INTRODUCTION

Refugee—the latest buzzword, a word guaranteed to spark conversation and fuel emotion. There are more than twenty-two million refugees worldwide, and another sixty-five million who have been forcibly displaced from their homes, their villages, from everything they know.¹ But who are these people, these refugees that seem to slip into our conversations, our country, and even our lives with nary a chance for us to understand what they’re all about? The scant news we have of them filters into our homes via dramatic satellite shots of distant, barely pronounceable villages in countries as foreign to us as any images of Mars might be. We barely have time to focus on the often gut-wrenching photos before the anchor is on to the next story, leaving us less enlightened and perhaps even a little more puzzled by what we’ve seen. It is in the seeing—the firsthand, close-enough-to-touch encounters—that the real truth can be found. It is my hope that by sharing their stories, their realities, I can provide a little of that truth here.

I am a nurse, a humanitarian aid worker, and a writer, and I’ve traveled to some of the most desolate lands on earth to deliver health care to persecuted, desperate people. But lest you think that this is some soul-searching, self-aggrandizing tome, let me assure you that the refugees with whom I’ve worked have done far more for me than I ever did for them. It is in this spirit that I share their stories as well as my own.

As a young (at least from my perspective some thirty years on) ER nurse in Boston, I’d been acutely aware of the intermittent refugee crises that gripped our world. These international disasters, appearing for brief moments in the media spotlight, invariably featured stark glimpses of big-bellied babies with empty, haunting stares, who invariably caught my eye and stopped me cold. And then, as if I’d only imagined them, they simply disappeared from the spotlight and I found myself wondering how this baby or that little girl had fared. Each new story sparked my interest a little more, and finally, in 1986, after a particularly gripping news story about Afghan refugees fleeing to Pakistan, I decided it was time to do something. I called the aid organization featured in the news story, and within two months, I was on my way.

I am by nature neither courageous nor adventurous, and though drama would weave itself throughout my days and nights delivering aid, it was neither a search for adventure nor a dramatic incident that served as the catalyst that finally drew me to aid work. For me it had been the right time and the right set of circumstances, and as an inner-city ER nurse well versed in the treatment of trauma and sad-eyed patients, I was sure I could help.

What happened, I’d always wondered, to people already living the hardest of hardscrabble lives when war and misery claim their land? For starters, they don’t give up. They manage to go on and sometimes even to smile no matter their own suffering, much like Fatima, a young woman I met in Iraq not long after the US invasion. We’d gone to her small village to test the drinking water, and as expected, it was filled with bacteria and would require boiling before consuming. But Fatima saw possibility in that dirty water. Tucking a stray hair under her hijab, she smiled coyly and spoke to me in perfect English so that the watchful crowd of locals wouldn’t understand her words. “My husband,” she whispered, “is an old man and I am his second wife. My life is miserable, filled with sorrow.” Her chocolate brown eyes scanned the horizon as if searching for something that was just out of sight. “I want to escape this place, and God willing, the dirty water will be the end of him.”

And that brings me back to the beginning—who are these people, these refugees? Are they the desperate, doe-eyed children with hungry stares, or are they more like Fatima—searching for opportunity wherever it appears? The answer, I believe, lies somewhere in the middle. They are neither all saints nor all sinners, but perhaps a little bit of each. But without their names or their stories, all we can see of them are footprints in the dust, and even those will fade in time.

It is my hope that once you’ve read these pages, those footprints will linger in your thoughts and remain there—tiny, precious pearls that help to remind us that we are all more alike than we know, that whatever separates us, we are ultimately joined by the common thread of humanity.