To close the month's theme: Women and Migration, I want to share with you a story that deeply impacted me. It is the story of two refugee sisters.
One of the main situations that motivate women to leave their countries is violence, often characterized by serious and widespread situations of human rights violations. The simple fact of being women places them in situations of extreme vulnerability not only before, but also during and after displacement. These same women are heroes in the fight for survival.
Sara and Yusra Mardini were born in Syria and were part of the youth swimming team, influenced by their father.
They lived in a situation of war. The Arab Spring had arrived in Syria and generated an insurrection with a series of violent clashes.
With people fleeing the country, Yusra and Sara wanted to do the same, but their parents didn't want to discuss the possibility. Until…
After swimming training in the morning, they were waiting for their mother outside, when a bomb exploded inside the place where they were training. At that time, they lost several friends.
So, they convinced their parents and decided to leave the country.
To do this, they would have to cross in an inflatable boat, from Turkey to the Greek island, Lesbos.
The traffickers who arranged the crossing placed 20 adults and one child in a boat with capacity for a maximum of 7 people.
15 minutes after they started crossing, the engine stopped working and water began to enter the boat.
The sisters then fall into the water, in an attempt that is not only epic, but extremely altruistic, and swim for 3 hours pushing the boat to save everyone there.
They arrive in Greece, but the challenges were not over. In Hungary, a barbed wire fence separated them from the European Union, but they needed to get to Germany.
Once again in the hands of human traffickers, they managed to reach Budapest, but there they discovered that they were selling refugees' organs or, in this case, women, if they were attractive, forcing them into prostitution. This extremely vulnerable situation causes them to flee.
At the train station in the Hungarian capital, they found the following situation: around five thousand refugees waited there, day and night, to board a train, but the police stopped them and there was a lot of confusion. They end up confined in a horrible refugee camp and, at that moment, the entire fight seemed lost.
However, in the midst of this hopeless scenario, special buses appear to send Syrian refugees from Budapest to Germany.
This happened when Chancellor Angela Merkel made a historic decision to welcome refugees. “I don’t want to enter a European competition to decide who treats these people worse,” she announced.
In Germany, they were received like human beings, hot food, baths, messages of welcome and lament for the war and everything they were going through.
It's difficult not to be touched by this story. It teaches us about the worst and the best in the world, at the same time.
To close this month's theme, I want to leave a message here: let us be aware of the labels and the hierarchy we establish between them. We are capable of dehumanizing others: for their origin, for their social class, for their gender... But there are no human subclasses.
Whether based on our action or our thoughts, we always choose what we see in others. So, may we start to see more of what connects us: our humanity and less of what distances us.