

A good-for-America immigration policy would not accept people with no job skills. It would not accept immigrants’ elderly relatives, arriving in wheelchairs. It would not accept people accused of terrorism by their own countries. It would not accept pregnant women whose premature babies will cost taxpayers $50,000 a pop,1 before even embarking on a lifetime of government support. It would not accept Somalis who spent their adult lives in a Kenyan refugee camp and then showed up with five children in a Minnesota homeless shelter.

I pray God that whoever will lead our country may be, in his heart, as much Pashtun as Tajik, as much Uzbek as Hazara. That his wife may counsel and assist him; that he may choose advisors of great character and wisdom. That books may replace weapons, that education may teach us to respect one another, that our hospitals may be worthy of their mission, and that our culture may be reborn from the ruins of our pillaged museums. That the camps of famished refugees may disappear from our borders, and that the bread the hungry eat be kneaded by their own hands. I will do more than pray, because when the last talib has put away his black turban and I can be a free woman in a free Afghanistan, I will take up my life there once more and do my duty as a citizen, as a woman, and, I hope, as a mother.

Nasser didn’t want them resettled; he kept them rotting in refugee camps and used them against Israel. The British did not create the Arab-Jewish conflict, though they may have aggravated it. If the Arab states did not deliberately exploit the Palestinians for political purposes, then the kindest interpretation of their conduct is that they were utterly incompetent. It is true that Israel might have done more for the refugees, over the years. The efforts made to indemnify those who had lost their lands and homes were far from adequate.

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS came one after another during 1985, all broadcast live on network television to tens of millions of Americans. In June two Lebanese terrorists hijacked TWA Flight 847, murdered a Navy diver on board, and negotiated while mugging for cameras on a Beirut runway. In October the Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro in Italy, murdered a sixty-nine-year-old Jewish-American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, dumped his body overboard, and ultimately escaped to Baghdad with Egyptian and Italian collaboration. Just after Christmas, Palestinian gunmen with the Abu Nidal Organization opened fire on passengers lined up at El Al ticket counters in Vienna and Rome, killing nineteen people, among them five Americans. One of the American victims was an eleven-year-old girl named Natasha Simpson who died in her father’s arms after a gunman unloaded an extra round in her head just to make sure. The attackers, boyish products of Palestinian refugee camps, had been pumped full of amphetamines by their handlers just before the holiday attacks.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

Make school affordable. For example, provide family stipends for keeping girls in school. Help girls overcome health barriers. For example, offer deworming treatments. Reduce the time and distance to get to school. For example, provide girls with bikes. Make schools more girl-friendly. For example, offer child-care programs for young mothers. Improve school quality. For example, invest in more and better teachers. Increase community engagement. For example, train community education activists. Sustain girls’ education during emergencies. For example, establish schools in refugee camps. Today,

He had lived in an apartment with books touching the ceilings, and rugs thick enough to hide dice; then in a room and a half with dirt floors; on forest floors, under unconcerned stars; under the floorboards of a Christian who, half a world and three-quarters of a century away, would have a tree planted to commemorate his righteousness; in a hole for so many days his knees would never wholly unbend; among Gypsies and partisans and half-decent Poles; in transit, refugee, and displaced persons camps; on a boat with a bottle with a boat that an insomniac agnostic had miraculously constructed inside it; on the other side of an ocean he would never wholly cross; above half a dozen grocery stores he killed himself fixing up and selling for small profits; beside a woman who rechecked the locks until she broke them, and died of old age at forty-two without a syllable of praise in her throat but the cells of her murdered mother still dividing in her brain; and finally, for the last quarter century, in a snow-globe-quiet Silver Spring split-level: ten pounds of Roman Vishniac bleaching on the coffee table; Enemies, A Love Story demagnetizing in the world’s last functional VCR; egg salad becoming bird flu in a refrigerator mummified with photographs of gorgeous, genius, tumorless great-grandchildren.

During World War II, the University of Minnesota’s Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene conducted what scientists and relief workers still regard today as a benchmark study of starvation. Partly funded by religious groups, including the Society of Friends, the study was intended to help the Allies cope with released concentration-camp internees, prisoners of war, and refugees. The participants were all conscientious objectors who volunteered to lose 25 percent of their body weight over six months. The experiment was supervised by Dr. Ancel Keys (for whom the K-ration was named). The volunteers lived a spare but comfortable existence at a stadium on the campus of the University of Minnesota.

But the thing that made it most interesting is what it had to say about books and religion. I love how Brooks shows that every great religion shares a love of books, of reading, of knowledge. The individual books may be different, but reverence for books is what we all have in common. Books are what bring all the different people in the novel together, Muslims and Jews and Christians. That’s why everyone in the book goes to such lengths to save this one book—one book stands for all books. When I think back on all the refugee camps I visited, all over the world, the people always asked for the same thing: books. Sometimes even before medicine or shelter—they wanted books for their children.

In 1944-1945, Dr Ancel Keys, a specialist in nutrition and the inventor of the K-ration, led a carefully controlled yearlong study of starvation at the University of Minnesota Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene. It was hoped that the results would help relief workers in rehabilitating war refugees and concentration camp victims. The study participants were thirty-two conscientious objectors eager to contribute humanely to the war effort. By the experiment's end, much of their enthusiasm had vanished. Over a six-month semi-starvation period, they were required to lose an average of twenty-five percent of their body weight." [...] p193 p193-194 "...the men exhibited physical symptoms...their movements slowed, they felt weak and cold, their skin was dry, their hair fell out, they had edema. And the psychological changes were dramatic. "[...] p194 "The men became apathetic and depressed, and frustrated with their inability to concentrate or perform tasks in their usual manner. Six of the thirty-two were eventually diagnosed with severe "character neurosis," two of them bordering on psychosis. Socially, they ceased to care much about others; they grew intensely selfish and self-absorbed. Personal grooming and hygiene deteriorated, and the men were moody and irritable with one another. The lively and cooperative group spirit that had developed in the three-month control phase of the experiment evaporated. Most participants lost interest in group activities or decisions, saying it was too much trouble to deal with the others; some men became scapegoats or targets of aggression for the rest of the group. Food - one's own food - became the only thing that mattered. When the men did talk to one another, it was almost always about eating, hunger, weight loss, foods they dreamt of eating. They grew more obsessed with the subject of food, collecting recipes, studying cookbooks, drawing up menus. As time went on, they stretched their meals out longer and longer, sometimes taking two hours to eat small dinners. Keys's research has often been cited often in recent years for this reason: The behavioral changes in the men mirror the actions of present-day dieters, especially of anorexics.

Why do Americans pay billions of tax dollars annually to a foreign war machine, deployed on a captive civilian population? If the United States and the United Kingdom both voted against the Palestinian right to self-­determination should we interpret this to mean that the most powerful nations in the Anglosphere if not the Global North at large believe that Palestinians must remain a colonized and dispersed people forever? That Palestine must never be free, but must remain subject to Israeli apartheid from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea? That Palestinians must remain subjected to daily violence, impoverishment in refugee camps, and permanent political alienation? The powers and principles that govern the world, hardly in hiding, reveal themselves now in three dimensions and technicolor.

Please Call Me By My True Names Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow— even today I am still arriving. Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a Spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive. I am a mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird that swoops down to swallow the mayfly. I am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond. And I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am also the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands. And I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people dying slowly in a forced-labor camp. My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans. Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up and the door of my heart could be left open, the door of compassion.

My family had been in a refugee camp for a year and I was thirty-one years old when the government of Israel arranged through secret channels to fly all the Jews of Yemen to Israel. It was unofficially called Operation Magic Carpet, and officially called Operation On Wings of Eagles. When our people refused to enter the airplanes out of fear—for especially our brethren from the North had no experience with modernity—our rabbis reminded them of divine passages. “This is the fulfillment of ancient prophecy,” they said. “The eagles that fly us to the Promised Land may be made of metal, but their wings are buoyed aloft by the breath of God.” Between June 1949 and September 1950 almost fifty thousand Yemenite Jews boarded transport planes and made some 380 flights from Aden to Israel in this secret operation.

The agencies tried to give the few incentive positions they had to women to encourage what they called ‘gender balance’ and, apart from those who chose to hustle in the market for a pittance, the remainder of the male population had no ability to provide for their families. They felt emasculated and camouflaged their injured pride in khat and idleness. There was little in their world that they controlled and so the one thing they sought to master, above all else, was their women. Muna

Thus when people object, as they do, to me and others pointing out that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer—by commenting that wealth is not finite, that statist and globalist solutions and handouts will merely strip the poor of their human dignity and vocation to work, and that all this will encourage the poor toward a sinful envy of the rich, a slothful escapism, and a counterproductive reliance on Caesar rather than God—I want to take such commentators to refugee camps, to villages where children die every day, to towns where most adults have already died of AIDS, and show them people who haven't got the energy to be envious, who aren't slothful because they are using all the energy they've got to wait in line for water and to care for each other, who know perfectly well that they don't need handouts so much as justice. I know, and such people often know in their bones, that wealth isn't a zero-sum game, but reading the collected works of F. A. Hayek in a comfortable chair in North America simply doesn't address the moral questions of the twenty-first century.

no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay. no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet hot blood in your belly it’s not something you ever thought of doing until the blade burnt threats into your neck and even then you carried the anthem under your breath only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back. you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land no one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled means something more than journey. no one crawls under fences no one wants to be beaten pitied no one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer than a city of fire and one prison guard in the night is better than a truckload of men who look like your father no one could take it no one could stomach it no one skin would be tough enough the go home blacks refugees dirty immigrants asylum seekers sucking our country dry niggers with their hands out they smell strange savage messed up their country and now they want to mess ours up how do the words the dirty looks roll off your backs maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble than bone than your child body in pieces. i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore unless home told you to quicken your legs leave your clothes behind crawl through the desert wade through the oceans drown save be hunger beg forget pride your survival is more important no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now i dont know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here

Few survivors carried anything, except for anguished tales of their abandonment by the Raj. Lying in their cholera beds, they told of Anglo-Indian families whose darker-skinned daughters were turned away from camps for Europeans; of columns of Indian refugees held back until Europeans had passed, so the roads would be less begrimed; of elephants struggling up the slopes, hind legs quivering, as they carried mahogany desks out over the bodies of children. The most despised rumour, which travelled well in India, was that the Army enforced separate ‘White’ and ‘Black’ routes: so little did Indian lives count in the end.

In the course of her letter writing, she’d learned a few things about the subtle peculiarities of the South’s power brokers. The Mississippi Sovereigns, like most other rebel groups, preferred to be addressed as Brothers; letters to Mr. Sharif, the director of Camp Patience, were exclusively read and acted upon by his secretary, but could never be addressed to his secretary; the Free Southern State government in Atlanta had a perfect record of responding to every letter, but no sooner than two years after the fact. She learned which methods of attack worked and which didn’t. Any familial relation between appellant and recipient, no matter how tenuous, was to be ruthlessly exploited; pictures of dead relatives or horrific war wounds never did any good, although the refugees in possession of such images invariably demanded they be sent anyway; a direct offer of bribery was more likely than not to elicit an insulted response, but an offer to make a donation to a cause of the recipient’s choosing got the same message across more tactfully. It was, in the end, hopeless work, the letters almost always doomed to fail. But for the refugees who paid or begged Martina to write these pleadings on their behalf, hopelessness was no impediment to hope.

Mom was often asked to give speeches about why she felt so committed to the cause of refugees. She would say, “Just imagine that you are awakened tonight by someone in your family who says to you, ‘Put the things you treasure most in one small bag that you can carry. And be ready in a few minutes. We have to leave our home and we will have to make it to the nearest border.’ What mountains would you need to cross? How would you feel? How would you manage? Especially if across the border was a land where they didn’t speak your language, where they didn’t want you, where there was no work, and where you were confined to camps for months or years.” And

For fear of upsetting Hitler, Roosevelt refused to allow Jewish immigration into America. He turned back a ship called the St. Louis filled with Jewish refugees, guaranteeing death for many of them. Roosevelt also refused to allow 20,000 Jewish orphans into America even though they all had sponsoring families through Jewish, Catholic, and Quaker aid organizations. Virtually all eventually died in Nazi death camps. Roosevelt’s refusal, according to historian Thomas Fleming, was the act that convinced Hitler that the world would not care if he pursued his final solution. And yet all that is easily brushed aside when historians judge Roosevelt to be a great president. Much is forgiven activist, big government

Kissinger traces the balances made in foreign policy, including that of realism and idealism, from the times of Cardinal Richelieu through chapters on Theodore Roosevelt the realist and Woodrow Wilson the idealist. Kissinger, a European refugee who has read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. “No other nation,” he wrote in Diplomacy, “has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism.” Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he pointed out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable.

There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.

When she was safely in America, Sarah Liu and two other refugees from the South China Church all resettled in Midland. The Midland community helped provide support for their living expenses under ChinaAid. We invited them over to our home during the Christmas season. We watched as Sarah walked ever so slowly up to our Christmas tree and stared at the lights twinkling on and off, absolutely mesmerized. “Those are just decorations,” I explained. “They’re on a string.” I pulled out a package and handed them to her, so she could see what they looked like before being draped over the tree. She took the string of lights out of the package faster than I could blink, her hands untangling them like she was knitting a blanket. Within seconds, she had completely unwrapped and disassembled the lights. Then she looked up at me with the various parts in her hands. “I assembled these in my labor camp for sixteen hours a day,” she explained. “We made Christmas lights and put them in packages that look just like this one.” She then reassembled them just as quickly. The whole process took only seconds.

Liberals are imperfect. Yes, of course. Liberals need to grow one fucking vertebrae, stop massaging capitalism’s nards, and actually serve their constituents. But, on the other hand, if you look at the actual fucking laws they are trying to pass and the actual fucking leader they are supporting, the Republicans of 2019 literally do not want human beings to have health care. They do not want millennials to be able to earn a living wage, own property, or comfortably retire, ever. They want to expand access to guns and shrink police accountability. They want refugees tossed into concentration camps. They want pregnant people to be forced to incubate and birth unwanted children and for barely pubescent rape victims to die in childbirth. They certainly want to roll back marriage equality, if they can, and they’ve already begun stripping rights and protections from trans people. They want to squeeze every last resource out of our ecosystem until everything you love—manatees, dragonflies, fruit, your grandchildren—either burns or starves or drowns. They want to steal your money and waste it on gold-leafed steaks that they can shit into their gold toilets while they watch the sun swallow the earth. They are very, very bad! Similarly, sometimes Democrats ask you to respect people’s pronouns!

Sharon passed around a handout: "Triangle of Self-Actualization" by Abraham Maslow. The levels of human motivation. It resembled the nutrition triangle put out by the FDA, with five horizontal levels of multiple colors. I vaguely remembered it from my one college psychology course in the 1970's. "Very applicable with refugees," Sharon said. "Maslow theorized that one could not move to a higher level until the prior level was satisfied. The first level, the triangle base, is physiological needs. Like food and water. Until a person has enough to eat and drink, that's all one would be concerned with." I'd never experienced not being able to satisfy my thirst or hunger, but it sounded logical that that would be my only concern in such a situation. For the Lost Boys, just getting enough food and water had been a daily struggle. I wondered what kind of impact being stuck at the bottom level for the last fourteen years would have on a person, especially a child and teen. "The second level is safety and security. Home. A sanctuary. A safe place." Like not being shot at or having lions attack you. They hadn't had much of level two, either. Even Kakuma hadn't been safe. A refugee camp couldn't feel like home. "The third level is social. A sense of belonging." Since they'd been together, they must have felt like they belonged, but perhaps not on a larger scale, having been displaced from home and living in someone else's country. "Once a person has food, shelter, family and friends, they can advance to the fourth level, which is ego. Self-esteem." I'd never thought of those things occurring sequentially, but rather simultaneously, as they did in my life. If I understood correctly, working on their self-esteem had not been a large concern to them, if one at all. That was bound to affect them eventually. In what way remained to be seen. They'd been so preoccupied with survival that issues of self-worth might overwhelm them at first. A sure risk for insecurity and depression. The information was fascinating and insightful, although worrisome in terms of Benson, Lino, and Alepho. It also made me wonder about us middle-and upper-class Americans. We seldom worried about food, except for eating too much, and that was not what Maslow had been referring to. Most of us had homes and safety and friends and family. That could mean we were entirely focused on that fourth level: ego. Our efforts to make ourselves seem strong, smart, rich, and beautiful, or young were our own kind of survival skill. Perhaps advancing directly to the fourth level, when the mind was originally engineered for the challenges of basic survival, was why Prozac and Zoloft, both antidepressants, were two of the biggest-selling drugs in America. "The pinnacle of the triangle," Sharon said, "is the fifth level. Self-actualization. A strong and deeply felt belief that as a person one has value in the world. Contentment with who one is rather than what one has. Secure in ones beliefs. Not needing ego boosts from external factors. Having that sense of well-being that does not depend on the approval of others is commonly called happiness." Happiness, hard to define, yet obvious when present. Most of us struggled our entire lives to achieve it, perhaps what had brought some of us to a mentoring class that night.

Thich Nhat Hanh shares this Mahayana philosophy of non-dualism. This is clearly demonstrated in one of his most famous poems, “Call Me By My True Names:”1 Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow– even today I am still arriving. Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. I am still arriving, in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope, the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of every living creature. I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird, that swoops down to swallow the mayfly. I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond, and I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands, and I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people, dying slowly in a forced-labor camp. My joy is like spring, so warm that it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast that it fills up all four oceans. Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up and open the door of my heart, the door of compassion. (Nhat Hanh, [1993] 1999, pp. 72–3) We

Diplomats sitting inside their cozy air-conditioned offices most profoundly utter, you must have patience to have peace on earth. To them I say, how dare you preach on peace, you ignorant snobs - tell that to the innocent little kids who are suffering in warzones, without any clue as to whether they'll live to see the next day - while the capitalist circle of the developed world keeps getting richer by getting the shallow masses hooked on nonessential technology, these children of war have one question in their mind - whether starvation will kill them first or explosives. Shame on you - shame on us - who despite having a roof over head and food on the table, have not the slightest bit of concern for these innocent lives forgotten by destiny. There is no time for patience - there is no time for diplomacy - there is no time for policies, legislations and meaningless paperwork. It's enough already. Either stand up and rush to the aid of these war-stricken communities through whichever means possible or keep your mouth shut for the rest of your life.

Organizationally, the ITC was remarkably successful as a prototype for later international efforts. Between July 1, 1948, and June 30, 1951, it carried out nearly 30 million prevaccination tuberculin tests in twenty-two countries and Palestinian refugee camps, followed by 14 million vaccinations among those whose tuberculin test was negative. Prophylactically, however, the results were disappointing,

So what does that mean in a world where some of us find being locked down a minor nuisance while others are still crowded in refugee camps or in third-world cities where ‘social distancing’ is about as easy as flying to the moon? We need to think globally and act locally–but, in doing both, to work with Church leaders from around the world to find policies that will prevent a mad rush back to profiteering with the devil taking the hindmost. Of course, in the middle of that, we need to strengthen the World Health Organization and insist that all countries of the world stick firmly to its policies and protocols. There are, no doubt, big questions to be asked of some of the world’s superpowers who have used the current crisis as an occasion for grandstanding or other political game-playing. The electronic rumour mills and the ‘fake news’ channels have been working overtime as well.

As we were leaving the camp, I wondered whether refugee and IDP camps are a sign of compassion towards displaced people, or are they signs of how far humans have gone in causing harm to each other?

I was unruly, full of contempt. I told them to go ahead and teach their students who knew nothing but comfort and were headed to careers at Goldman Sachs. I would not go along. I had not picked bugs out of my feet and watched my beaten sister nurse her baby fleeing from one refugee camp to another to be lectured about human ethics by a man in corduroys.

Democratic citizenship requires a degree of empathy, insight, and kindness that demands a great deal of all of us. There are easier ways to live. For example, we can reduce our public engagement to consumption, viewing our labour as whatever we need do to enter the consumer marketplace with money in our pockets, free to choose our widgets, to shape an identity based upon consumption. Or we can go global and expand our understanding of “us” by wandering the world and appreciating its cultures and wonders, considering both the people living in the refugee camps of the world and the residents of small towns of Iowa to be our neighbours, while maintaining a connection with our own local traditions and duties.

But with so many refugees on the move, it was easy for minor party officials, former concentration camp guards and other functionaries to lose themselves in the anonymous multitudes migrating from east to west and ‘misplace’ their identification papers en route.

The sexual abuse and trafficking of North Korean women and girls is a serious and growing issue in China. Hundreds of North Korean women defect every year, seeking relief from famine and repression, and hopeful for a better life. Go-betweens often promise them a job in a restaurant or factory—then sell them to brokers who force them into marriage, prostitution, or cybersex work. To make matters worse, the Chinese government regards these victims as illegal immigrants rather than refugees. If they go to the authorities, they are simply repatriated back to North Korea, where they will likely serve time in prison camps under horrific conditions.

Some people are primarily concerned with systemic evils—corporations, nations, and institutions that enslave people, exploit the earth, and disregard the welfare of the weak and disempowered. Others are primarily concerned with individual sins, and so they focus on personal morality, individual patterns, habits, and addictions that prevent human flourishing and cause profound suffering. Some pass out pamphlets that explain how to have peace with God; some work in refugee camps in war zones. Some have radio shows that discuss particular interpretations of particular Bible verses; others work to liberate women and children from the sex trade. Often the people most concerned about others going to hell when they die seem less concerned with the hells on earth right now, while the people most concerned with the hells on earth right now seem the least concerned about hell after death.

At the age of five, she was forced to flee an area of the world that is now Pakistan. It was during the time of the bloody Indian subcontinent partition. Along with her family, my mother joined one of the largest human migrations in history. After arriving in India, she lived as a refugee for the next several years, struggling to survive. People in those refugee camps didn’t have the luxury of hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Yet her mother (my grandmother), Gopibai Hingorani, a woman who had completed only the fourth grade, told her she was going to make sure her daughter received something that no one could ever take away from her: an education. It still gives me shivers to imagine a young girl trapped in a camp being told she would one day become someone who mattered. By keeping her promise, my grandmother initially gave my mother her sense of purpose. My mom completed engineering college in India and made history as the first female engineer there. It was just the beginning of her life in a male-dominated space. After reading a biography of Henry Ford, she dreamed of working for the company that he’d built. Again, my grandparents came through. They took their savings of a lifetime to send my mom to the United States in 1965. At age twenty-four, she became the first woman hired as an engineer at Ford Motor Company. My parents are now retired in Florida, but they stay active, playing a lot of bridge, singing karaoke, and traveling. My mother spends a lot of time with her five granddaughters, teaching them the value of a life lived with purpose.

And I had to say why this moment mattered. That this was not waiting for someone to give us back what had been stolen, with violence, with terror. That breaking up, our dispersion, our diaspora. That fracture of the four Ephrussi children to four continents of the world, the suicide of their mother, their father a refugee, the murder in the labour camps of uncles and aunts. This wasn’t about art. It was what art carries. This was restitution: a bringing back of something taken.

People have forgotten how badly the refugees from Spain were treated, kept in camps near the border for years, as if they were criminals, to be punished. Well into the sixties, there were a couple of pubs in Soho where intensely poor Spaniards met to talk about how the world had forgotten them, and yet they had been the first to stand up to the Nazis, to the fascists.

For Hmong, an additional layer of punishment was how life in the camps deprived them of their self-reliance. Officially, residents of Ban Vinai were not allowed to leave the camp. In the earlier years, some men and women made informal arrangements to work off-site, mostly as farm laborers. At no point, though, were they allowed to have their own farms: that would have taken land away from Thai farmers, and it might have encouraged the refugees to stay. While camp rations were meager, the cruelty of this prohibition was not the people’s hunger; it was that since before anyone’s memories began, agriculture had been the axis on which Hmong lives spun. Practically, farming designed how they spent each day. Societally, farming was the underpinning of their financial and cultural independence. Now it was gone. As if all the bones had been removed from a body, the structure of life had been taken away.

Hysteria! And grief and bitterness. That's what goes on. Not satisfied that our fighters evacuated the city, the enemy went after their women and children whom they left behind in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, slaughtered them, and left their bodies stacked in grotesque piles in the muddy lanes, fly-covered, rotting in the sun. They went after our Palestine Research Center the repository of our culture and history in exile, whose treasures we had been collecting since the day we left Palestine, looted it then burned it to the ground. Fifteen thousand of our people, including boys under the age if twelve and men over the age of eighty, were picked up and put in a concentration camp called Ansar. Our community in Lebanon, half a million men, women, and children found itself suddenly severed from institutions (educational, medical, cultural, economic, and social) they had depended on for their everyday living, which the enemy destroyed. Our fighters, the mainspring of our national struggle, were shipped to thre deserts of Algeria, the outback of Sudan, and the scorching plain of Yemen. Our leadership sought refuge in Tunisia. And when the choked psyche of our nation gasped for air, some months later, we lunged atat each other in civil war, because we had failed our people and ourselves. Our promises had proved illusory.

According to my orientation classes, the one thing I needed to know about America above everything else was this: “There is no such thing as hakuna matata in America.” I laughed the first time the instructor said this. Hakuna matata means “no worries.” In Africa, it is more than a catchy saying. It is a way of life in the camp. Time simply does not matter. From presidents and kings and judges all the way down to boys in a refugee camp, arriving somewhere “on time” is a very foreign concept. If you say, “Be here by nine,” that means, to us, “Show up sometime before noon.” If you are late, hakuna matata—no worries. In Africa, no one expects you to show up on time, anyway.

I will NOT be loyally to no party before my freedom! Any party that attack my 1st and 2nd amendments right is a dangers party to vote for! I lived in a communist country and I defected from them because they did what Democrats are trying to do! Remember Communism don't come in one day, it starts with socialism. Than they move forward censoring and seizing guns than they move forward seizing your properties than the dictate over people with IRON FIST! Vladimir Lenin said " Socialisms is the road to the communism" I can tell you from my own personal life experience living under communist IRON FIST! You are free to vote for communism in a free country. But try to be free, and vote out of the communism! You have to shot yourself out like I did! Through bullets I defected communist regime after after being screened and backwound check. I spending few months in a concentration camp waiting to be approved to come legally to America, and today Democrats are opening the borders and letting illegal's come straight into America, cutting in front of the line of the other immigrants/refugees who are waiting for months and years to come legally to the USA! This is what I call undermining the democracy! Country with our a borders is not a country just how a house with out walls is not a house! They say fences makes a good neighbors!

I will NOT be loyally to no party before my freedom! Any party that attack my 1st and 2nd amendments right is a dangers party to vote for! I lived in a communist country and I defected from them because they did what Democrats are trying to do! Remember Communism don't come in one day, it starts with socialism. Than they move forward censoring and seizing guns than they move forward seizing your properties than the dictate over people with IRON FIST! Vladimir Lenin said " Socialisms is the road to the communism" I can tell you from my own personal life experience living under communist IRON FIST! You are free to vote for communism in a free country. But try to be free, and vote out of the communism! You have to shot yourself out like I did! I was only 23 years old when through bullets I defected communist regime and landed to the neighbor country before I immigrated to the USA! After being screened and back round check. I spending few months in a concentration camp waiting to be approved to come legally to America, Today Democrats are opening the borders, and letting illegal's come straight into America, cutting in front of the line of the other immigrants/refugees who are waiting for months and years on line to come legally to the USA! it is not cool! This cheating and undermining our democracy! A country with our a borders it is not a country, just how a house with out walls it is not a house! They say fences makes a good neighbors!

The hallway's walls are covered now with posters, of dinosaurs, cartoon characters, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, and displays of artwork by the orphans. Many of the drawings depict tanks running over huts, men brandishing AK-47s, refugee camp tents, scenes of jihad.

It’s a bloody mess,’ Oliver told her as they settled into their seats in the stalls. ‘Barcelona raided by heavy bombers, thousands of refugees pouring into France every day. The French are keeping the border open for the time being, but they simply can’t cope with the numbers. They herd the Spanish into camps where they have barely enough to eat, no medical attention, and only tents to sleep in. It’s cold and rainy. Ankle-deep in mud. Children are dying. And more coming every day.

The immigrants from Europe, almost all of them having spent months, even years, in Displaced Persons’ camps (DP camps) in the British and American occupation zones in Germany, were mostly the penniless, exhausted, traumatised remnant of murdered families and communities lost in the Holocaust, fleeing the lands where they and their ancestors had lived and worked for hundreds of years. The immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries were mostly the penniless, exhausted, traumatised expellees who had been made refugees as a result of the sudden, furious reaction to the creation of the State of Israel by the governments and peoples among whom they and their ancestors had lived and worked for 1,400 years.

The most provocative suggestion comes from visitors to modern Israel, who cannot help noticing the similar plights of Galilean Jews in Jesus’ day and Palestinians in modern times. Both served the economic interests of their richer neighbors. Both lived in small hamlets, or refugee camps, in the midst of a more modern and alien culture. Both were subject to curfews, crackdowns, and discrimination. As Malcolm Muggeridge16 observed in the 1970s, “The role of the Roman legionnaires had been taken over by the Israeli army. Now it was the Arabs who were in the position of a subject people; entitled, like the Jews in Jesus’ lifetime, to attend their mosques and practise their religion, but otherwise treated like second-class citizens.” Both groups, modern Palestinians and Galilean Jews, also share a susceptibility to hotheads who would call them to armed revolt. Think of the modern Middle East with all its violence, intrigues, and squabbling parties. Into such an incendiary environment, Jesus was born.

The Australian and Nauruan governments have gone to great lengths to limit information on camp conditions and have prevented journalists who make the long journey to the island from seeing where migrants are being housed. But the truth is leaking out nonetheless: grainy video of prisoners chanting “We are not animals”; reports of mass hunger strikes and suicide attempts; horrifying photographs of refugees who had sewn their own mouths shut, using paper clips as needles; an image of a man who had badly mutilated his neck in a failed hanging attempt. There are also images of toddlers playing in the dirt and huddling with their parents under tent flaps for shade (originally the camp had housed only adult males, but now hundreds of women and children have been sent there too).

When I think back on all the refugee camps I visited, all over the world, the people always asked for the same thing: books. Sometimes even before medicine or shelter—they wanted books for their children.

No one would choose to crawl under fences, beaten until your shadow leaves, raped, forced off the boat because you are darker, drowned, sold, starved, shot at the border like a sick animal, pitied. No one would choose to make a refugee camp home for a year or two or ten, stripped and searched, finding prison everywhere. And if you were to survive, greeted on the other side--Go home Blacks, dirty refugees, sucking our country dry of milk, dark with their hands out, smell strange, savage, look what they've done to their own countries, what will they do to ours?

In 2008 an official website commemorating Sharon’s life and achievements was established, in which, rather than hiding his role in Gaza in those days, it proudly lauded it: Sharon participates in these searches himself. He orders the soldiers to perform a full body search on all males and sometimes imposes curfews on refugee camps in order to conduct a search. The clear goal of the mission is finding terrorists and killing them. The soldiers have orders not to try and capture the terrorists alive. Sharon instructs them to be rough with the local population, to perform searches in the streets and even to strip suspects naked if necessary; to shoot to kill any Arab who holds a gun; to shoot to kill any Arab who does not obey a Stop! call; and to diminish the risk to their lives by employing a big volume of fire, by uprooting trees from orchards which makes it difficult to capture terrorists, by demolishing houses and driving out their owners to other houses in order to pave secure roads. Haider Abd al-Shafi, Senior Palestinian leader, says: ‘Sharon took a decision to open roads in Al Shateya camp and in Rafah for security. That led to removing houses, the houses of refugees, which is an action not to be taken lightly, but there was no objection neither from Dayan nor from the Israeli government. They let Sharon realize his aim and he really destroyed a lot of refugees’ houses.’ Eli Landau, political ally and a friend of Ariel Sharon, says: ‘He was a very senior officer going with the troops from house to house, from bunker to bunker, from orange grove to orange grove, to explain what he meant. Three months later, Gaza was quiet. The terror was crushed with an iron fist, with a vicious hand. He cast fear in Gaza, he was feared.’9 The manner and detail of the retaliation were based on British military counter-insurgency methods employed against the Palestinians during the Arab revolt in the 1930s; it seems that the new rulers of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were highly impressed by this ruthless methodology. In the case of the British this pattern of inhumanity was in place for three years; in the case of the Palestinians it has lasted for more than fifty years.

It is estimated that the Jewish population in the country was about 210,000 immediately before the German occupation, though this figure may be a significant underestimate, not taking into account many unregistered Jewish refugees from Poland and elsewhere. About 8,500 Jews were able to flee east into Soviet Russia before the arrival of the Germans, and between 3,500 and 5,000 either escaped from the ghettos and concentration camps or survived to the end of the war. The rest – at least 196,500, and according to some estimates as many as 254,000 – were killed. The great majority were slaughtered by the Einsatzgruppen and their local paramilitary helpers in the first months that followed the German invasion.

They said that there were refugee camps set up by a group of powerful countries. We would be subjected to their decisions, these foreign nations, though this fact did not feel like new information. Hadn’t we been all along? Even in Laos, we were at the mercy of the countries who had sent planes across our skies, dropped rice and bombs for our people to eat and to die.

If one had cigarettes, one could barter for food with the German farmers. If the Latvian did not speak German, then the exchange was primitive and went something like this: "Ich Zigarette, du Schwein." ("Me - cigarette, you - pig") The farmer understood, and the DP returned to camp with a hunk of smoked bacon.

If I close my eyes hard, twenty years after living in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp, I see the way the camp was. I know that it no longer exists. Everything was left to ruin in 1995 when the camp closed. The shacks were taken apart, and the signs of people having lived there, wiped away by people, by nature, by time. The people that were buried in the place I was born: what has happened to their graves, unmarked even then, just little mounds across the hills?

Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money. The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared: Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim. An American text designed to teach children Farsi: Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.

For fear of upsetting Hitler, Roosevelt refused to allow Jewish immigration into America. He turned back a ship called the St. Louis filled with Jewish refugees, guaranteeing death for many of them. Roosevelt also refused to allow 20,000 Jewish orphans into America even though they all had sponsoring families through Jewish, Catholic, and Quaker aid organizations. Virtually all eventually died in Nazi death camps. Roosevelt’s refusal, according to historian Thomas Fleming, was the act that convinced Hitler that the world would not care if he pursued his final solution. And yet all that is easily brushed aside when historians judge Roosevelt to be a great president. Much is forgiven activist, big government war presidents.

Life in a refugee camp is hellish, unbearable. The relief worker who ends the first day wet-eyed can’t always blame the choking dust. But compared with life in Cambodia since 1975, many refugees say their plight doesn’t seem so bad. Talk to them. As they tell of years of horror and misery that Westerners can barely comprehend, their faces are expressionless and dull. Their voices go flat, as if they’re talking about a dull day at work. Their tales end with a nodding acknowledgment of the death of their nation and culture. I

Yesterday at dawn Roy was murdered. The quiet of the spring morning blinded him, and he did not see those who sought his life hiding behind the furrow. Let us not cast blame today on the murderers. What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years now, they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their land and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home. It is not among the Arabs of Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roy’s blood. How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate and see, in all its brutality, the fate of our generation? Let us today take stock of ourselves. We are a generation of settlement, and without the steel helmet and the gun’s muzzle we will not be able to plant a tree and build a house. Let us not fear to look squarely at the hatred that consumes and fills the lives of hundreds of Arabs who live around us. Let us not drop our gaze, lest our arms weaken. That is the fate of our generation. This is our choice—to be ready and armed, tough and hard—or else the sword shall fall from our hands and our lives will be cut short.

Even a single smile is too powerful, and if all the faces in the world know to laugh, then there are no bullets, guns and grenades, and not even the refugee camps, but unfortunately the most faces forget how to laugh, and they accumulate the bullets and the guns, and now the weapons ruling the world.

On that day, in jungle hamlets and mountain villages, in cacophonous slums and sprawling refugee camps, on worn concrete floors and under roofs thatched of rice straw and banana leaves, in clay brick homes, on rutted, red dirt roads, and on scorching swaths of sand, children cried and screamed and sang and giggled and toddled and ran and fell and got back up and climbed on their mothers' laps and pulled their siblings' hair and gazed out in wonder at the big, bright world that swirled around them. Millions of boys and girls whose lives were reclaimed whose stories were allowed to continue, who were not mourned or grieved or buried, but instead were loved and held and fretted over and scolded and prepared for the challenges of living, of surviving, all because of a man they had never met and whose name they would likely never know.

No one wants to admit that the temporary camp of Dadaab has become permanent: not the Kenyan government who must host it, not the UN who must pay for it, and not the refugees who must live there. This paradox makes the ground unsteady. Caught between the ongoing war in Somalia and a world unwilling to welcome them, the refugees can only survive in the camp by imagining a life elsewhere. It is unsettling: neither the past, nor the present, nor the future is a safe place for a mind to linger for long. To live in this city of thorns is to be trapped mentally, as well as physically, your thoughts constantly flickering between impossible dreams and a nightmarish reality. In short, to come here you must be completely desperate.

After so much death, it was a wonder anyone remained in the country at all. No one really knows the population of Somalia but, during the past twenty years, somewhere between one third and one half of the six-to-eight million inhabitants had fled their homes. There were over one and a half million refugees abroad, many of them in the camps of Dadaab. The people who still lived in Somalia were the ones without the bus fare to flee, the ones with property to guard or money to make, or the ones who had simply lost their minds. Many were afraid to take the risk of running into the unknown and held to the adage, ‘better the devil you know’. Many more were so inured to the roulette of war, it had simply become the landscape of life. Guled was one of these.

In the city, the ‘Battle of Mogadishu’, as al-Shabaab’s offensive was known, intensified street by street with trenches, snipers and indiscriminate shelling. The militants’ war effort drew all the men, resources and even children into the fight just as the twisters of the eternal Jiilaal sucked the dust of the hard-baked plain into the air and lent everything a brown tinge. The coming tragedy would be played out in sepia. After

But Ethiopia and America were nervous of an Islamic government and the US and other nations sponsored Ethiopia to invade Somalia and dispatch the ICU. This they did in 2006 with astonishing speed, force and cruelty, pounding Mogadishu to rubble and blazing a trail of looted homes, massacred civilians and raped women across the country, while those who had paid for the invasion looked away. With

Al-Shabaab seemed right about many things. The newsletter said that international aid was brought to ruin Somali agriculture and to make people dependent on foreign food; both had indeed been side effects of the relief effort. They said that the West wanted Somalis to be held in ‘camps, like animals’, which could be an accurate description of Dadaab. Most of all though, it was the rhetorical question posed in the newsletter that had the biggest impact among Guled’s traumatized generation: ‘Why invade a country that has been fighting a civil war for a decade and a half the moment they have decided to live in peace?’ The Islamic Courts Union had brought peace. It had been wildly popular and Somalis resented the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion. ‘The United States cannot abide a situation in which Islam is the solution,’ the newsletter argued. And to many that seemed like the truth. The

Back in 1992, the camp originally held ninety thousand Somali refugees fleeing the civil war. They had reproduced. Then others had come: more waves of Somalis, as well as Sudanese, Congolese, Ethiopians, Ugandans and Rwandans seeking asylum whom the Kenyans had shipped out to the margins of their country. And they too had had children. Three generations now called this giant cosmopolitan city made of mud, tents and thorns, home. That morning, 1 December 2010, Guled was the newest arrival in the largest refugee camp in the world.

When he asked about work, Noor laughed. Guled learned that employment in Kenya was forbidden. Like many governments anxious about asylum seekers, Kenya didn’t want Somalis taking Kenyan jobs, so all formal work with a decent salary, with the agencies and the UN, was reserved for Kenyans. Most of the camps’ economy is informal, however, and in the grey economy it was possible to get work in the market, driving, butchering, teaching in the private colleges. The

I tried to explain to the NSC officials my own wonder at this teeming ramshackle metropolis with cinemas, football leagues, hotels and hospitals, and to emphasize that, contrary to what they might expect, a large portion of the refugees are extremely pro-American. I said that the Kenyan security forces, underwritten by US and British money, weapons and training, were going about things in the wrong way: rounding up refugees, raping and extorting them, encouraging them to return to war-racked Somalia.

Raised on the meagre rations of the United Nations for their whole lives, schooled by NGOs and submitted to workshops on democracy, gender mainstreaming and campaigns against female genital mutilation, the refugees suffered from benign illusions about the largesse of the international community. They were forbidden from leaving and not allowed to work, but they believed that if only people came to know about their plight, then the world would be moved to help, to bring to an end the protracted situation that has seen them confined to camps for generations, their children and then grandchildren born in the open prison in the desert. But the officials in the grey room saw the world from only one angle.

I thought of Nisho, the young man who works as a porter in the market, his face clouding into a scowl as he stormed out of an interview when I asked why he had not joined the militants: they paid well and he was poor. The very question was an insult. To him, and to all the refugees he knew, al-Shabaab were crazy, murderous criminals.

I thought of the former child soldier Guled and the many like him, who had fled to the camp to escape the extremists, not to join them. But

Poverty does not necessarily lead to extremism,’ I said. In my head, images of the proud Imams defending their traditions against the murderous corruptions; of the determined youth leader Tawane, risking his life to provide services for the refugees when the aid agencies withdrew for fear of being kidnapped; of Kheyro, working to educate the children of the camp for a pittance; of Professor White Eyes broadcasting his reports on the camp radio. How could I convey their towering dignity, their courage and independence of spirit when they only featured in the official mind as potential terrorists?

At a time when there are more refugees than ever, the rich world has turned its back on them. Our myths and religions are steeped in the lore of exile and yet we fail to treat the living examples of that condition as fully human.

Millions more, the vast majority, remain in camps. And through our tax contributions to the UN, we all pay billions of dollars to keep them there. In Dadaab that means funding schools, hospitals and shipping 8,000 tonnes of food per month into the middle of the blistering desert to feed everyone. This

These broadcasts were of varied content. But all of them took the United States and Canada to task for their anti-Semitism, for not being willing to comprehend and act on the news of the concentration camps early enough, and for continued anti-Semitic policies as they pertained to Jewish refugees.

The place where Guled had come seeking sanctuary was, according to Oxfam, a ‘public health emergency’, and had been for several years. It was a groaning, filthy, disease-riddled slum heaving with traumatized people without enough to eat. Crime was sky high and rape was routine. And the population was about to explode again. On the day Guled arrived the camps held nearly 295,000 people. Twelve months later, at the end of 2011, there would be half a million. Guled

In Ifo he felt only hostility. The inhabitants eyed him nervously. Guled had come from a place of fighting and fear; as far as they were concerned, he was capable of anything; he was a murderer, a terrorist, a bandit, until vouched for otherwise.

Isha was familiar with the bleeding gums, the inflamed limbs, the cramped pain of drinking, the torture when the empty stomach eats itself. When the mind achieves a lucidity departed from the body, perhaps closer to God, and the world acquires a glassy sheen. Isha knew the lethargy like an old friend; when the brain shuts down and desire sleeps and the love between a man and a woman goes. Maybe the man says ‘they are your children’ and leaves, but a woman cannot abandon her children. The people of Rebay looked at the sky and worried. They looked at each other and they had nothing to say. Before, when someone told a story, they stood. But a hungry man will just sit and cry. Hunger keeps you awake. You cannot sleep. It was said that the mind of a hungry person goes gradually mad.

beauty contest, the porters jostled for business. Those with big families could not carry all their rations, so they traded some of their food in return for help with transporting it home. It presented another chance for a boy with only his strength to sell to earn a little extra.

One day, upon awakening from troubled dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin.” —Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis One day, upon awakening, Haileab Asgedom found himself, in America, transformed into a monstrous black beetle.

So we, God’s servants, go, our Master’s invitation in our hands, out to the highways and hedges. We walk through squalid refugee camps in Syria, fetid open-air trash dumps in Mozambique, drug-infested smoky brothels in Bangkok. We go because deep in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan and out on the dusty plains of Iraq, there are people whom God wants to come to His feast. There are people hidden away in small villages in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan who belong at God’s table. There are women in Somalia; street kids in Portland, Oregon; girls in northern Nigeria; and men in Chechnya and a thousand other places who belong in God’s house. God sees them, every one of them, people drawing water from open wells, drinking tea in mud houses, scheming evil in dark camps, hiding from violence in rough caves. He knows their names and faces and voices and laughter and tears. He knows their fears and dreams and joys and sorrows. He was there when they were born, when they fell down, and when they got up—and He wants to share the blessings of all He has with them. This is the heart of God—generous, loving, kind, patient—always ready to bless. He’s prepared His table from the foundations of the earth, and there is still room.

Nearby, towers of bottled water were staged near the runway awaiting distribution. Sure, some bottled water is necessary after a natural disaster, but in general I think it’s one of the least sustainable methods of addressing a water crisis. Once that water was consumed, the bottles simply became mountains of litter covering the already trashed streets of the capital. Without enough bottled water to go around, many earthquake survivors resorted to drinking water from the street gutters. More than one million folks were being exposed to deadly waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid. Reusable water filters were what the Haitians needed most. That was exactly where I chose to direct Wine to Water’s response. We partnered with FilterPure, a nonprofit organization out of the Dominican Republic that builds water filters. The filters were ceramic, simple things made much like clay flowerpots. Before the firing process, the clay is mixed with sawdust and a small amount of fine-grain silver. The sawdust burns in the kiln, leaving tiny porous holes for the water to trickle through. The silver mixed throughout kills any bacteria making it through the tiny pores. These pot filters, sitting inside a simple five-gallon plastic bucket, are capable of filtering water for a family of eight to ten people for up to five years. Some folks from FilterPure picked me up at the airport in a truck loaded with filters. Together we started handing them out throughout the city, in refugee camps and at orphanages in the area.

Over the years I forced myself to be creative in how I covered the same scenes over and over. I started shooting refugee camps out of focus, sometimes in abstract ways, to try to reach an audience beyond the typical New York Times readership -- an audience geared more toward the visual arts. As ugly as the conflict was, the protagonists were beautiful, wearing brilliantly colored fabrics and, despite persistent hardships, wide, toothy smiles. The Sudanese were lovely, friendly, resilient people, and I wanted to show that in my work. It seemed paradoxical to try to create beautiful images out of conflict, but I found that my more abstract images of Darfur provoked an unusual response from readers. Suddenly I was getting requests to sell fine-art prints of rebels in a sandstorm or of blurred refugees walking through the desert for several thousand dollars. I was conflicted about making money from images of people who were so desperate, but I thought of all the years I had struggled to make ends meet to be a photographer, and I knew that any money I made from these photos would be invested right back into my work. Trying to convey beauty in war was a technique to try to prevent the reader from looking away or turning the page in response to something horrible. I wanted them to linger, to ask questions.

As Dr Tino Sanandaji has pointed out, it costs more for 3,000 migrants to be housed in temporary accommodation tents in Sweden than it does to fund outright the largest refugee camp in Jordan (housing around 100,000 Syrian refugees).

So the man was sad! Of course, he was in mourning. He had just lost his wife, what — a few months ago? What a luxury, she thought enviously, that he could mourn his loss like this when her husband had disappeared. She would have liked to give up on life and cry until she was empty of tears; instead she had to brave a refugee camp, a new country, and now a whole new language.

I recall taking a condom to school one day in Year 9 at the insistence of the hungry followers of my sex education class. My father used to hold free medical camps for the Afghan refugees, and I stumbled on a huge carton of condoms in his cupboard. As kids, I remember blowing them up as balloons, blissfully unaware of their intended use. Now, armed with the knowledge of that enlightening book, I opened the pack to a wide-eyed audience. We measured the length with a ruler, which was perhaps not advisable.

It is a scandal—or, rather, it should be a scandal and one wonders why it isn’t—that the US prison population, after reaching a postwar low in the early 1970s, has since grown more than 500 percent. The United States locks up a higher percentage of its own population than any other nation in the world. Even with extraordinary prison construction projects over the last decades, the cells are still overfull. This massive expansion cannot be explained by a growing criminality of the US population or the enhanced efficiency of law enforcement. In fact, US crime rates in this period have remained relatively constant. The scandal of US prison expansion is even more dramatic when one observes how it operates along race divisions. Latinos are incarcerated at a rate almost double that of whites, and African Americans at a rate almost six times as high. The racial imbalance of those on death row is even more extreme. It is not hard to find shocking statistics. One in eight black US males in their twenties, for instance, is in jail or prison on any given day. The number of African Americans under correctional control today, Michelle Alexander points out, is greater than the number of slaves in the mid-nineteenth century. Some authors refer to the racially skewed prison expansion as a return to elements of the plantation system or the institution of new Jim Crow laws. Keep in mind that this differential racial pattern of imprisonment is not isolated to the United States. In Europe and elsewhere, if one considers immigrant detention centers and refugee camps as arms of the carceral apparatus, those with darker skin are disproportionately in captivity.

It seemed impossible that a modern airport, full of prosperous and purposeful travellers, was only kilometres away from those crushed and cindered dreams. My first impression was that some catastrophe had taken place, and that the slums were refugee camps for the shambling survivors. I learned, months later, that they were survivors, of course, those slum-dwellers: the catastrophes that had driven them to the slums from their villages were poverty, famine, and bloodshed. And five thousand new survivors arrived in the city every week, week after week, year after year. As the kilometres wound

Modern health and aid workers still dole out artificial milk to breastfeeding mothers in hospitals, clinics and refugee camps because they do not like to ‘waste’ free supplies provided by guileful companies and ignorant donors.

The church is not built on the rock foundation of geniuses and influencers but of apostles and prophets. This should hardly be surprising, since the kingdom is not greater than its king, and the body is not greater than its head. When confronted by the gospel, the natural response from any culture is, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” That’s true, come to think of it, even in Nazareth (Luke 4:24). And the natural counter-argument from the church is, “Come and see” (John 1:46). The kingdom of God dawns in trailer parks and refugee camps. That shouldn’t surprise us. The kingdom came to us not from a boardroom or a literary guild, but from a feeding trough and an execution stake.

... I came across a gipsy encampment, the first of many I was to see....I never saw any of these Romany folk working; always they were squatting before a fire, doing absolutely nothing at all but gaze in the embers. What their philosophy of life is, I cannot guess, but it must be perfected at a very early age, and I imagine none but those who are whispered the secret in their cradles can ever hope to understand it. Idleness has no defence; it cause mental and moral and physical stagnation; but the me I saw in these camps were completely inactive. They were not resting from their labours, but simply lounging killing time. It was almost pathetic to see them, for theirs were not happy faces, but the hopeless, expressionless faces of men sunk deep in melancholy....They were as men without hope, waiting for the end; they were refugees, outcasts, yet neither.

But I also said it was up to you to decide what kind of monster you wanted to become. And what I saw that night in the dungeon, at the refugee camp, facing down Sarren...it gave me something I have not felt in a long time. It gave me hope.

Dutch Jews were being forcibly herded into the Amsterdam “ghetto,” and then into the Westerbork concentration camp. Ironically, the ghetto, or Jewish quarter, was where Jewish refugees had sought refuge from the Spanish Inquisition, at the end of the fifteenth century.

I thought about all the people who'd had to do this through history. The millions taking flight from disasters, fleeing tyrannical despots, making exodus from pogroms, escaping warring soldiers and pouring out of bombed cities. What had kept them going was the promise of safe haven, whether in some sprawling refugee camp or under the protection of a friendly army. We didn't have that

The people in the refugee camp, so varied in their language, dress, and terrible experiences -- imparted through a look or sometimes words -- had only this in common: nothing to look forward to.

The Soviets had lost fifteen thousand lives and suffered more than thirty thousand casualties. Between a million and two million Afghans perished, perhaps 90 percent of them civilians. Villages were razed, crops and livestock destroyed, the landscape studded with mines. A third of the population sheltered in refugee camps in Pakistan or Iran.

One of the most fascinating studies of differential susceptibility took place in a refugee camp in Syria. The researchers measured by self-report the level of war trauma in 579 children, the level of their sensitivity, and the level of functioning of their family before the war. Surprisingly, HSCs (highly sensitive children) with bad childhoods were less traumatized by their experiences in war zones than those who were not HSCs, and amazingly, HSCs with poor childhoods were also less distressed than HSCs with good childhoods.

The horrible side effects of this pandemic is nothing in comparison to surviving in refugee camps. 80 million people are struggling to survive, to stay alive. Unhygienic and unsanitary conditions is all they know while the majority of us is worrying about toilet papers, disinfection soaps, and co! Lyrics from the song 80 Million People! Written by Lily Amis

How long can we close our hearts to the despised and dispossessed? What are our slums, our penitentiaries, and our refugee camps if not a reflection of our own lovelessness?” from the novel Hotel Noir

The Lost Boys had hardly unpacked by the time they started appearing in local newspaper headlines for their exploits on high school track teams. “Only months after settling in Michigan, two Sudanese refugees are finding that they are among the fastest high school runners in the state,” went the lead of one AP article. Another, in the Lansing State Journal, noted that Abraham Mach, a Lost Boy who had no competitive running experience before arriving at East Lansing High, was the most outstanding performer in the thirteen-to-fourteen age group at the 2001 National AAU Junior Olympic Games, medaling in three events. Mach, who had been living in a Kenyan refugee camp just one year earlier, went on to become an NCAA All-American at Central Michigan in the 800-meters.

The future can't breather in a refugee camp, Amal. The air here is too dense got hope. You are being offered a chance to liberate the life that lies dormant in all of us. Take i

Holmberg tried to help them, but he never fully grasped that the people he saw as remnants from the Paleolithic Age were actually the persecuted survivors of a recently shattered culture. It was as if he had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and concluded that they belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving.

What does “refugee” mean, Mama? the girl asks from the backseat. I look for possible answers to give her. I suppose that someone who is fleeing is still not a refugee. A refugee is someone who has already arrived somewhere, in a foreign land, but must wait for an indefinite time before actually, fully having arrived. Refugees wait in detention centers, shelters, or camps; in federal custody and under the gaze of armed officials. They wait in long lines for lunch, for a bed to sleep in, wait with their hands raised to ask if they can use the bathroom. They wait to be let out, wait for a telephone call, for someone to claim or pick them up. And

This was encouraging to the refugees, but what lay beyond was even more so. At Mule Springs they would find supplies and horses and there, if not sooner, they would meet Mr. Woodworth and old Caleb Greenwood with their men. Beyond Woodworth was Captain Kern who had moved up from the Fort to establish a relay camp. Beyond Kern was Johnson’s ranch and beyond Johnson’s was Sutter’s where Sutter, Sinclair and McKinstry were forwarding supplies. Finally, beyond Sutter’s was Yerba Buena where Alcalde Bartlett and Governor Hull were backing up the relief work with money and necessaries. There was something heart-moving in the way that California, war-harried and thinly peopled, had rallied to the cause of humanity. It was as if a strong chain were extending itself link by link across the mountains, finally to reach the camps and draw out the sufferers. The seven had merely gone ahead in the strength of their own stout bodies and stouter hearts, but the next relief would have the organized strength of many men behind it. . . .

Of the Palestinians, some are dead, others are taken prisoner, the rest presumably are for the most part homeless or dispersed. The fighting boys who looked after me in the upper flat in Sidon and chatted with me in the tangerine groves; the bombweary but indomitable refugees of the camps at Rashidiyeh and Nabatiyeh: from what I hear, their fate is little different from that of their reconstructed counterparts in this story.

Meanwhile, my fellow Fatehites in Kuwait were kind enough to find a role for me. They proposed that a group of us do something creative for the summer of 1968. They suggested we could perform two important tasks— assisting overworked mothers in the "refugee" camps and visiting the families of our martyrs. "Social work", I scoffed, "is not social revolution. I want to participate fully in the revolution.

The Palestinian refugees languished in makeshifts camps, dependent on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for food, water, health services, and jobs. Meanwhile, their homes in Israel were settled by Holocaust survivors from Europe, were demolished, or fell into disrepair.

It wasn't just a pastime. Our stories were drumming with power. Other people's memories transported us out of our places of exile, to rich, vibrant lands, and to home. They reminded us of the long, unknowable road. We couldn't see yet, fresh from our escape, but other sharp turns lay ahead. We had created our life's great story; next would come the waiting time, camp, where we would tell it.

the PLO was not dead. Most of all, the Palestinian issue remained unresolved: the Palestinians still had no state, Israel still ruled over hostile populations in Gaza and the West Bank, and huge numbers of their people remained in refugee camps. Israel may have won the battle in Lebanon, but it only delayed another day of reckoning with the Palestinians. The only question was when and where it would come.

they were people like any others

UNHCR staff numbers grew from 500 to over 9,000 between 1950 and 2016. Camps provided jobs: just not for refugees.

The imagined needs of refugees have almost universally been reduced to two basics - food and shelter - and it has become assumed that the most viable way to provide such rights is through camps.

Indefinite dependency on aid has gradually become the default long-term response to refugees.