Kate Cronin-Furman at Wronging Rights lists the top five (only five?) “reasons it sucks to be a refugee.” The suckiest, IMHO, seems to be number four: “Your brain might swell up and kill you.” Because if you’re a refugee, you aren’t facing enough pressure from your home country, the country where you’ve been displaced, and the dire conditions in which you live; no, your own brain has to come after you.
But to continue this line of morbid thinking helpful understanding of refugees’ plight, I thought I’d add a few reasons that it sucks to be a refugee that we’ve mentioned over the past few months:
- You lose contact with your friends and family — and hope that someone invents a sort of “search engine” to help you out.
- You could drown while making your escape, in pirate-infested waters, to boot.
- You could be accused of witchcraft.
- You could be rejected for asylum by the very country that started a war in your backyard to begin with. And struggle if you are lucky enough to get there.
- And, perhaps most deadly, you could get bitten by a mosquito. And contract malaria. (Send a net, save a life.)
(image from flickr user hdptcar under a Creative Commons license)