Child Refugee Quotes

“One of the strangest things about this journey was how whenever a smuggler or a driver gave us an instruction, we simply followed it. Whether it was get in the car, stay silent, follow me, eat this, shave your beard, hand over your passport - we simply followed orders. Without questioning or really even thinking, we put our lives into the hands of strangers, time and again. We had no choice. When they said come, we little lost sheep had to follow.

It's very hard to explain the feeling of repeatedly putting your complete trust into the hands of strangers who see you as a commodity. Every time I did as one of these men asked, I had an acute awareness that this could be the last instruction I would ever follow. Each of these men had the power to take us to our deaths, at any time.”
― Gulwali Passarlay, The Lightless Sky: A Twelve-Year-Old Refugee's Harrowing Escape from Afghanistan and His Extraordinary Journey Across Half the World

“The humiliation was hard to bear. Many of the faces I saw spoke of the same thing. In their own countries, these people had power, even the respect of their communities. Here in the Jungle we were barely human. We were the beasts that gave this place its name.
I imagined myself running up to some high-ranking French official and shaking them to demand answers. It wasn't my fault I wasn't born in Europe. My home was a war zone - did that somehow make me less human?”
― Gulwali Passarlay, The Lightless Sky: A Twelve-Year-Old Refugee's Harrowing Escape from Afghanistan and His Extraordinary Journey Across Half the World

“That became my definition of a good day - a hot meal, some new clothes, a visit to the doctor, and an illicit shower from which I emerged clean and dressed. I hated filth - back home I was so clean.”
― Gulwali Passarlay, The Lightless Sky: A Twelve-Year-Old Refugee's Harrowing Escape from Afghanistan and His Extraordinary Journey Across Half the World