What cannot be said...

I have noticed that our lives mimic nature more than we are aware of. Spells of sunshine interchange with the ones of dark clouds hovering above and then all of a sudden a thunder strikes down, sends shivers down your spine, throws some new light on the world and makes you look around with a new insight. After a period of heavy rains, what might follow is a period of long drought. Having cried their hearts out over some deep irrecoverable wrong or misfortune, people sometimes just bottle up. They become indifferent or lifelessly submissive to what ever is going on around them. You can see them walking around with “Do what you want with me. I don’t care and even if I did it wouldn’t make a difference.” attitude written all over their faces. 

I used to think that tears are only for the weak. I didn’t like them, mostly for the fact that you can’t control them. Once they build up in a mighty torrent, nothing can stop them. Before you even know it, there is a terrible flood of emotions all around the place. Who would ever want that? So I decided to stay clear of the disturbing matters. On the one hand, I wanted the world to know where it has gone wrong, on the other it was too hard to speak up to it. 

When I finally decided to sketch some of these episodes from my past, I did it out of wish to help other people, hoping that it might speed up somebody’s recovery process. I wanted to take this special somebody by the hand and help them back into the world. I wanted to tell them that you can always stand up to your past, thank you for the lessons it taught you, acknowledge the traps it might have led you into and then move forward much stronger. I wanted to bring down some walls of silence between people and replace them with bridges of understanding. And I would still give any minute of my time to put my whole heart and mind into doing any of these. 

However, as it often happens in life, you set out to help somebody else, yet in the end you realise that perhaps the healing process was equally needed to you as well. I became aware of it only recently when a friend told me that he was amazed at how positive I was talking about the hardships from the past. He ascribed it to my character and made it sound as if I was born lucky to go through it all so easily. It made me smile really. I had some explaining here to do describing that it was a product of much effort rather than the influence of some lucky star I was born under. However, I think that much can be ascribed to writing as a lot of unresolved feelings get much clearer in the process of putting them into words. And if you think that it can be of good use to somebody and you give it a purpose then the writing mission works both ways. A French philosopher Derrida once said that “what cannot be said must not be silenced but written”. I couldn’t agree more.

I went home that evening flying on a brand new pair of magic wings, which seems to me always come as a reward after a long tough battle, thinking one happy thought over and over again “I’ve made it! I’ve really made it!”.

A quick test

It will take just a minute as it actually consists of one question only:

In your opinion, is the universe we live in friendly or hostile?

If by any chance Einstein, who supposedly believed this to be one of the most fundamental questions we can ever ask ourselves, lived today he would have given you the following test key:

If you believe that the universe is a hostile place, you will work hard all your life on building walls around  you in order to protect yourself from it.

On the other hand, if you see the world as basically friendly, you will spend your lifetime on building    bridges around you.

Well, it’s not that hard to guess what would anyone who has been anywhere near the war choose as an option. Does it mean that these people, even if they escape the war and outlive its terror, are in a way crippled for life? Are the tins of canned beef and beans, powdered milk, bags of flour and containers of oil nearly enough to make up for all the damage that has been done? Ok, the patient survived but what about their quality of life afterwards and how long it will last?

I can tell you that the situation is not hopeless. Everything is reversible, even the hostile image of the world. You just have to give it another chance, no matter how hard it might seem. I think that as soon as one shows some determination and willingness to try, an opportunity will show up.

In my case, I think it all began from looking at the world through the eyes of a person who is more confident about the goodness of other people than anyone else I have ever met. This friend of mine loves taking photos, especially of people he, by the way, so easily makes contact with. So I had the privilege to wander around the world seeing it the way he does. This easygoing, unrestrained approach to people seemed to me as amazing as their smiling eyes that would in return shine back from his photos. A little later, when I discovered Couchsurfing, I’ve come to feel some of this shiny warmth even more intensely by meeting people in person. From then on, everything has been a lot easier.

Julian Barnes, one of the best contemporary English writers and a very smart guy by the way, would probably drop in here to say that you have to believe in the world just as you have to believe in love. And even if it lets you down again, which is very likely, if not inevitable, you still must go on believing in it as otherwise the world will come down on you with all its heaviness. Eventually it all comes down to building bridges or walls in life and I’m sure everyone will agree that building bridges is much more fun.  

Related posts:
How to survive escaping a bullet? 
A survivor
Do you need a couch? 
Hello Mr/Ms Harp! 

Do you need a couch?

I’ve always been somewhat shy. I admit it. As a kid, I would hide behind my Dad’s legs trying to avoid the shower of kisses coming down on me from my over-excited relatives. Having my cheeks all sticky and wet afterwards didn’t help much either. 

I guess seeing people at their worst some ten years later, helped even less. How can you ever again think highly of humans, once you feel the shower of bombs coming down on you on a number of different occasions? Even if this can be ascribed to the advancement  of the latest extermination tools that elegantly reduce direct human contact to seeing people as too many dots on the screen, there still remain so many disturbing examples of people whose hands have been covered in fresh blood from cutting somebody’s throat. For those who escape all these wide ranging forms of the war’s brutality and violence, still comes another unexpected challenge of overcoming the usual rejection and hostility refugees encounter on a daily basis. Well, excuse me but one really has to be either blind or stupid or made of stone not to acknowledge it. 

However, there is a good side to it, as once you start thinking of people as inferior to animals, every little act of kindness comes as a miraculous surprise. Rather than being overlooked, any sign of human goodness is much appreciated and supported, especially if it comes from a complete stranger. 

If I had been writing this a couple of years earlier, I would have probably finished here concluding that overall people are to be approached with utmost precaution as very few of them are actually well-meaning. Yet, recently I’ve come to seriously doubt it. 

Ten years ago I could hardly imagine myself going over to somebody’s place after just a couple of hours of conversation, or inviting them to my place. This was reserved to very good friends and relatives only. However, a few days ago I got stuck at my new friends’ place until past midnight talking, laughing and completely forgetting about whatever reason I’d had for being shy and detached. At the end of the last year’s summer, after a couple of months of hanging out with my new friend who turned out to be such a wonderful person, I returned home with eyes full of tears because she was leaving the country and I had already missed her much. Through her I met some more good hearted people whose invitations to birthday parties to some far off places I would have gladly accepted if only I’d had a little more money for travelling. A year ago, I asked another newly met friend to stay over for the weekend and was rewarded with a great company, a big warm hug and even a bigger smile. On another occasion, some of my new friends invited me to their special French pancake dinner party and taught me how to make them myself. And just a month ago I spent one out of many wonderful afternoons with my great friend and conversation companion Elsa at a local café whose overshadowing ripe grapes gave us a shelter from the hot summer sun. I’ve met her quite recently too. And the list could go on and on. Actually, the list was too long to fit into my previously constructed perception of the world so that eventually the perception had to be modified. 

The question is how can somebody who is a bit shy, untrusting or overly cautious get a chance to meet some new people and even make a number of new friends? 

Well, it all began with a couch. However, not the familiar one that you sit down on at your friends place for an occasional chit-chat, or the one that you find at a therapist’s. I have come to believe that there is no advice, talk or consultation that can change your mind frame as effectively as the first-hand experience you acquire yourself. So the couch that I have in mind is much more powerful. It enables you to meet new people through their kindness and goodness. 

The idea was born when a group of travel loving enthusiasts decided to build an online community of like minded people who wanted to help each other travel more easily. They created a network of people who fill in their internet profiles by giving a brief overview of likes and dislikes, interests and friends and most importantly offer help to travellers that happen to come to their part of the world. It may be just a walk, talk, having a tea or coffee together or even letting somebody sleep at your couch for a couple of days. The idea proved to be revolutionary as it gave a whole new dimension to travelling. Not only did it become more affordable, but at the same time more interesting and rewarding as well. For how can you possibly feel what the new place is like and how it lives and breathes if you don’t get to know its people? And for those who don’t have enough money to travel around the world themselves it is now possible to welcome the world at their own home.

Here is where you can research into it yourself: Couchsurfing

To tell the truth, I was initially very skeptic about it but luckily also curious enough to give it a try. Coffee after coffee, lemonade or tea and I could slowly feel the change coming on. Certainly not all of these new acquaintances were life changing, yet quite a number of them were. What is even more important is that once you let down your guard, other people start approaching you more easily as well, including those outside the couchsurfing community.  

So these days I’m looking forward to having some of my new friends over for dinner, lunch or sleep-over and as soon as having enough money coincides with having enough free time, I’ll fly off to visit some of these great people all around the world.

An oracle called history

In the village where my father, grandfather and their forefathers were born, there was a hundred year old book written by a monk who came to do his service for the local church. This funny fellow was in the habit of shocking people with his strange visions of future often provoked by people and situations, but sometimes he would simply spell it out, in a manner of a local Nostradamus. These disturbing and often enigmatic windows to the future were said to be written down in that ancient book. I have never seen the written proof itself but I’ve been hearing some of his words circling around from mouth to mouth among the locals ever since I was a kid. Some whispered them with awe, or better say fear, others repeated them mockingly, yet nobody believed that some of his most alarming prophecies would come true, at least not in their life time. How on earth could one vast area of the country become deserted over night, as he used to say? And what did he mean by saying that “the ones who leave the first will eat with a golden spoon, whereas those who leave the last will have nothing but a wooden one”?

With the onset of war, these perplexing words started to make more sense and when the day came when deserted soldiers, runaway husbands and fathers rushed from battlefields to their villages spreading the word that the enemy was approaching fast and that there was no time for packing, people jumped in the cars and tractor trailers knowing that their wooden spoons were waiting for them.

Some time ago I was reading a non-fiction book written by a renowned local historian describing my homeland less than a hundred years ago when I came to a passage that gave a very vivid account of a situation shockingly similar to the one my family and I went through in recent history. There was an ethnic clash in which one side was breaking the shop windows of another with the same hatred and even identical  threatening words shouted out loud. I marched into the kitchen with a book and demanded an explanation from my father. I wanted to know if he knew anything about it. Actually it was not a question, it sounded more like an accusation and I didn’t quite believe him when he said he hadn’t heard about that very episode. Yet, even so, he knew about the animosity, and the hatred, and how unwelcome we were and he still let us go through that same hell our forefathers had gone through, obviously in vain. I held him responsible. I found him guilty of being naive for believing that people are too good to let horrors happen or, even worse, repeat. He trusted them too much, he didn’t take the warning signs seriously and completely ignored history that made a fool of us again. I could almost hear it laughing.

My anger waned quickly as I knew I loved my father for what he was, sometimes too naive but more often as openhearted and giving as one can be. However my issue with the history remained unresolved. How are we to handle it? Ignore it, scorn it and each and every time learn all over again, or acknowledge it and approach life and the world more carefully? If we could only know who wrote it and whose version of a story we are presented with. And which version is the right one, if there is the right one? We are living in an age of doubt acutely aware of what a little propaganda and marketing can do. Words have become the most powerful weapons.

Another issue is how to approach people then? Seeing the worst of them made me perhaps too careful. In an attempt not to be naive, at one point I became too reserved and sceptical. And when it comes to people, it is not hard to guess what happens if you keep yourself at a safe distance from the potential danger. Yes, you are bound to end up feeling lonely.

Perhaps father was right after all. Even if you do know historical facts and learn its lessons, living by them turns out be too hard. I may still be confused about the best approach to history, but I am nevertheless more than thankful to both my parents for being raised as a human being, neither superior nor inferior, but equal to anybody on this planet no matter what any propaganda may try to convince me into believing.

Would you...?

@UNHCR

Even these days, after many years of being far from my homeland, whenever travelling through the vast plains and gazing through the window my eyes seem to draw shapes of vague mountain silhouettes somewhere at the far end. It is because my childhood horizons were always framed with them. A few seconds later my mind reports back with some disappointment: “Oh, those are just the clouds”.

And when after a long absence I finally reach the sea I am excited as if I am about to meet a good old friend. Each time the two of us meet I cannot help but grin from one ear to another, crack jokes, loosen up, dip my fingers and toes into it to say hello and I breathe out with relief for I’ve met somebody who can understand me without saying a word because we have a history together. We can sit together comfortably silent for hours. I know its smell and the way it feels from the dark moody greyness to a cheerful morning crystal blue. I know how warm and quiet it feels when it sleeps and how much comfort can be found in its embrace. I like it when it is gentle and sways me on its back, I like it when it is playful and tosses me around. I like it so much that even when we part I love to feel its presence at least for a little while on my skin, eyelashes, hair. And yet we cannot be together, not without much sacrifice.

I am not sure everybody is aware of this sacrifice. I have met a number of those who dream of getting their old life back. It is more than a dream. It is an excuse for not living their present life. It is an escapism to the memories that are expected to become alive again some day. I used to be one of those people.

However, these days some of the usual questions  “Would you return?”, “Do you ever wish none of this has happened?”, “Are you nostalgic about your hometown?”...  sound very simplified, naive and incomplete to me. These questions actually answer themselves when finished through:

Would you give up your life that you have now, your present job, friends, hobbies and little habits and return to a place full of strangers, a place where you would have to hide or give up a part of your identity, family tradition and religion, a place where you don’t mention your relatives, a place where you cannot choose who you want to be but must assimilate with the overbearing majority?

Would you prefer to have lived your old life undisturbed by all the painfully acquired but precious knowledge about the ways of the world, of what freedom means, how little possessions matter, how very important is to work on yourself, how little is needed to get by, what makes a true friend, what makes a good human being, how important is your family, what life is all about?

Would you feel at home in a place where you are not accepted for who you are, where there is nobody you know, nobody you love? Can pretty buildings, familiar sights, the colour of the sky and the smell of the sea make up for the warmth around the heart that is missing? Can you live out of memories?

Alice in Bomberland

I’ve heard that in some countries people don’t know who their President or Prime Minister is. Life in these countries runs smoothly, people mind their own business, rarely anyone bothers to watch the news, flowers bud, children play, the sky is blue. That sounds much like a Neverland to me. And for those who find living this unruffled life a little boring and wish for some adrenaline rush, well, there is an answer even to that. They can hop in a virtual world of Alice in Bomberland and see how good they are at escaping bombs. In case one gets tired or just needs to pee, no worry, they can simply press pause or the exit button.

I once got carried away thinking that I could be Alice and that I could press the exit button myself and boycott politics in my life by ignoring the everyday torture of endless political ramblings on TV screens realising that I have no influence on it whatsoever. I needed to break free and tried to push it out of my life. Soon after, I was woken up from my reverie and brought back to reality by the bombs falling “out of nowhere”. My friend who was with me when it happened was no better. She had mistaken the first one for a thunder. The only thing that didn’t quite fit in was that surprisingly the lightning came after the thunder and that it came out of the perfectly clear starry night. If we had watched the news that evening we would have seen the bombers taking off in the direction of where we live. From then on I prefer to be informed.

Our reactions to the bombs were very different however. My friend stood in wonder, watching the sky, still trying to figure out whether it was the lighting or some sort of unsuccessful military experiment, whereas I didn’t waste time. I started running towards the nearest building looking for the shelter. Only some time later, the blood freezing, apocalyptic wailing of the sirens announced the beginning of another hard period that would last for months.

My first moment of wonder and fear paralysis happened years before while Mum and I were watching the news in our first out of many places of refuge. We were staying in a flat of some people whom we in turn let in our home on the opposite side of the battlefield. In an unfamiliar town, with only few acquaintances, we anxiously watched the news hoping for a miraculous turnover when it happened. Well, not exactly the kind of miracle we hoped for. There was some violent ground commotion as the night lit up for a few seconds and went back to darkness with a deafening noise. A minute later we were standing in the corridor confused. We were supposed to join the quick steps running down the stairs but I wondered how to talk my knees into it as they declared autonomy from the rest of my body and were shaking uncontrollably. However, it didn’t take me long to progress from a terrible knee shaker to a speedy short distance runner.

Years later, I stopped running. We all did. We got tired. When the sirens announced themselves, people would get out and climb to the rooftops to watch the anti-air artillery producing firework effects on the sky. While others were out watching the spectacle, I used the rare opportunity to have a nice shower with enough water to run up the shower head. In the lack of electricity and popular entertainment provided by the computers, phones and TV sets, young couples made a lot of babies in the longish dark nights, kids played volleyball in the moonlight,  parents talked to their kids and even recited some long forgotten verses. A rare car that would appear on the streets would stop to pick you up even without you asking for it. I have never seen more solidarity and good will than in those days. So, along with a record number of antidepressants sold daily, lethargy and indifference to whether a bomb will find you or not, even some good came out of bombing.

On one of those summer days, hot from the heat and the omnipresent threat of bombing, I opened my doors to some unexpected visitors whom we rarely had at the time. I saw my three friends standing in front, smiling at me with their pink, sun-burnt cheeks while holding a small gift for my birthday. They had been riding miles on bikes through the bumpy fields on a scorching summer day, simply to wish me a happy birthday. I framed that picture in my mind and I bring it out whenever I remember bombing. Perhaps I didn’t have a choice and couldn’t escape the reality at the time, yet now I can choose how to remember it.

Have you helped someone today?

Once again it was morning, in another city, in another country, sunny, fresh and full of surprises. The bus stopped after a half an hour of rhythmical clink-clanking and I stepped off a little drowsy into an early morning hustle and bustle of the city market. Rivers of people hurrying to work were intersected with sellers dragging huge bundles of this and that, honking, grumbling, bellowing.  So even I, who normally wouldn’t notice if an elephant walked by at that time of the morning, spotted an old lady ahead of me stooping to pick up some dropped oranges. I quickened my step to give her a hand but, just before I reached her, she had dunked the last one into her bag and was already marching in front of me. A minute later an orange missile whizzed past my ear straight into the old lady’s back and was soon followed by another one. The granny surprisingly didn’t look back. She just kept on marching, even if not a little faster. A shout that accompanied the second flying orange made me drop my jaw, “Shame on you! Stealing in those years! Here, take some more with you!”.

A little further, if you turn left around the corner, a long street will get you right to the city center. However, after only a couple of days of walking up and down the local main street, you might  start approaching it as if it were a ski path and adopt a zigzagging technique trying to evade “the money collectors” bumping into people, getting into their way or dragging them by the sleeve to sell some cards or badges to help the abandoned kids, animals or refugees. Always the same plastic smiles on the same faces, never early in the morning though. If they hadn’t been smiling so much they might have persuaded me that all the money was really going to end up in the right hands and not just some symbolic percentage of it.  

Obviously, so many phonies in the streets account for some of human disregard for those who really need help, yet not for all of it. Many studies have confirmed that a person could easily die in the middle of the street full of people if they suddenly collapsed. The scientists explain this social and psychological phenomenon as the Bystander Effect. I witnessed one such unfortunate event and was horrified feeling all the cruelness of the humanity in those very long minutes of trying to call for help as I realised that I couldn’t move a collapsed man on my own. He was lying in the middle of the street and the cars just kept circling around us. The man was unconscious and in some sort of physical agony his body shaking and twitching, whereas I trembled for quite a while later from the emotional agony of this shameful incident.  

Anyhow, such human reaction, or rather lack of it, in a situation in which somebody is spread on the street and another person cries out loud for help gives you a clue of what happens to those who are not as loud.

@ UNHCR/Florian/Transparency/Photovoice

However, being ignored is not the worst that can happen to a person. In a clash of two ethnic groups, at the time of madness, when my family had to leave home, not only were we ignored, we were kicked out of a temporary shelter we managed to find in the exile. We were kicked out into the street again, only this time by the people of the same nationality, the locals. The motive was as ancient as the human race - pure, old-fashioned, insatiable greed. Somebody needed more space for themselves. So it happened that our lives were threatened again. An important lesson was learnt however on realising that one is not to fear any ethnicity or religion but some ever present human flaws.

The society is indeed full of controversies. On the one hand you have a whole new spectrum of volunteering agencies making money on the increasing number of people who want to cross oceans to help and, on the other, you have people dying before the eyes of passers-by. Sometimes people don’t realise that you don’t have to go far away if you want to help somebody. Why not start with your closest members of the family, friends and neighbours, fellow citizens? Perhaps volunteering agencies would then go bankrupt.
                                                                                                 
An interesting idea has been launched through a book called Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde and later a film made by it in which a little boy Trevor does a favor for three people, asking each of them to "pay the favor forward" by doing favors for three other people, and so on. It sounds much like a fiction so I was surprised to find out that The Pay It Forward Movement does actually exist as well as its Foundation.

If you ask the professionals, they will tell you that helping people works in two ways - by helping others, you help yourself. When a renowned psychiatrist Dr Karl Menninger was asked what a person should do if he or she felt a “nervous breakdown” coming on, he said “Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, find someone in need, and do something for them.”

I would just like to add another aspect to it by returning to the unconscious man in the road. After a while, one of the cars that were circling around us finally stopped and a guy jumped out of it to help. He quickly moved the man to the pavement, put him in the right position, rubbed his temples with some water and continued stroking his head even after the man had regained consciousness. I think the guy wasn’t aware of it, but his stroking silenced more than the man’s pain and fear. I could as well feel my shivers subside with every gentle move of his hand and the world suddenly appeared to be a friendlier place to live.

How to survive escaping a bullet?

In one of his nineteenth century novels, Balzac complains that doctors have come up with so many new specialised terms for illnesses that on hearing them you have no clue as to their origin and cause. As if these names live a life of their own, alienated from an individual and the possible complexities of his of her life. In the old days, people would say that one suffers from unrequited love, envy, worry or disappointment and today you have technical terms like irritable bowels, dementia, cancer, stroke. They used one of these to explain my grandfather’s death when he collapsed on a cold winter day in front of the house while collecting some wood for the fire.

I don’t remember what was the exact word except that it sounded irrelevant and even misleading. If anybody had bothered to know why his big generous heart failed I would have told them that after four agonising years of living in the exile it received its final blow just a month earlier when his wife died and was overwhelmed with immense grief. And even though many people concluded that living up to your seventies is not that bad, it didn’t comfort me much. I was sure both he and my grandmother would have lived to see many more sunrises if life hadn’t been so hard on them at the very end. During those four long years there was not even the slightest glimpse of a chance that they would ever get away from the dirty ugly urban suburb of a big city where they lived entrapped between four gray walls and return to their home that was miles away in the countryside. With their family and friends being scattered to different corners of the world and the busy locals keeping at a safe distance, there was not much comfort for the aching hearts and weary minds. And even though my grandpa was a man of strong constitution and even stronger will, I had seen him crushed.  

© UNHCR/Zalmaï

Only four years earlier, we were all relieved when after a couple of days of waiting by the phone we finally got the news that they had escaped the cruel death that befell some of their neighbours who stubbornly refused to leave their homes. Little did we know at the time that this immediate death was only to be replaced with slow dying.

However, my grandpa wasn’t the last victim. Four months later, their eldest son, my uncle, followed the same road, again exhausted with disappointment, disorientation, hopelessness, desolation and quiet suffering. They were like falling dominoes, yet nobody considered them casualties of war because they did not fall by the bullet or knife. Nobody keeps a record of these slow deaths in the exile. Perhaps because it would be terrifying to hear the number. Rarely anyone acknowledges them and takes them for what they really are. It is much easier to tag them as cancer, heart failure and diabetes. As if they weren’t ignored enough at the end of their lives.

I wish the society as a whole had paid more attention. I wish people close to them had shown more understanding. I wish they had had somebody to talk to. I wish they could have made themselves talk. I wish they could have accepted the injustice as one of the life’s tricky ways to challenge us. I wish they had been just a little stronger to live to return only a couple of years later. 

Related post:
A survivor

Hello Mr/Ms Harp!

Are you a refugee who sticks to your clan because you feel at ease with those who know what you’ve been through?
And you think that the rest of the world would never understand it anyway?
You believe “they” wouldn’t even understand your jokes, let alone your dreams and fears?

Of course, your fellows in war, or whatever, will understand you better but is that all there really is to  friendship? Don’t you think you’re missing a lot if you just stick with one group of people gathered around the same idea or need? Aren’t you as an individual made up of a little more than only one experience no matter how much it influenced you?

Or you may be one of those people who instead of sticking their nose into other people’s business and life prefer to think about who they are and what they are here for?

Well, that is a good start, I would say, a precondition for any self-improvement! However, sitting alone in your room, mulling over things and pondering might not yield many answers to your questions. Are you even aware of what you like and don’t like? How can you know whether you like mango if you have never tried one? How can you explore yourself if there is no one you can relate to? The physicists would put it like this:

Imagine yourself alone in the midst of nothingness and then try to tell me how large you are. (Eddington, A. S. The Nature of the Physical World).

People often forget that through meeting other people not only do you discover what connects you but also what differs you. How else would you know what makes you distinct and one of a kind? And how far do you expect to get in this self-exploration process if you restrict yourself to hanging out with people with whom you only have certain things in common? And if this always happens to be the same group of people?

Just as you can recognise that you were (un)fortunate to get your nose from your father or flat feet from your mother so you can recognise little pieces of yourself in your friends. The more different these pieces are, the more puzzles you’ve put together. The only downside may be birthdays and other social gatherings when all these people you have something in common with are, well, seated next to one another only to discover that they are mutually not very compatible.

However, as birthdays are once a year, I think the idea should not be altogether rejected. It came clear to me after reading a book by Anthony Storr on the Integrity of the Personality. After describing the process of how a young soul gradually acquires its form within a family, he continues to follow its lifelong development and emphasises the role other people also play in modelling it. I think the following passage sums it all up nicely:

Personality is like a harp with many strings. Not all the strings are plucked at once and some may lie silent throughout life. Others may be set into vibration by the impact of personalities with the same frequency.  

The beauty and the complexity of the melody you will produce is therefore not just up to you but rather up to you in relation to other people. Each and every person that has entered our lives and stayed there at least for a little while has struck a chord or two, added a few tones, minor or major, some already familiar and some never heard before.

The music of a war child

If you are a teenage refugee, lucky enough to be able to continue your education in the exile, you’re likely to be confronted with some or all of the following questions and comments:
 

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.

Who is your fellow Martian, oops, I mean refugee?

If you look up the word in a dictionary, it might give you a clue http://www.thefreedictionary.com/refugee but I'm sure it will still sound pretty abstract. What danger is it about? Do these people just walk away? Maybe they did something bad so they were rightfully kicked out of their country? Are you to trust these people?

Try to imagine your life changes over night. Or maybe not over night but too fast for you to keep up with all the calamities that strike one after another. People react to it differently but a complete shock is unavoidable. It's like somebody plunges your head under the water and just when it pops back to surface the hand pushes you back again leaving you no time to grasp some air in. Again and again. You wonder if your life before was a dream or the moment you are in is a nightmare.

You might refuse to accept the changes by shutting yourself in and trying to ignore the reality as much as you can, because the reality cannot be for real, right? You can only accept that it is a short period of confusion and madness, similar to a tropical storm that strikes randomly, out of blue, but eventually calms down and then everything slowly gets back to what it used to be. Or as close to it as possible. Of course, it never does, but at that turning point in life it's hard to believe anything else. Too painful. The experience stripes the world off its fancy clothes right in front of your eyes and you stare in disbelief. You never forget the picture and it might take a while before you figure out how to best deal with it.

However, life can only move in one direction and that is forward so sooner or later you must learn to embrace whatever comes your way. People react to pain differently. Some become more inert, some more active, some more observant and tactful and other more angry and resentful. Some seek to fight the universal wrongdoing whereas other seek personal revenge. Perhaps it would help if all of them could work this out together, exchange ideas and compare possible answers?

When I first found myself in a group of people tagged as "refugees" I thought everybody outside this group would without much explaining be familiar with all the emotional luggage that goes along with it and then perhaps show some understanding. It seemed only natural because to a person affected this uninvited turmoil equals a huge global catastrophe and then comes another disappointment when you realise that other people look at you as if you were a Martian. Or even worse, an intruding, threatening and unwelcome Martian. 

To be honest, this viewpoint is not far from the truth in some aspects. Refugees are unlike most of their fellow non-refugee humans, lost in time, space and universe and, moreover, depleted of everything they'd learnt about the ways of the world. They have to start from the scratches, not only in finding their new home but in finding their place in this chaotic universe.

Most people don't bother to dig in much further than "Hello Martian" attitude, and yet even those who are willing to share some of their burden are usually just left wandering about those high thick walls people build around their pain.

I've decided to throw some light on this matter hoping that it might help somebody somewhere, whether it be a refugee or not. And it doesn't have to be all that gloomy if you approach any experience as an opportunity to learn and grow, as a personal challenge. This is how, after a lot of brooding and questioning, I've decided to view this substantial part of my life and it made it a whole lot easier.

Oh, by the way, I'll leave out the unimportant details such as my name, family name, nationality, country of origin or exile, continent, planet. The juicy details such as the names of presidents, politicians and other puppets are equally irrelevant for this matter or any other matter if you ask me. They are being given too much publicity anyway.