So, what sort of music do you like?
What’s your favourite band?
Fancy a smoke?
You don’t smoke?!
(After scanning you from top to bottom) “Interesting” shoes, where did you get those!?
How about plucking your eyebrows?
Where do you go out?
Why don’t you go out?
Got a boyfriend?
What did you say? You’ve got such a funny accent!
Why are you so quiet?
And the thoughts usually never spoken out loudly but commonly simplified into “hm, well, no, I don’t know...” would be:
It’s hard to tell about my music preferences after a year or more of living mainly without electricity or otherwise having a priority of listening to the war field reports and how’s the enemy progressing, which was occasionally interrupted with war chants that were supposed to encourage people for the fight, boost up the moral and the like. At night I would often fall asleep listening to the guns and cannons roaring and thumping here and there.
When I last went to a normal school we were still kids. How come everybody is now wearing make-up, peeling off all the traces of hair (except for those on the scalp) and smoking? Did I miss a decade? I feel like Sylvester Stallone playing a frozen cop who wakes up after 20 years or so.
Well, I don’t have any clothes of my own. I didn’t have time to pack it up with me and I have no money to go shopping. Especially not for branded ones that are a must have around here. The shoes belonged to my older relative and the sweaters and T-shirts to my brother or again relative. A few have been kindly tailored by my aunt (such as a silky tracksuit made of an enemy flag).
I don’t really feel like going out in a weird looking clothes and wouldn’t have money for drinks anyway.
You happen to speak in a funny way too, you know. But you were lucky not to be uprooted and displaced to a place where you’d be a minority. Can I finish a sentence without somebody repeating words after me, if you mind? Oh, I guess it’s easier not to speak at all or only when I have to.
Not having a boyfriend is quite self-explanatory in the above mentioned circumstances.
In fact, at the time, having a boyfriend was the last thing on my mind. Namely, the differences between me and other non-refugee kids were not only in the appearance. Even greater discrepancies were obvious on the inside.
An average teenager detests school and looks for every possible way to escape it, spends minimum time with the book and most of the time with friends. According to what I’ve seen, an average refugee teenager usually reacts to school and education in one of two very opposite ways:
They either completely give up on everything in life including school, thinking “What the hell it matters when everything is falling apart? Why bother with school, only criminals and war heroes prosper.”
Or they more clearly than their peers see education as a means to help them out of a life they don’t like, the only tool left for realisation of their future dreams.
So you can imagine my misery when I heard that I might not continue my school semester because of the war escalating, and nothing made me as horrified as the possibility of missing a school year. What a teenager!? After the experience of losing everything over night, school seemed like the last tiny straw of future hope and I hang on to it desperately.
Unfortunately, the majority of refugees falls into the first category and nobody is there to set some values back into their heads. There is nobody to encourage these kids to fight for themselves and not to give up, not to waste their talents and spend the rest of their lives in bitter disappointment and despondence. To make it worse, such hopeless attitude is often encouraged by equally disoriented parents and the society resembling the Titanic crowd concerned only about saving their own lives, even if it means stepping over dead bodies. In such circumstances, you are a nuisance to everybody.
One of the most moving and convincing confessions I have heard of a refugee struggle and the importance of education was given by Emmanuel Jal, a war child refugee speaking at one of the TED conferences. He was lucky enough to get some education and smart enough to realise the importance of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment