More Than Just a Name

Jack Foersterling

Professor Leake

WRIT 1733

More Than Just a Name

Having been in class for a total of 5 weeks now and having read, watched, researched, and seen first hand many different refugee stories my definition of a refugee and what their story entails has both remained true to, but also grown immensely from what my ideas at the beginning of the quarter were. Our first blog post focused on such an idea. Exactly what is a refugee? While we all have the definition fed to us by the popular media stories (starving African children come to mind pretty quickly) What most people fail to see is the very broad range of situations a refugee can come from. The definition I came up with at the beginning of the quarter is “A “refugee” in my definition is someone who changes location, from their physical home or homeland, by either force or on his or her own accord.” (Foersterling) For the next class we were to read the UNHCR report regarding the definition of refugees, which gave the following, “A refugee is someone who ‘owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country…” (UNHCR) Now while I believe my definition and that given by the UNHCR are very close in description, we must also remember that the UNHCR definition was given at a 1951 convention dealing with the status of refugees, over 60 years ago. 60 years is a large amount of time for a single definition to still be held in place regarding a group of people. To put things into perspective, African Americans didn’t even have the right to vote until 13 years after this conference took place. While I believe the definition still holds generally true to the majority of those under refugee status, a modern convention on refugees would allow for a new definition of a refugee that involves all that has happened globally since the previous one.

            Now that I have gone over the working “definition” of a refugee through both my idea and what the actual legal parameters are, we can tackle what it means to have a “refugee story”. One of the main topics we have covered in class, the idea of a “refugee story” has very grey lines on what exactly it means, solely because there are so many examples of them that trying to cram them all under one overarching denotation. Much like any time one group of people is defined by their stereotype or general characteristics, there are still a very large portion of the common population that do not adhere anywhere close to the “norm” of their group. Take for example the common stereotypes of minority groups such as Latino Americans and African Americans. While we might try and reject the idea that there is the common “idea” of what both groups are like, whether we like it or not, they exist. Stereotypes have for decades plagued groups of individuals by describing their diverse culture in simplistic terms that grossly oversimplify the actions and beliefs.

            I believe that both the best and the worst thing for the sharing of these refugee stories in American culture, as well as world culture, has been the popular media. The second a war or genocide or other form of social persecution of people begins in a developing country today it is a media feeding frenzy for who can be on the scene fastest and getting coverage of the event unfolding. While at its core this does seem like a positive thing, media covering large world events that effect a large group of people, the modern media outlets have reached a level of coverage much more than just reporting the news to the general public. If you flip on the news today, any channel, it doesn’t matter if its on one side of the spectrum like FOX or the complete other side like CNN, you will see the same thing, the over dramatization and coverage of events. As a journalism major I have been engrained with the idea that we cover stories and make our lead titles something that will attract the largest audience. What does this for the average American media consumer? Horror stories. War in this country, famine in this one, murder in this city, scandal in the capital, etc. It is all the same, if it has a shock factor big enough, it will make front-page news guaranteed. There is no way any major news corporation will cover the story of a man who was reconnected with his lost father after 30 years over any story involving some form of violence or unjust actions. In the covering of refugees in African countries, the media almost doesn’t treat the victims as people. Put in coverage that almost makes them seem like the animals out of a Sarah McLachlan ASPCA commercial, the refugees are put in a light that even the hardest criminal will feel pity for them. News broadcasters look for the biggest “sob story” when covering the refugees. Like Deng said, there are plenty of stories that involve the typical “running from lions and drinking our pee to survive” recollections. However, like Deng also stated many refugee stories are fabricated for the media. Much like we as college students did not technically “lie” to college admissions board about our accomplishments and what we did in high school, but it would be very easy to state that we all buffed up our best traits and stories and threw them to the front of the line to get the most attention. We, along with the refugees telling their stories are not simply lying, but more fabricating some of the truths to make our stories and our triumphs stand above the rest.

  While the major media outlets do have their faults (just like any large corporation these days) they do assist in what their true purpose was initially intended for, informing the general public of worldly events and happenings. Without them we would have little to no idea what is happening two states away from us let alone what is going on in the Middle East and Africa. Without the popular media covering stories of refugees and their struggle, there would be nowhere close to the amount of help going to them from American sources as there is now. Everything starting from the UN to other world-wide help and support groups down to local organizations that hold small fundraisers to send money to African and other refugees would not be at all as effective as they stand today without the assistance of the major media covering the events that occur in the places they are helping. While both sides of the coin can be debated for whether or not the mass media and its coverage of refugees either hurts or helps the telling of their stories, I do believe that the stories would not be able to be told without it.

            What I have noticed in reading, watching and researching about refugee stories is that their largest detriment is that they forget the individual, the person. They instead focus on the large group, summarizing the stories of many into the story of one. It is not until you search out stories such as God Grew Tired of Us, of Beetles and Angels, and What is the What all you find are stories without names. There is no Deng, no Mawi, no John Buhl or Panther or Daniel, all that they use is “refugees”. There is no personality to this word “refugee” it is a blank faced title given to characterize such a large and diverse group of people, many times, who could not be more different. African refugees, Asian refugees, even Native American refugees, are we saying that all of these people are the same? Refugees deserve the right to the name they were given at birth, not the one they were given when they were forcibly removed from their country against their will. They are people, just like you and I, it doesn’t take much reading to see that. Mawi describes in his book the perils of growing up in the suburbs of Chicago not only as a refugee, but mostly just as a child. I share so many similar experiences with him in this respect. No, I did not move from an African refugee camp to America at a very young age, but I did deal with bullies, I dealt with school, I dealt with my parents, I dealt with girls. While our backgrounds may be completely different and we have experienced things the other may never even imagine, we still share such a solid common ground. While one of us has the technical denotation as a refugee and the other is just a white middleclass suburban kid, we both grew up here, we’re both, and I proudly say this, Americans.

            Overall, there should be no reason that refugees should be defined by their legal status and title, they should be defined by their actions, and their individual stories, not those about their entire group. We must choose to break outside what is simply given to us instantaneously through mass media that hits us in waves every second in todays fast paced society, we must not simply take the story given to us and move on. We have to look at the individual and not the group. We have to see people, not just “refugees”, because it’s more than just a name.

Works Cited

Asgedom, M. (2002). Of beetles & angels: a boy's remarkable journey from a      refugee camp to Harvard. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co..

Eggers, D. (2006). What is the what: the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng            : a novel. San Francisco: McSweeney's.

UNHCR. (2012, September). Protecting Refugees and the Role of UNHCR. UNHCR, September 2012. Retrieved March 19, 2013, from https://blackboard.du.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id _2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%

Voices of Refugees

While I was only able to attend the Voices of Refugees presentation for one speaker, the story that he told was incredibly moving to hear in person. Just like how reading about a refugee’s experience and then seeing them “in real life” at the ACC, being able to hear directly a refugee’s story was incredible to experience. The first speaker of the evening, Naseebu (I haven’t a clue if I’m spelling his name correctly) had a very interesting story to tell, talking about his fleeing from Burundi, a very tiny country in central Africa that honestly I had never even heard of before, and his movement to a refugee camp in Kenya, and his eventual journey here, to America. His necessity for leaving Burundi was the war that erupted there in 1958 between two of the native groups of Burundi, the Hutu and the Tutsi. These two groups sounded very familiar to me, and I soon realized that they were the two groups from the movie Hotel Rwanda, which I had watched just earlier this year. After looking up that Burundi is located just to the south of Rwanda, I realized that Naseebu was stuck in the conflict I had just seen depicted through film not more than few months ago. This again, was bringing stories I had seen before (some in more of a fictional feeling/sense) to life. This person, standing here before me, has gone through these terrible atrocities that I had read and seen. They didn’t really seem real until just then. It was lines such as “So we were held hostage in our own country” and “I escaped even from those who held me hostage. Who forced me to use stones against another person. To even kill a person simply because they belonged to another ethnic group.” That escaped Naseebu’s lips that brought an intense sense of reality to all of the stories.

ACC Volunteer Experience

While I have only had one volunteer day so far at the ACC, I learned and incredible amount in the 5 hours that I was there volunteering. I volunteered this past Friday from 10-2 with Roderick, and while this is not normally a very large number of refugees to work with on Fridays, I still did get to interact with a few of them. My main work for the day was transferring data files for refugees in the ACC system who have had their status changed from “employable” to “unemployable” for a variety of different reasons. While this was not my number one idea of what it would be like to volunteer at the center, I was happy that I could help out in any way possible. However, my time at the center was not all sitting in front of a computer, I did have a chance to meet and talk with several refugees in my off time between computer jobs. I think this connection was what really brought together all that we have read and researched so far in class. Yes, we can read hundreds and thousands of pages and watch hours of raw documentary footage, but I really don’t think the idea of a refugee can really hit you until you meet them in the flesh. I met a Middle Eastern family who had only been in America for a few weeks, and although I had read all the stories from Mawi and the Lost Boys and Deng about their first weeks in America, the reality of this situation really became real when I listened to the ACC representative talk with the family, through a translator, about what they can expect for their first few weeks, months, and first year in America. All of the things that I take for granted in life, knowing common laws and rules, my ability to access medical help and attention, and simply just my understanding of American society and culture, these people are learning for the first time in their 30’s. I cannot fathom the courage and hard will it takes for these families and individuals to come to a completely alien place to start a new life. It is also these stories that I look forward to learning and hearing directly from the refugees as I volunteer longer at the ACC.

We're closer than we think

            While in her article Powell states there are many inherent differences between those affected by Hurricane Katrina and refugees, such as the Lost Boys or families such as Mawi Asgedom’s, who escaped Sudan and Ethiopia for American freedom, I also believe there are many more similarities that she did not exactly hit on. While under the UNHCR’s definitive structures of defining a refugees status, Katrina victims fell under Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and those like Mawi, Deng, and the Lost Boys, are, of course, refugees, I believe that they are much closer than they seem. While victims of Hurricane Katrina (and Rita) still remain in the United States, what many people don’t realize is that a vast majority of “refugees” in our definition actually never leave where they are to come to the United States. While the stories in mass media we read about in our everyday lives revolve around those who have caught the break and have the opportunity to come and live in America (God Grew Tired of Us, Of Beetles and Angles, What is the What, etc.) a much larger portion of the refugees in the world are those left back in the countries the authors of our stories left. In saying this, the victims of natural disasters here in the US are more similar to the African refugees than they think. While yes, they are not moved to a different, adjacent country, but they are forced to move somewhere they do not feel is “home” by some outside force that they had no choice in fighting against, they simply left because it was what would keep them alive.

Overall, I feel that in reading this article, I was able to get a deeper feel on the refugee’s experience in not coming to America. While we can all make connections to those that come to the United States (we’ve been drowned in the stories of refugees and immigrants in their struggle to survive in American society for decades) I haven’t really been able to make a concrete connection to those that remain in Africa. Yes, I can read about them in books, but it just doesn’t have that personal feeling. This is where I believe the stories of those effected by hurricanes and other natural disasters in America bring the closest feeling to those of refugees, we just need to open up our horizons and see the striking similarities.

Every Refugee Has His Story

            Overall, I found Deng’s recollections of life as a refugee both in Africa as well as in America one of the best refugee stories we have read or watched about so far. While only halfway through his autobiography, I have already expanded both my knowledge and understanding of refugees and their journeys and stories ten-fold from the stories of Asgedom in Of Beetles and Angles and the Lost Boys in God Grew Tired of Us. Deng’s story takes both of the stories we have read and adds a completely new level of reality to them. While the two previous stories told incredible accounts of life back in the camps, Neither of them came close to those stories told by Deng. I feel as though while Asgedom and the Lost Boys told their stories of life before America, Deng has the most intact memories of what life was like, or at least felt they were pertinent to share. Asgedom shared the stories passed down to him, as he remembered very few personal memories from his time in the camps and in Africa. The Lost Boys on the other hand, while remembering vividly their time in the camps in Kakuma, spent very little time in the course of the documentary sharing them. Whether this was due to their own accord or that of the documentary producers, I feel as though a large majority of their stories are held back in the refugee camps, and not necessarily their time while in America. Deng on the other hand, had an incredibly complex way of intertwining both a story written in the “present” of his robbery, and “telling” the people around him the story of his time in Africa. What I also found very surprising was his tearing apart of and acceptance that many refugee stories are slightly if not more than so, emphasized and exaggerated from the truth. While this does make a lot of sense, I found it astounding that he was so open about coming out and admitting it. While this does through my “definition” of a refugee story off a little bit, I look forward to hearing the rest of Deng’s story.