As the world we know today has continued to become more and more violent, it has caused a crisis. It is a devastating crisis that effects more than 50 million people around the world today and 51% of these people are under the age of 18. Due to war, every day there are people pushed out of their homes and countries because the places they live are no longer inhabitable. These people who most likely lived normal lives are now put in extreme danger to travel out of their country or home into a place they are unfamiliar and most likely unwanted. Many come to refugee camps where they have inadequate food or water and go from living in houses to living in tents. As the numbers continue to rise all around the world, these people still go unnoticed. Many of these people never have their stories heard because the world is not willing to listen or too afraid to hear. As children become vulnerable to exploitation and malnutrition when families split up and violence continues to rise, the question of the refugee crisis still remains unanswered.
According to the UN Refugee Agency, 59.5 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes worldwide and at the end of 2014, the world contained 19.5 million refugees. During 2014 alone 42,500 people were displaced from their homes each week and Syria had taken over as the world's top distributor of refugees. 95% of these people are placed within the surrounding countries. While some stay in the country in which they are natives, many are forced to leave their home country and go to unfamiliar environments. While most of the refugees are pouring out of the Middle East, it has also spread into Africa and Europe because many refugees have resorted to camps that will accept them there.
It seems that it is hard for Americans to understand why this is such a large problem because we today have hardly seen the effects of war on our own soil, but these people are more than just numbers and go through horrible circumstances every day. One of the darkest stories of the refugee crisis is the story of the child. Children are getting very sick because they lack medical care and forced to live in very poorly sanitized areas where many children contract pneumonia and cholera. If they are not split up from their families, most of them have to work in very harsh labor environments to help support their family. Most children are no longer able to go to school because it is unavailable. Lastly, and one of the most disgusting factors, the risk of children being exploited has risen to extreme heights. Not only are they susceptible to unsafe environments in which they can be abused or sold into slavery, they are also at risk of being married off at a young age. As families struggle to maintain themselves, they often sell their girls into marriages as early as the age of 13.
Many of these families are taken to refugee camps where they live their lives in deep poverty. These people go from living in homes to tents within a matter of days. Most of these people go from having steady jobs to completely relying on humanitarian aide to get by. They most often become extremely sick from the living conditions in the camps. The camps contain thousands of people in an extremely small area and many of these people have no idea when they will get to leave, if ever. I was able to see this for myself while I was in Uganda last summer. While Uganda is a relatively safe country for the area, the surrounding countries are not. Many refugees flood into the camps there for safety. The camp my team went to held around 80,000 people within only a few miles. Most of them lived in tents with only a few buildings for the small school there and other purposes. We were able to provide them with a meal that had been their first in days. The people in this area came from around five neighboring countries with all different cultures. This caused extreme tension among them that was extremely evident. The Muslim children were allowed in a certain area, while the Christian children were allowed in another. Families stuck together by country because they believed that a family from one place was better than a family from another. On top of that, they were starving with no money, no clothes and no home. Like I said, many of them hadn't received a meal in days, and many of them had been there for months or even years.
However, the most shocking thing to me was not the way they lived or how long and far away from home they were, it was that I had never heard anything about these people. If I had, it was only negative things on the news about how they are ruining other nations that decide to let them in, but it is much different to see the numbers go from 50 million people to small faces of the children I had now seen.
There is no good answer to solve this problem. Of course, some will never return home and some will choose not to if given the opportunity, and I don't blame them. There is no answer for a whole area of the world that is becoming dominated by terrorism, pushing millions of people out of their comfortable lives into tents. But I do know the answer is not to ignore them. Most of these people feel forgotten, unloved and unwanted, and while we cannot give them their home back or their lives, we can show them someone notices. Awareness is the first place to start and until their stories have been heard, they will have no home away from home.
