By: John Boonstra on July 21, 2009 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)
