News, stories and thoughts on helping refugees ..
Refugees United
News, stories and thoughts on helping refugees find lost family members
When a child is lost.
2 October 2006I myself am a father. A loving parent of a healthy, happy, secure, loving, nurtured and stimulated little 4 year-old girl named Amaya Chai. A bundle of care, interest, curiosity and gusto for life; always seeking, asking, loving and caring for the word surrounding her. A little girl about whom I’ve written books, both for her and about her, in my quest to bring her the very best life has to offer.
I am blessed. I am fortunate. Not just for having a beautiful daughter with the world waiting at her feet, but because of a geographical lottery I’ve won in a strike of luck prior to birth, where I wisely chose parents from the safety of a Western Frontier: Europe in all its splendor and advantages.
Amaya is the musical chord that resonates in the symphony of what I seek to create; the light in which my shadow exists, to aid and carefully guide her in a world that is often a race in the blind, seeking life where none has been found before.
And so my thoughts fall on mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers; children of the lost. The frail hallucinations we fail to see in our quest to attain a life of luxury where they merely seek a life to live. For truly our lives must be shadowless reflections where darkness has claimed our attention when we allow desperate cries for help go unheeded.
I imagine the thought of Amaya lost, age 7, torn into a whirlwind of international statutes, traffickers, smugglers, immigration, uncertainty, fear, hopelessness, devastation, destitution…These words may merely seek to convey the heartwrecking emptiness a mother must hold to her candle of hope, knowing that somewhere, likely, her child is being preyed upon by a world too numb to realize the pain it nurtures is its own severed limp. For what we do unto others, we do unto ourselves.
The powerlessness is overwhelming; the simple thought drawing energy like an empty void; what would I do if suddenly my daughter was taken away from me?
I have fought before and I would fight again, but I speak as a privileged westerner with access to reliable judicial systems, non-corrupt police and a non-chalant indifference to racial, religious and economic persecution. I fear nothing in my state of life, for what have I to fear? And so my thoughts must rest with those so painstakingly caught in a web of terror; those born with the seed of fear blossoming from their stomachs, fed by the very milk they suckled from their mother’s life giving breast. For fear, true fear, is a poison that flows in the veins of the weak through generations: Not weak in spirit, not weak in heart or soul, but weak in the word’s most incapacitating and inferior sense: Weak in that they cannot protect themselves. Weak in that a proud father must accept humility at the hands of cruelty to protect a family he so wishes the strength to fight for. But what is a fist against the might of weapons? What is a stance against the moral and religious majority? What is fury in the eye of the storm? And so it must be my duty to take a stand and fight; for my words may penetrate deeper than a sword, my voice may be louder than a gun and my influence may be tougher than steel. Is it not the duty of the strong to protect and nurture back to life the weak? Is it not the job of he who has everything to grant she with little the possibility to claim a life of dignity?
Refugees United will continue to fight and work and dedicate our every waking moment to create a global shelter for refugees, wherein they can once again establish contact to lost family, torn apart during their harrowing escape. Please help us, blog about us, link to us, spread the word about www.refunite.org, to establish a possibility for families to find each other. Please, it’s so simple, so straightforward…All we’re asking for is a few minutes out of your day, week, month, year… Come help us, come join us… Countless refugees will be forever grateful!
Thanking you sincerely,
Christopher Mikkelsen
Refugees United
www.refunite.org
posted by annie at 8:31 PM
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