Jada Riley

Home is a place where you can be yourself unapologetically.  It is somewhere that makes you feel loved, valued, and respected.  Unfortunately, war, religious persecution, political turmoil, and natural disasters have forcibly displaced 80 million people, leaving them without a place to call home.  As can be seen in The Girl Who Smiled Beads, not having a home is detrimental to one’s physical and psychological well-being.  In the memoir, Wamariya recalls how physically demanding homelessness was on her body.  She describes losing all of her toenails and catching lice at age six, then nearly dying of malaria at age ten.  Wamariya also details an ongoing battle with hunger, malnourishment, and dehydration.  She describes waiting in line for five hours to receive maize, which was impossible to cook and often led to constipation.  Wamariya also describes the two-hour trek to the water pump and the hour-long wait to get to the front of the line.  Like Wamariya, asylum seekers from all over the world must survive the wear and tear that being on the run places on their bodies.  Nourishing the body and protecting it against disease, rape, attack, and death is an overwhelming burden that refugees have little help in bearing.

As if enduring physical trauma isn’t difficult enough, refugees must also try to overcome many of the psychological traumas we have discussed in class—PTSD, depression, and anxiety, to name a few.  read more…

Tayla Mann

The idea of home to me is the people and the love I surround myself with. I could live in a big mansion but if I don’t have my friends and family and if there is no warmth to the house it is just a house, not a home.  Home is more of a feeling of being not necessarily the place you are living in.  For a house to become a home you can furnish it, and I mean this physically, spiritually and mentally.  During her talk at Towson University (on April 7, 2021), Joyful Clemantine Wamariya mentioned having certain rugs or light fixtures that reminded her of her aunties’ and uncles’ homes back in Africa; she wanted to have bits and pieces of family and friends so her place could be considered a home.  This reminds me of a conversation I had with my roommates on the insides of peoples’ homes.  So there is a friend who lives in a home that can be described as a staged house.  Currently where I live, my roommates compared my home to a place that looks lived in, more of a home.  I mention this because no homes look exactly the same and may never but people can pull from other places to make it their own safe sanctuary and that they call home.   Homes can have different components and may not be a place that we imagine a home to be.   When Joyful, her sister Claire, and her niece were living in tents at the camps, they may not have considered those places as homes, but for that time being it was, because that was where her family was.   As long as you have family and love you can push through and persevere and call where ever you are, your home.    read more…

Emma Shakan

As droughts persisted mercilessly through Boquilla, Mexico and Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, the farmers’ crops continued to fail. Water was still nowhere to be found, and in result of the widespread crop failure another threat loomed above their heads, and over their communities; the threat of starvation. Climate change completely uprooted most of these famers’ lives, the slow shift of their environment forcing them to face unsolvable issues such as floods, droughts, debt, and deplorable sanitary conditions. In Guatemala, “rainfall is expected to decrease by 60% in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop as much as 83%” (Lustgarten). Without the most basic of resources to live, along with hotspots continuing to increase, climate driven migration has revealed itself to be one of the largest factors for the continuation of displaced people around the world. The New York Times presents that 1% of the world is in a barely livable hot zone, by 2070 that portion could go up by 19% (Lustgarten). Already, these almost inhabitable hot zones are forcing millions of lives to find new homes that provide more acceptable living condition. While these midpoints are considered to be a more acceptable living condition, rural areas, and refugee camps are not completely safe either. read more…

Central American migrants cross the Suchiate River between Guatemala and Mexico, October 2018. Credit: Fred Ramos for El Faro

Emma Feeney

The refugee and migration crisis is a global issue that is increasing in severity. The number of people seeking to escape from danger and civil unrest in the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Central America continues to rise. We have had multiple class discussions focused on media and its role in exposing these harsh realities and injustices experienced by migrants. Fred Ramos is a known photographer who captures the lives of Central Americans adversely affected by the gang violence and government corruption. His work is featured in The New York Times article “Chronicling the Reasons Central Americans Migrate to the United States.” As Roland Barthes says of images and rhetoric, the rhetoric of Ramos’ images frame the viewer’s interpretation of the picture. His images are impactful, with subjects who are physically affected by the unrest in their communities. Children are photographed sleeping in the back of a truck as they travel to the border. Another photo shows a family gazing into the United States through a wired border. One of the last photographs in the article shows the remains of a river in Honduras. The river was drained for the benefit of a hydroelectric plant in Honduras. As a result, the community no longer has a source of water.

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