Photo caption: Photo by Sohaib Ghyasi on Unsplash, Children in Kabul, Afghanistan (September 2020) Award-winning children’s author, Elizabeth Laird, collaborated with our team to develop “A Refugee’s Story” (an abridged version can be downloaded for FREE with the full-length story coming in Spring 2022). We asked her to share her experiences of helping child refugees, as well as teachers in schools supporting them. Elizabeth also explains how teachers and parents can potentially use this powerful new story to help children understand what refugees have been through and how we can all help to make refugees feel safe and welcome.
Five years ago, I spent a few weeks in Jordan working with teachers in Syrian refugee camps. The aim of my visit (organised by the Norwegian Refugee Council) was to help teachers create stories that the children could relate to, as there were no culturally appropriate storybooks in the camps' schools.
To start us off, I said to the teachers, "Tell me about your students. What are their main fears and worries?"
The answers came thick and fast.
"They worry about the way they look. Are they too tall? Do their ears stick out? Or perhaps they don't like their hair."
"They get upset when there's conflict in the family, especially when they think their fathers are too strict."
"There's a lot of anxiety around bullying and friendships in general."
"Some worry about their schoolwork. They're desperate for the chance to take exams that will help them into further education."
I was astonished. No one mentioned the trauma the students had suffered, the war raging in their homeland a few miles away, the loss of their former homes, anxiety about family members left behind, grief for those who had died in the fighting. These students, living in cramped cabins, their parents making do on UN food handouts, were above all else teenagers, with the concerns and anxieties of older children everywhere.
Back at home, I wrote a novel based on what I'd learned in the camps. Welcome to Nowhere* follows two boys, Omar and his disabled brother Musa. Their family have to flee from their home in Syria and seek refuge in Jordan. The burden of responsibility for their mother and sisters falls increasingly on the boys' shoulders. At the end of the story, the family is granted asylum in the UK.
Children often ask me if I'm going to write a sequel to Welcome to Nowhere. "I can't," I say. "What happens to Omar and Musa in Britain is up to you. How would you respond to a refugee in your school? Would you make friends? Would you be kind and welcoming?"
We can barely imagine the trauma of experiencing the violent destruction of one's home and embarking on a dangerous journey at the mercy of criminal traffickers to seek asylum in a foreign country. And yet without understanding refugees' experiences, how can we develop empathy and respect for them?
Such empathy can be in short supply for newcomers to the UK. There may be resentments over housing and tensions over unfamiliar customs and diets, all compounded by the lack of a common language. Refugee children often report being bullied at school.
Alongside complex emotional traumas, many refugees have also been plunged into poverty and are experiencing a dramatic loss of status. Their educational achievements may not be recognised. Their life savings and possessions, including precious mementoes and photographs, may all have been lost. They may be offered more menial jobs than those they had at home. At the same time they must learn to live within an alien culture. Food, clothing, the behaviour of young people, religious practices – all may be strange and upsetting.
For most asylum seekers, the complex process of gaining settled refugee status is accompanied by intense anxiety. Years can drag on as applications for asylum struggle through complex legal processes, while the family suffers crippling insecurity.
Schoolchildren leave these complex problems behind every day to face the full-on impact of teenage culture at school. It will take even the cleverest many months to learn fluent English, and even when they can communicate with other children, the gulf in family circumstances and experience is dauntingly hard to cross.
If a child can't explain what has happened to them, or even frame it to themselves, they may become isolated and withdrawn, or angry and aggressive. They may want to bury their past, like a shameful secret. They'll want only to fit into their new environment, and be accepted by the other children. But if their story is brought out and honoured by teachers, a refugee child may gain new respect and understanding with their fellow students and begin to put the two sides of their lives together.
Beyond Words’, A Refugee's Story, is the text-free illustrated story of a young man and his little brother, who flee from their war-ravaged country to seek asylum in Europe. They fall into the hands of traffickers and are separated. The older brother braves the perilous journey at sea on his own. As we follow his progress in his new country, we start to understand his loneliness and anxiety, how it feels to deal with officialdom, and the relief of finding compatriots who understand him and can help him to settle in.
Not all young refugees will find their whole story in this book, but many will find some of it. As they share it with teachers and fellow students, we hope that a new understanding and a greater sympathy – even new friendships – can be forged.
There's no right or wrong way to use wordless stories, such as those created by Beyond Words, and teachers will need sensitivity when deciding when and how to introduce A Refugee's Story. They're sure to find ways to use it that its creators haven't envisaged. But that's the power of stories. They're infinitely adaptable. And when they are shared and understood, whole new worlds can be created.
Click here to download A Refugee’s Story for free.
*Elizabeth Laird's two novels set in Jordan are Welcome to Nowhere and A House Without Walls, both published by Macmillan Children's Books. Teachers' notes with background material and pictures are available on her website to freely use and reproduce. Go to www.elizabethlaird.co.uk/hello-teachers to download the pdfs.