Empathy: Syrian Refugee Crisis

I have been thinking a lot about the refugees coming out of Syria and other war-torn nations in the Middle East and Africa. Some media outlets would have us focus on the effects they will have on our countries. Instead this morning, I am thinking about how migrating will affect the migrants.I am an immigrant myself. I moved to the United States at six years old. I was not a refugee. I didn't arrive on a boat. I flew with my mother and my 18-month-old sister across the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean in a spacious jet. Yet it was difficult.It was the first time my mother had to communicate entirely in English. She was dealing with two squirming kids by herself. She had to navigate customs and border control in a foreign tongue. It was her very first time on an airplane. I think about that journey often.These days I compare it to the harrowing journey of Syrian refugees. I think about getting on a boat in the dark with men I don't trust to go to a land that barely tolerates me.  To leave a land I love, that I adore, that suddenly hates me--like a mother wrenching a runt from a litter and tossing it aside to die.I think about Elián González. Back in 1999, Elián and his mother left Cuba on a boat to escape to America. His mother died on that journey, and a few short months later he was sent back to Cuba to his father. I remember how, as a 15-year-old girl, I rooted for him to stay, watching events unfold on television, crying about his mother's sacrifice, dreaming of a life for him here. I think about him on the boat. I compare him to the tiny Syrian boy whose corpse washed up in Turkey. What a miracle it was that Elián made it. What conflicted feelings I have about us as a nation sending him back.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Elian being taken from his maternal relatives to be returned to Cuba (by Alan Diaz of the Associated Press)

The numbers are hard to wade through. SyrianRefugees.eu estimates that 9 million Syrians were displaced both within and without Syria by summer 2014. That's as if all of New York City (plus a million more people) were suddenly homeless and on the run. Three million people had made it out of Syria, mostly in Lebanon and surrounding countries. About 100,000 were in the European Union. Again, these are 2014 numbers.The UN Refugee Agency UNHCR has its latest numbers (Sept 2015) at over 4 million registered refugees. The number of registered refugees out of Syria has DOUBLED since those summer 2014 stats. If I am analyzing the chart correctly, 50% of them are children. That is 2 million lost and terrified children. Most of them are in Turkey and Lebanon.When my family moved to the United States, we left behind a fully furnished apartment in an apartment building owned by my grandfather. A back-up plan. A home we could always return to. These refugees... They have no plan B. They have no back up plan. They claw their way out of the darkness into a hostile light. Maybe they left behind homes. But there's no guarantee those homes will every be theirs again, no guarantee those homes will even exist.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” the inscription on the Statue of Liberty

Wretched refuse. Homeless. Tempest-tossed.I wonder if today, for only a moment, we can put ourselves in their tiny velcro shoes.====

Disturbing images of refugees (not all of them Syrian)

UNHCR Syrian Regional Refugee Response

That Little Syrian Boy: A related NPR story. I have not listened and probably wouldn't be able to bear it.