The following piece was written by Khalid Ahmadzai, our Senior Director of Partnerships, on World Refugee Day in 2019 and reshared last weekend. We believe it is important for our community to hear this story, especially now, as we mark World Refugee Day once again.
We invite you to take a moment to glimpse the journey that refugees so often face when they flee their countries in search of safety.
Khalid wrote:
The Camel Route
After sixteen hours of a treacherous, cramped bus journey through hell, we made it to Torkham, the semi-official border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was late evening, and the gate had closed a couple of hours before our bus arrived. A few Pakistani border police officers approached my father asking for money, enough to let us sneak through a cut in the fence beside the gate. The border was free to cross during the day. We didn’t have the money. They were asking for the equivalent of three to five dollars per person, and there were six of us. Torkham is not a place you can stay with a family. We couldn’t go back to Jalalabad, a border city three or four hours away by bus. It was too late, and every option had closed with the gate. It’s a godforsaken place, Torkham is.
We were not going to Pakistan for fun. We never did. We never could afford to live there. We ran for our lives because the Mujahideen were fighting for power and killing civilians by the hundreds in our city, Kabul. We were running from power-hungry, monstrous men.
The driver told the tired travelers that if they didn’t want to pay the bribe, there was the camel route, a longer crossing shared with hundreds of camels hauling goods that nobody wanted to pay taxes on, and nomads who had been making this passage for generations.
So we walked. Zigzagging under the long legs of camels through dust of biblical proportions, for what felt like an eternity, we made it to the other side. Two or three hours, perhaps. Only to arrive at a bus station just a few meters from the Torkham gate on the Pakistani side. A journey we could have made for twenty dollars and a five-minute walk.
If you have never been a refugee, if you have never made the conscious decision to run for your life, your children’s lives, the lives of the people you love, I don’t think you can truly understand those who leave everything behind to flee to another country.
More than eight years of working in refugee resettlement have passed since I first wrote those words. And yet, seven years later, I am still involved in this work. In that same span of time, the number of refugees worldwide has nearly doubled.
Yesterday was World Refugee Day, a day to pause and reflect on one of the most profound human experiences of our time: the journey of those who had to leave everything behind simply to survive. Let us hold space for those still waiting, still in limbo.
Published in honor of World Refugee Day
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