I'd like to take you on a trip, you know the sort that your elementary school teacher would invite you along on as you closed your eyes and practiced imagining things. Let's imagine together!
It's late one evening, you find yourself collapsed upon the couch, exhausted from a long day. Your family surrounds you, playing, talking, eating, and just enjoying being together. All the sudden a horrific sound splits open the sky and pulses the ground beneath you. Screams fill the room and outdoors, as your family rushes to grab hold of one another. Huddling together on the floor, the children begin weeping as the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun cascades down through the open windows. All too quickly there is a sharp beating upon the door, followed by loud commands. Slowly you rise up to gingerly peek through the cracked door. What follows next becomes a blur in your memory during the next months. All you can recall is being hurled across the room as the door is slammed into being fully opened. Strong words, commands you can't believe, and slowly watching everything you have ever known as yours being burned from your sight and life. Forced to flee for your lives, you find yourselves on your brother's doorstep in another city. Fear fills his face as you see him quickly steal a glance around the curtain next to the door. Relief floods through his features as he sees who it is. The horrific news cannot be refrained as he opens the door and utters the words that continue to haunt your heart. The bombs that constantly fall day and night in your country are not merciful or just. The strength he's had to masquerade behind for days crumbles and sobs break the silence. His family, save his littlest daughter, is all gone. Your own flesh and blood gone, in a flash of light and sound. The only visible remnant of the event is borne upon your niece's body, as shrapnel mangled her flesh, and in her vacant eyes as she trembles silently in the corner, oblivious to all around her. What hope is left for your family? For your people? For this land? Three different armies are rumored to be marching toward this place. What else is to be done but empty your bank account and steal away in the night?
Quietly and quickly your family tries to cross over into the neighboring country in the stillness of night a few days later. The ever watching border patrol is not kind or even humane, often taking the lives of those who sought to do what you are about to attempt. Through some random luck, a call comes through the radio, beckoning all hands on deck for a crisis in another part of the area. Silently you grab every hand you can hold and make a break for the distant lights of a village that represents freedom. Tired, thirsty, and beyond hungry, you noiselessly plod along the rural roads, unsure of where you even are anymore. Days merge into weeks as mere survival becomes the lens through which life is encountered. Finally you all are able to locate a eclectic gathering of people speaking your language and fleeing the same war. Talk spreads quickly in such circumstances, and it doesn't take long to hear of what seems like your only shot at hope: being smuggled far away from here. The cost is your entire life savings, but what choice do you have as you look from face to face of your weary family?
After a few days of rest, you start the long journey to the other side, where good conditions and satisfaction have been promised and even guaranteed. Night after night, you sink to the ground, masking your growling stomach, bleeding feet, bloodshot eyes, and aching body with a smile, softly singing your heavy-ladened children to sleep. Small sobs unconsciously ripple from your smallest's body as she collapses in exhaustion. Will you all ever arrive there alive?
After nearly a month of traveling, you finally make it to the coast where your smuggler has promised the embodiment of hope in a raft that will safely carry you all the way to freedom. But what you find awaiting on the shore isn't any of the agreed upon things. Instead of 40 people to ride along with you, there are a staggering number of 70 waiting along the shoreline for the raft to come. Children wail in unspoken fear, while the adults express inabilities to swim, the life vests that are filled with rubbish instead of foam, and what could lay ahead. After everyone is forcibly shoved onto the boat, the smuggler then announces that he will not be traveling along to navigate, but suddenly designates the nearest man as the captain of the vessel. With no time for anyone to digest this information, he shoves the raft filled with panic-stricken people into the cold waters. Silently he turns and walks off, without a look behind to the people who just made him $60,000 for doing nearly nothing. Knowing that this boat will sink without everyone working together, you try to help the fear-filled captain with seeing around the mass of people. The crashing waves seem endless as the wind picks up on what was once a clear night when you set out. Fear erupts through the entire boat as you are all nearly capsized. As people shift and squirm, you quickly pull out a small baby that has lost its mother and is nearly trampled beneath the mass of humanity above it. Holding on for dear life to this child and your own children, you begin to pray that nothing is lurking out in the dark, unable to be seen as the moon's light vanishes behind yet another cloud. Minutes stretch on into hours, as suddenly a loud sound fills the air as wave upon wave finds another object to crash against. Though you've never been out on the sea, dread fills your heart as you instinctively know this is the sound of water pounding against rocks. Without an act of God, this group would all drown!
Breaking through screams and splashes, a welcome voice is heard nearby shouting in a strange language that they are there to help. In an instant the boat collides into a massive rock and begins to lose its buoyancy quickly. Strong hands start pulling the baby from your arms. Under normal circumstances you would never let go of her, but knowing your own helplessness in this moment, you attempt to shove your own children towards more waiting hands. Land, a dry blanket, food, and warm smiles greet you all as you make it ashore. The relief is short lived as news passes around of how borders have just been closed yesterday, and decisions have been made that will force your family into a holding pattern. The fear that filled your heart as you watched your family being tossed about on the sea returns tenfold into the pit of your stomach. The culmination of all the stress of the last month boils over as hot tears fill your eyes. What now? Where can you go? Caught in the middle of war and rejection, what options could possibly lay before you now?
This is part one of what I hope is a glimpse into the very real pain and struggle thousands of displaced people in this world are currently facing. It is no one's story; rather a compilation of the various pictures I've had painted for me these past months. I hope you can put yourself into their shoes. The passport you own isn't deserved by you anymore than they deserve to be victims of a horrific war. Enter into their story, because, but for an act of mercy from God, it could be yours.
No comments:
Post a Comment