Consider This from NPR - How Becoming A Refugee Changes You

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

Inside Ukraine, millions of people have been displaced, with millions more living in increasingly dire conditions. In the city of Maruipol, hundreds of thousands of civilians remain trapped — with dwindling supplies of food and water and no electricity. Mariupol has been bombarded by the Russians for weeks now. Petro Andrushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol's mayor, told NPR civilians in bomb shelters are running out of food. Millions of others have fled Ukraine without knowing if or when they'll be able to return home. Amid that uncertainty, they must start a new life elsewhere. It's an experience only people who've been refugees can truly understand. Mary Louise Kelly talks with refugees from Vietnam, Syria, and Afghanistan about their experiences, how fleeing their home country has affected their life and what life is like now. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In less than a month, more than 3 million people have fled Ukraine. That's more than left Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan in an entire year of those wars. Most Ukrainian refugees are women and children. Men of fighting age are required to stay behind and defend the country. So you're seeing families that are trying to carry their life's possessions in suitcases with children in tow, sometimes elderly in tow. Travel to the border is arduous. Chris Skopek is with Project Hope, an organization providing mental health services to refugees on the Polish-Ukrainian border. People are arriving at border crossings by car, train,

or on foot, and many show up with no plan for where they'll go. You're listening to these almost surreal conversations between themselves and in some cases with me. Well, this man's offering me a ride to Germany, but this bus here is going to Norway. Should we go here? Should we go there? They're making these really critical life decisions with no knowledge, no information as to what lies ahead and no idea what options may be out there for them. Consider this. Millions of people are

leaving Ukraine with no idea of if or when they'll be able to return. And with that uncertainty, they are beginning to start new lives somewhere else. It's an experience only people who have been refugees can truly understand. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Monday, March 21st. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. The number of refugees who've left Ukraine is a fraction

of those who've had to leave their homes but stayed inside the country. According to the UN, we're talking about 6.5 million people displaced. Another 13 million are still in their homes where fighting is taking place, and many of them are having a hard time getting food, water, and medical assistance. The situation is terrible because all our people must live in bomb shelters without any electricity, without any water, without heating. Petro Andryushenko is an advisor to the mayor in the southeastern city of Mariupol. He told NPR that Russians are blocking aid to people sheltered in the city. Mariupol is running out of food. In another city, Russian troops shot people waiting in line for bread, according to the State Department. While millions remain in war zones, others have fled to border countries,

including Romania, Hungary, Moldova, Slovakia, and Poland, where Chris Skopek of Project HOPE was recently stationed. Our point of interaction really has to be focused on their immediate needs, helping them understand where they can go for resources, how to get shelter, how to get access to health care, how to get food and clean drinking water, and just basic services. Humanitarian groups are worried that with so many women and children fleeing Ukraine, they could be vulnerable to kidnapping and human trafficking. Scopex Group has been working to guide refugees to resources offered by legit organizations.

The level of anxiety and stress that they've been under, the traumatic experiences that they've gone through just to get there, it's a scary time in their lives, and they really, none of them had planned for this. None of them had any plans for how to respond to this. So they're trying to figure out these solutions, even as they are dealing with the separation of their family and the loss of their homes and all of their possessions, really. Over the last few weeks, Nita Al-Jabarin has been watching the news out of Ukraine, the scenes of families pouring over the border. I see myself in these kids. I went through this. I exactly feel your pain.

I know how that feels. And I really hate to see other families leaving home, maybe leaving part of their hearts in there. Nita fled her home in Syria when she was just 13, so she has an idea of what's next for Ukrainian kids whose lives have abruptly changed forever. This is not an easy experience, and this is not fun, but it will definitely shape who you're going to be in the future,

and it will definitely teach you a lot. Nita spoke to my colleague Mary Louise Kelly, who picks things up from here. Nita is one of three people I talked with this week about the experience of being a refugee, what it feels like, how it shapes you. I'm Viet Thanh Nguyen. He fled Vietnam when he was four. He's now an author and professor. My name is Nida Al-Jabaran. We heard from her a moment ago, she left Syria as a seventh grader. My first name is Maywand and my last name is Basiri. A translator who'd worked for U.S. forces. He flew out of Kabul with his wife and son

hours before the Afghan government fell to the Taliban. He loved his life there, he told me. My life was simple, beautiful life. I had a beautiful family. Simple is the same word Nida used to describe her life in Syria. It was very simple. Me, my parents and my siblings lived outside of like a village surrounded by like olive trees. We would walk to school every day. It was very like simple, peaceful life. Via doesn't remember much about his life in Vietnam, but there are things that nearly 50 years later stay with him. I'm not even sure that they're real, but the fragments I have are all actually mostly related to war, like meeting an American soldier bouncing on his knee or thinking

I've seen a tank in the streets with North Vietnamese soldiers on it because our town was the first one captured in the final invasion of 1975. For many Ukrainians right now, the decision to flee has been abrupt. One day you're safe, the next you're not. We heard that sudden urgency in the stories of each of the people we talked to, including my want. Tell me about the day that you left. It was very chaotic because before leaving Afghanistan, I did not want to actually come to America because I always thought that life is not easy, especially starting everything from scratch. But provinces were falling and areas were taken over by the Taliban. So me and my family decided that I could be an easy target because I worked so long for the American forces.

But we did not know that it's going to happen so fast. Even when I got to the airport, I did not know that after 24 hours, everything will collapse. So did you know when you left that you wouldn't be going back, at least for a long time? No. I always thought, like in the back of my mind, I always thought that there's a bridge that connects me back to my home country. But when I got to Doha, there I saw in the news that what's going on in Afghanistan. And that moment, I thought that that bridge that connects me back

to my home country is destroyed for now. And you saw that where on it on a TV in the airport? Yes at the airport I was waiting to get to another flight from Doha to DC and at the airport I did not have a phone to call back my parents and I panicked. I borrowed someone else's phone and I called them and I said what's going on? I want to come back. I don't want to go with my flight all the way to DC. And my parents said, don't worry for right now, nothing is bad. And you're returning back to Kabul. It's not going to affect anything. So the better option would be to go ahead and go to America. So your instinct was, I should go home, I got to get back to Kabul,

and your parents were saying, no, go, go, go, be safe. Yes. For Nida, it was war, but also a series of tragedies that pushed the family into leaving their home in Daraa, Syria. How did your family decide to leave? My family at first actually did not want to leave until one day my eldest brother got an asthma attack and so we had to drive him to the hospital. And so that night I remember it was really tough because I could hear the shootings, I could hear the bombings everywhere and so it was hard to leave the home and take him to the hospital an hour away before we arrived there. They stopped us and they told us that we can't enter the hospital because there's a lot of bombings so my brother ended up passing away before he got to the hospital and then a few months after my dad also got shot in

his leg and then our neighbor's house got burned out with the people in them, and so at that point, really, my parents were like, yeah, we can see how it's going to keep going. Oh, my gosh. My dad made the decision the night before we left, and then I just woke up at 4 in the morning, and my mom told me, yeah, today we have to leave. So we just took a few clothes with us. And then I remember

there was like a van and there was a full of people, like there was already six families in there. And we were just all like squeezing in there and we had to be covered so no one can catch us. We sneaked out of Syria to al-Zatari camp. This is in Jordan? Yes. Both Nita and Viet ended up in refugee camps after they left their homes. You arrive, Fort Indiantown, Gap, Pennsylvania. This is summer of 1975. What's your first memory there? What do you remember? I remember the barracks. And of course, when you're young, and your parents are taking care of you, and you're surrounded by other children, it can actually seem like fun, a fun kind of a camp. But of course, that wasn't the reality. And I've certainly seen photographs in retrospect of a time in those camps, and there were lots and

lots of people. Our lives were completely displaced. People had lost everything. So the pictures show people just trying to adjust to their new realities when their new realities were really devastating. People who'd lost everything. That's a pretty good description for what Nita's family faced, too, in that refugee camp in Jordan. They gave us, like, a tent and some blankets, food. And they told us, yeah, this is your new home.

And I was like, no way. This is not what I want to live. But I was thankful that I was able to escape out of the war. I was just like, at that point in my life, I was just so sad. I was like, this is it. Like, I left my rest of my families. I left my cousins. I left my uncles. What is this? There's no friends here. There's no family here. But you were safe. Yeah. I think my parents made the right decision. Even the right decisions come at a price. But each of the people I talked to has built a new life.

Nita will graduate from Syracuse University in the spring, having studied pre-med. She wants to work with refugees. Maiwand is helping other refugees get settled here in the U.S. with Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. And Viet won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is a professor at the University of Southern California. All are settled now, but their identities will forever be tied to being a refugee. And that's on each of their minds as they watch the images of people leaving Ukraine. When I see children are suffering, when I see women and elderly are suffering,

it gives me all the images that I have from my own country. And as a human being, wherever we are, if you're in America, if you're in Europe, we should have open arms for the Ukrainians and we should feel their pain. And I can feel their pain more than anyone else because I come from a country that's been torn apart by war. So I urge people to have respect for the refugees that they arrive in seeking refuge, looking for a safe future. I can only say to them that I feel for them. I've been in their place and it's a place of terror because you've lost so much. You've left so much behind and you don't

know what the future holds for you. And none of us knows what the future holds for them. But I would say that looking at my own experience among Vietnamese refugees, many of us remain traumatized by what happened. But as a community, we survived and we built new lives. And we were able, we are able to tell our own stories and claim our own voices. Part of the story is that not all refugees have been welcomed with open arms. That is something Nita noted. Refugees are refugees regardless of where they came from or what color is their eyes or how they look. I think all refugees just should receive the

same respect and help from anywhere they go to. It shouldn't be like more sad to see Ukraine's refugees than Syrians or anywhere else because at the end we're all humans. The task ahead for the humans rushing out of Ukraine is rebuilding their lives, finding a sense of place, of home. I questioned Nita and Maiwand about that. If I were to ask you, where is home? What would you say? Where is home? Where is home? Home is where you're safe, you're secure, and you're not worried that something's gonna bad happen to your family. That's home. Does America feel like home now? Yeah. Honestly, if we are gonna define home at first, it's the place that provides you with security. It provides you with all the

resources that you need to grow up. The refugees leaving Ukraine must look forward to new homes for now, even as the ones they've left behind, the country they've left behind, still call. Nita wrote about that in a poem, and she shared it with me as we concluded our conversation. I set a foot in the street not knowing why my body needs. My thoughts fight among themselves, bleeding into tears. I don't recognize the look in my grandfather's eyes. He looks as if he's about to face his worst fear. The fear turns into a teardrop.

He takes his glasses off, but the tear is stubborn. It refuses to leave his face. Oh, grandfather, our house key is lost, and the doors cry for those who left. Nida Al-jabaran, who spoke to Mary Louise Kelly. It's Consider This from NPR.

I'm Ari Shapiro.