“A Life Uprooted”

Nigerian novelist Okey Ndibe has written a moving column in the New York Times entitled, “A Life Uprooted,” in which he reflects upon his family’s experience fleeing Nigeria as well as the current refugee crisis across the world. Here’s a brief excerpt from the short column: 

“Men, women and children are fleeing wars, conflict and persecution in places like Syria (11.6 million), Iraq (4.1 million), Democratic Republic of Congo (4.0 million), Afghanistan (3.7 million), Sudan (2.9 million), Somalia (2.3 million), Ukraine (1.3 million) and Myanmar (907,000) according to the United Nations. Emotionally closer to home for me, the U.N. also said in September that more than 2.3 million people in Nigeria’s northeast had been displaced since May 2013 — victims of Boko Haram, the Islamist insurgents.

Turkey is currently sheltering about 1.6 million refugees. The names of the other leading hosts might be surprising for some, since they are neither European nor wealthy: Pakistan (1.5 million refugees), Lebanon (1.2 million), Iran (982,000), Ethiopia (660,000) and Jordan (654,000). By October, 643,000 refugees and migrants had reached the European coast via the Mediterranean since the beginning of the year.

Whichever place these refugees once called home, they know the cricket’s plight. When you’re forced to gather your children and run, there’s no time for visas and passports. The urgency is in how to walk across the Sahara without dying of thirst, or how to survive the passage across the Mediterranean on a raft. Every person who dies attempting to reach safety testifies, in effect, that some deaths — for example, by drowning close to an Italian shore — are better than others.”

-JKoh