It’s a strange feeling, leaving all you know
behind to start off from scratch in a new place. Packing bags, tying up loose
knots, saying goodbye. I know that I’m lucky to get a chance to close this
chapter of my life with enough time on my hands. Many others don’t have such
luck, as I’ve seen in the past few years of my life working as a refugee
lawyer. So many people have no chance to even say goodbye to their loved ones,
let alone pack their bags and plan things well.
The past two years of life in the Amazon
jungle, in the petrol town of Lago Agrio on the Ecuadorian side of the border
with Colombia, has taught me many things about having to leave everything
behind and start a new life. It’s not the first time that I’ve been given this
lesson by the people I’ve met through my work – people who were forced to
escape from their homes and plunge into the darkness of the unknown. I can
never forget the eyes of persons newly arrived to a location that was
previously unknown to them, that bewildered look of someone suddenly woken up
from a dreamy deep sleep and trying to adjust to the reality that has abruptly
been shoved upon them. Some arrive with family members, others with persons
they’ve met along the route of their escape, some arrive alone. An important
part of their past has brutally come to an end. Whether they like it or not, a
new chapter of their lives is about to begin. Such is the life of a refugee.
Through my work, I’ve played a part in the endings and beginnings in the lives of a number of people - hopefully in a positive manner. My job focused on identifying vulnerable persons who need to move on to safer places from this jungle border area, and to make the move happen. This has meant listening to countless stories of pure horror and suffering, interviewing persons about their deepest traumas, seeking for information that could help me present their cases for resettlement to a safer place. I must have interviewed a few hundreds of people in the past two years alone, but I can hardly forget any face or name. My colleagues found it amusing how I remembered all these names and stories. But how could I ever forget them?
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| The San Miguel Bridge, that connects Ecuador with Colombia |
How could I forget that middle-aged woman who, with
teary eyes, told me that I was the first person she had ever told that she was
raped? How can I forget the man who described a massacre he had witnessed,
where people were cut up with chainsaws? The screams of those people still paralyse my mind at times, even though I never heard
them with my own ears. Yet, I could hear those screams by looking into the eyes
of this witness. One day, after several months from our first meeting, many of
these people got the chance to move on to another country. Once again, they
stood there before me with tears in their eyes, this time tears of joy.
One of the persons dearest to me during these
two years in the jungle was the middle-aged father of a severely disabled 19 year
old son, an honest and strong man whose family had lost everything due to the
whims of violent men with too much power. He was forced to run away with his
family of five from the world they loved in order to save their lives. It didn’t
matter where they went, they just had to escape. In the middle of the night, he
woke up his wife and three children and arranged for a truck to take them far
from their hometown. His sons had no idea what was happening. His disabled son
was placed in the truck, wheelchair and all. The family quickly grabbed some
basic belongings without really planning on what to take with them. They had minutes
to decide what to take with them to their new lives, and what to leave behind
forever – belongings they had earned through hard work and sacrifice all throughout
their lives.
Over time, once the family arrived in Ecuador, we developed a
strong bond of trust and respect. I witnessed their suffering when they faced
discrimination by the healthcare workers who were meant to help their disabled
son. I smiled with them when we got hold of a new comfortable wheelchair. I was
perplexed with them when their son started to show massive signs of anxiety due
to his forced displacement, despite the fact that he has a mental disability which
made people mistakenly think he was unaware of what was going on around him.
One of my lasting memories from my time in Lago Agrio was when this courageous
father, on learning that his family had been accepted to be resettled to
Canada, breathed a sigh of relief and told me: “Now I can finally start to
dream again”.
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| The San Miguel River, a natural border in the jungle between Ecuador and Colombia |
It is now my own time to leave the jungle town
of Lago Agrio. A very different ending to an important chapter of my life from
the abrupt endings so many of the persons I have met had to face. I knew this
day would come and had time to plan my departure and think about what to do
next. Whilst I would never change the job I do for anything else, it does tire
you both emotionally and mentally. There are so many tragedies you can listen
to day after day until you face the risk of burn out. I’m not burnt out yet, but
I don’t want to get there. I’m starting to feel mentally tired and I know it’s
a good time to leave.
As a next stop, I've decided to follow a dream. I start
to write this blog as I start to follow this dream – an overland travel across
South America. My idea is not to simply chronicle the travel, since so many
people are doing that already. One of my main ideas is to use the story of this
travel (and future ones) as an excuse to look back at more or less ten years of
human rights work in various countries and share anecdotes and thoughts from
these experiences. I’m not sure if these words will ever reach an audience or
if they will simply remain an excuse for self-reflection as I face yet another
ending, or rather, a new beginning.
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