Living in Refuge

Leena

Published April 10, 2014, last updated on April 9, 2018 under Voices of DGHI

By Leena El-Sadek
Global Health Major
Columnist, Duke Chronicle
Bass Connections in Global Health

Imagine yourself on a flight’s standby list. You're stuck in a liminal period that is predetermined by some higher power—“some” being the key word, because you really have no idea who this higher power may be. This feeling of betwixt and between leaves you plunging for any opportunity that will lead you to the front of the line. And even then, it's not guaranteed that you'll get a seat.

Now imagine instead of a seat, you're plunging for food, water, medications—you're fighting for the basic items of survival. And these items are not only for you. They're for those who have managed to escape the turbulent lands with you.

I heard this analogy on my research trip during Spring Break. I traveled with my Displacement and Mental Health Bass Connections team to Amman, Jordan to dig deeper into some key refugee issues that are often overlooked. This afforded me the opportunity to meet key stakeholders and organizations that shape refugees' trajectories. This also afforded me the opportunity to realize that the way we’re talking about refugees is hurting our research and, more importantly, hurting the millions of people who have been involuntarily displaced.

We numb our conversations, drowning our words in a pool of political correctness and prestigious rhetoric. (Although, let's be real, we shouldn’t turn to politics for correctness.) We place a shield around our conversations so that only those with similar backgrounds can participate. Our bodies have become desensitized as we have trained our mouths to sing the songs our media exudes on repeat.

While these discussions place us one step ahead of those who remain oblivious (read: ignorant), we miss an important part of the conversation: humanness. Refugees are people who have histories, memories, families, love, relationships, heartbreaks, careers and dreams. And just like, us, students, they want futures. By privileging the voices of refugees, we learn so much more than any textbook or article can tell us.

I grew as a student of mental health, displacement and behavioral issues during one of the conversations I had with refugees in Amman. Refugees can recall the exact corner near their home where a best friend was killed or the market where a brother was kidnapped or the street where an explosion killed hundreds of community members. A lot of refugees have no desire of returning to their motherlands, even though those are often the only lands they’ve ever known.

These memories don't dissolve, and it takes more than politicians to pose solutions. Refugee issues transcend all disciplines. Leaving them out of our discussions is leaving out an important part of the story.

Let’s put the obvious disciplines aside and look at some less discernible fields that are influenced by, and influence, refugee studies. Economics is one. At millions of dollars a year, refugee camps are financial burdens to host countries. But there are more to refugees than refugee camps. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that over half of all refugees are urban refugees. While in Amman, I learned that two of the city’s largest hotels are owned by Iraqi refugees. These hotels are focal points of the city and welcome tourists, and their money, from all over. While many camps still exist, Palestinians now make up about half of the Jordanian population. During my visits to various organizations, I met lawyers, professors, doctors and directors of nongovernmental organizations who are of Palestinian descent. And let’s not forget about the refugees’ influence on us here in Durham, N.C. Sondos Taxis was started by an Iraqi refugee and now employs over 15 refugees from Iraq and Sudan. Discounting these stories from our discussions and studies is not accurately representing Jordan, Palestine, Iraq, refugees, the hotel industry, the taxi industry, the Duke experience or the financial successes of economic systems.

Anthropology is another discipline that grows with refugee studies. Ethnographic research is an essential tool because it allows us to understand how others constitute themselves in society. It’s only then that policy reform can capture the nuances of different refugee populations and develop effective programs. We see this through mental health services, which call for a solid understanding of interpretations and current resources before proposing any intervention for refugees.

Medicine, global health and bioscience are other avenues that push researchers to the next level when studying refugee issues. It allows students and researchers to combine their backgrounds with effective, innovative solutions that place them outside of the box that a textbook prescribes.

These last two years, Duke has given me the opportunity to interact with and understand refugee issues in Egypt, Jordan and North Carolina. But it takes more than a handful of students and professors (many thanks to the Kenan Institute for Ethics) to change political discourse. It’s not always about repatriation or caveats in the system—it’s about the mothers, the children, the doctors, the fighters. It’s about the students who, too, want a college education. It’s about the pregnant mothers who are dodging the damaging effects of a failing healthcare system. It’s about the men and women whose economic successes go unheard. It’s about the stories. And it’s about how we develop and integrate them into our lives.

My ode to all students: listen, learn, and grow. Because our educational trajectory is for more than us. Our educational trajectory is shaped by and is for so, so many more than us.