I’ve had polio in my left leg from when I was a child but we never had any qualified doctor to diagnose my condition. Then, when I was 6 years old, we had to flee our little village because of the attacks on Karen people in our area. It was really hard for my dad...
When I was 7, my family left Czechoslovakia because things had became progressively worse in the 20 years since it was occupied by the Russians – there was no freedom of speech, and they had slowly obliterated the Czech way of life. Fleeing was very risky at that time...
Every summer holiday, we would leave Damascus to go to visit my grandparents in Aleppo. When we went to visit them in 2012, the war had started but it was still far away from us, so we didn’t worry about it. But after two weeks, just as we were about to book the...
Between the ages of 8 and 13, I was sexually abused by a family member. It happened many times and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I had all this guilt. As a result, when I was 11, I got into metal music, and my parents didn’t like that at all. They were...
(3/3) In the distance, we could see an island, and then the port of a tiny village. The fisherman had already made a few phone calls along the way and when we got there, after one or two hours, hundreds of people had gathered. They put us in a big room, and police and...
(2/3) The next time, there were four big buses full of people, and we drove from Jakarta all the way to Surabaya, which is a 24 hour drive. When we arrived, I actually saw a boat for the first time. It was a scary looking boat, wooden and very old, and it was big –...
