The thing people don’t seem to get about refugees is that they don’t want to be refugees. They aren’t taking advantage of the chance to get to a “better” country. It isn’t a scheme. 

I tutor a refugee family. The wife misses her home terribly. She talks about the fruit trees outside her house, and how she could walk out her door and pick apricots right there. She’s not here because it’s her dream to be here. She’s here because they needed to keep their family safe. 

I think we genuinely can’t comprehend this, because we have nothing to compare it to. When I talked to the father about family, he said he had four brothers. Three of them were killed by the Taliban. His father? Killed by the Taliban. Think about your family. Really. When I think of my immediate family, no one has died at all. If I expand that to my extended family, it’s old age, old age, old age, cancer, suicide. No one I know has died from a violent conflict happening right on their doorstep . 

Refugees leave everything they know behind, all their friends, their family. (And family, in many cases, is not the nuclear thing we have in western countries. It’s grandparents and aunt and uncles and cousins). They don’t leave because they want to. They leave because they have to. Because they are fleeing for their lives.

We should be doing more to help them.