Tag: story

What Adventure Does

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“Most great adventures work that way. You don’t plan them, you don’t get all the details right, you just do them.” -Bob Goff, Love Does

Think about a book you love. A story treasured from one generation to the next; one so powerful it offers readers insight each year it’s read.

Stories like those have a funny way of sticking to your heart, like snow on frozen ground. Yet it often seems hard to decipher what qualities connect them all to greatness. Is it a complex prose? Captivating dialogue? Or, a meticulously planned storyline?

Maybe.

But when I think of my all-time favorite stories (like Harry Potter, The Alchemist, or the Narnia series), the common theme I find is the unexpected adventure their characters find themselves in.

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Story Feature: A Tale of Two Sisters

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“I had a dream to be in school. Then school was bombed—that dream is now gone.”

Meet 19-year-old Malak (left) and 23-year-old Hana (right), two sisters from Yemen who have lived as refugees for nearly half their lives. Malak was only 12 when the sisters lost both of their parents in Yemen… and they have been traveling on their own ever since. From Yemen the two girls went to Syria where they stayed under the care of UNICEF for 5 years as minors. But when the war in Syria forced them to leave, they decided to search for their future in Europe.

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Story Feature: Beyond the Stereotype of Young Refugee Men

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Meet Muhammad Ali and Fahad, two individuals who may help you break the stereotype you have of young refugee men in Europe. They were both students from a small Kurdish town in Syria before they fled the war, and have found themselves unable to get farther north than Slovenia on their journey into Europe.

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When I asked them about their hopes for the future, Muhammad responded, “I cannot think of the future I want—I need to go back to school, I need an education for my future. I like to learn and need to learn new languages. We left because of the war and fled through Turkey’s mountains with no food and no water for three days trying to get to Europe. And now we are stuck here. No, I cannot think about the future.”

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Story Feature: Refugee Life Through A Boy’s Eyes

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Meet Ali, an Iraqi boy who radiates kindness and intelligence, but whose situation as a refugee is quickly turning from bad to worse.

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When our team arrived at the Šid refugee camp in Serbia, we met Ali and quickly became friends through broken English, a few words in Serbian, and a lot of pantomiming as he explained what was happening in the camp. Here’s the cliff-notes version: two days before we arrived, hundreds of people started to fill the camp as borders to the EU (primarily in Slovenia and Croatia) began refusing entry to large numbers of refugees, including nationalities that had previously been allowed through as asylum-seekers.

Try to picture it all: an overflowing refugee camp (built with large white tents in the shadow of an old butcher/meat factory) with people who are upset and confused — and in the midst of it all, this sweet boy (probably between the age of 14 or 15) who eagerly engages us with the little English and Serbian he knows.

After talking for a few minutes and watching yet another busload of refugees enter the camp, Ali noticed the camera slung over my shoulder and so I gestured for him to come closer. I put the strap around his neck, gave him a 2-minute photography lesson, and then watched as he became my “photography assistant” for the day. The following photos are what he took while we walked around the camp.

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Story Feature: A Fragile Escape to Europe

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Today at the Greek-Macedonian border we met one Kurdish family with a story so full of emotion that it took mere seconds to cross from laughter to tears. This may not be an easy story to read.

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Back in their town in Iran, life as they knew it came crashing down with the arrival of ISIS. According to the mother of three (two little boys and one 9 year old girl), ISIS was beheading as many men and little boys as they could in order to take the women and little girls as slaves. ISIS took all of this family’s documents before they could flee, but as the mother explained through laughter and tears, she was simply thankful they got out alive.

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Sleepless in Seattle: Caring for Seattle’s Most Vulnerable

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A little over a year ago I was walking along “the Ave” (a street known for homelessness in Seattle’s University District) with a friend as we looked for her acquaintance, Eddie Wang. We were meeting up with Eddie that night to talk with the homeless who called those streets “home.” As we passed a local grocery store my friend and I kept our eyes fixed ahead of us, not wanting to engage the homeless men sitting at our feet, mostly because we were two girls and it was getting dark, but also because we were waiting to interact with the homeless until we had a more “official” reason (like walking with the founder of the group, Sleepless in Seattle).

Five minutes passed with no sign of Eddie—and then it hit us. We turned around and, sure enough, he had been sitting with those homeless men outside of the grocery store the entire time… the men we hadn’t even acknowledged. The shame was instantaneous. I can assure you, nothing is more convicting than totally failing to be a good person in your pursuit of being a good person.

But that experience served as a much-needed wakeup call for me to understand homelessness in Seattle, as well as the people working to address it.

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