Refugees and Peace

65.3 million. Now, if you know numbers, then you know that that is a huge amount. This is the amount of refugees in our world right now. I know, frightening, isn’t it? But, it is what it is and this is the actual number of refugees in our so called peaceful modern world right now. For those who don’t know, a Refugee is a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster. So many refugees are forced to leave their homes due to wars and laws and what not. But, most refugees run out of their own home and own country due to war crisis. As we sit in our living rooms in an air-conditioned environment with our family and friends enjoying the pleasures of modern technology and what not, there are millions of people out there in the world who don’t even know what technology is or have never had the time to learn about it. Not only technology, but they don’t know about a lot of things that we term as common. They don’t know about latest fashions and trends and fidget spinners and Instagram and what not. Now, by all of this, I don’t mean to say that they are backward or something like that. A lot of them are quite smart, sometimes even smarter than us, but they are never given the opportunity to expand and utilise their smartness since they are always running and trying to seek shelter and food and surviving to even think about all these things.

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They don’t have the time to think about which dress to wear that day or which film to watch that weekend, rather they have to think about which country will accept them or allow them to lead a normal life again and how to reach there without their own country catching them red-handed and killing them and their families. And this great cruciating agony doesn’t see any age. From 4 year old children to the 20 year old youth to 80- year old senior citizens have to plan how to get out of their own country just to save their souls. People lose their homes, their families and everything that once was to just save themselves from being killed.

‘Jordan has taken in 600,000 refugees while United Kingdom has allowed only 20,000 to enter their country with double-triple the economy of tiny Jordan’, etc., etc., etc. While our huge world is too busy thinking about which country is taking in or allowing more refugees into their countries, thousands of refugees are still stranded somewhere in the middle of nowhere, very far away from their homes, desperately trying to find a new place to call home and wishing and praying with all their heart that some kind country will let them in and lead the same normal life that they can just dream of now. Often, actually quite often, these refugees not only have to leave their homes and belongings behind, but also have to leave behind their families just to survive themselves, without any guarantee of reuniting with them ever again. There are some countries who even kill the families of the runaways when they come to know they have run away.

And what happens when they finally manage to flee from their country? They are rejected to enter other countries. They are termed to be ‘illegal migrants’. A lot of countries say that why should they take in those refugees with whom they are not at all concerned with, but little do they remember that they are connected to all of them by the long, sticky strand of humanity that joins us all together and also by the world we live in. I am not complaining or trying to put down anybody or any country over here. I am just upset at the fact that wars are still occurring in our world even after seeing the great disasters of World War-I and II and various other huge wars. Why do we need to fight and do wars when we can all, like proper mature adults, work out the problems and reach to a common solution benefiting all the parties concerned. How can we teach young children to not fight and act maturely and try to act like proper human beings or ‘adults’ when we, ourselves don’t know the meaning of it. Researchers have found that the number of refugees we have currently in our world, is more than the total number of refugees during World War-II.

According to me, it is the wrong way that we look at problems that creates more problems. We are busy thinking about whether or not to allow refugees into our so-called peace-ridden countries or how to stop them from entering our country, while we should rather be thinking about why they are leaving their own country and their own homes and why are they are so compelled to leave their own home and face rejection by numbers of countries. If we start seeing things from the right angle, things will start getting better themselves.

But, it isn’t like this problem has risen up only now, in the recent years, it has been prevailing since many many years and had probably started as early as at the time of the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Greeks. Now, I don’t know if you know but there are some families which have been dealing with these refugee problems from years and sometimes even their kids have to go through the same all through their lives. The United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees(UNHCR) does provide a lot of help to these agony driven people. They arrange refugee camps for them and provide them with food, shelter, clothes, etc., but a lot of times these camps themselves have inhumane conditions. And though there are many organisations who are trying very hard to do a lot for such refugees, it feels sad and shameful to say that the amount of refugees these organisations find and help are not even half the total number of refugees scattered around the Earth.

Certain countries give the excuse of not allowing refugees into their country as not being related to that problem and those people in the first place. Consider it this way, if we were all passengers in an aeroplane and suddenly two passengers start fighting and hurt other passengers who are trying to calm them down, would we stand up and help the hurt and try to calm down the situation or would we keep ourselves tightened to our seat-belts and not do anything about it until someone of our own is hurt?

But yet, I am just a teenager, not even an adult, so my say doesn’t matter as much(or so some adults say) but if any adult is reading this, try spreading the message of not refugees and their struggles but peace because peace is the only final and ultimate solution to all our problems.You can learn and know more about this topic from various sources.       https://go.ted.com/CyNS      and       https://go.ted.com/CyNj

If you like this blog and relate with it, do give it a like, comment your thoughts on this one of the many important topic, share it with your family and friends and also do follow my blog for further updates. And always remember, be brave. Be strong. Be great.❤

                                “Treating refugees as the problem is the problem” Passenger