At the end of 2014 there were 19.5 million refugees worldwide. The people who have been recently forcibly displaced due to conflict or persecution in the world is 13.9 million.  (a)  So, we have all these people who are all moving enmasse across the globe, all moving towards what they believe will be a better place than the one they have come from. And who can blame them? The experiences of war are something no-one in a lifetime should ever have to endure.

As an English teacher who spent 10 years working with refugees, I have seen firsthand the type of trauma that many people carry with them, not just within the confines of their homes but in the classroom, in the street, on the bus, in the bank, buying lunch. At any given moment something might erupt or  break down and they, the holder and bearer of the most terrible memories will be at the mercy of the strangers around them. Unable for just that short period of time to contain the composure that we expect in our civilised societies.  And after? What happens to that person then? We bring in refugees to our respective countries, we give them cheap housing and put them on benefits hoping that they will soon become proficient enough in our language to join the workforce. But often this does not happen. In each and every country we have thousands of displaced persons languishing in safe, protected, situations who are lonely and lost and longing for the familiarity of their own village, town, city or country.  Each and every one of them harboring conceptions of things that we can only imagine and that we should all be grateful we have not had to endure.

A friend of mine who is now an interpreter, came to a safe western country many years ago from Tehran, a city of eight million people.  The house  her family was given was in a beautiful, leafy, suburb of a quiet Australasian city of 300,000.  Once the family had been settled in by social workers over the weekend, they came on the Monday and assisted her husband and children to find their way to their respective daily places of work and school and she was left at home. She had no English at this point in her life. That first weekday she spent in her new country was one of the most terrifying she had ever had.  At three o’clock on the Monday afternoon she waited at the window overlooking the street.  She waited and waited and not only did her husband and children not appear for several hours, there was no-one on the street. While she was waiting she imagined all sorts of terrible scenarios. The streets in Tehran at three in the afternoon are literally teeming with life. Schools open their doors and children play football or cricket or sit on sidewalks reading books or just chatting. Parents walk to pick up their children and stand in groups and catch up on local news. Youth crowd out on to the sidewalks and streets and stroll along arm in arm. Vendors come with their carts of sweets or snack foods and the cafes wait as the afternoon customers pour into their establishments wanting afternoon refreshments. The streets are alive, vital,  dynamic. There is never a time in Tehran when there is no-one on the streets.

Now as my friend looked out her window, there was no-one. Nothing moved, no animals, no cars and definitely no children or husband. That quiet seclusiveness that we pay appreciable real estate dollars for was the very thing that created a foreign and alien experience for my friend. She considered all types of horrific scenes in her mind; the most logical and overwhelming one was that somehow the city where her children and husband had gone had been overrun by an over powering army and that everyone had been killed. She was now alone and soon she would be found and killed as well. This was her only explanation for why there were no people anywhere.  This was the  sole reason the streets were empty and there were no signs of life as she knew it to be. She had only been in this country for a few days and in that time she had been through initial security checks,  met lots of well meaning strangers, been hastily shown a new house to live in, arrangements had been made for her children to attend school and her husband was going to a job that had been arranged before they left Iran.  She, as the non-bread winner, was the one left alone and unaided with no communication in her own language. At that point in time she longed to be back in her city, she wanted familiarity, she wanted to be where she knew why things happened, she wanted to be safe, she wanted to be home.