Essay On Universal Refugee Experience

The universal refugee experience is a term that colloquially describes the pain and hardships that all refugees endure. This term often includes persecution, oppression, and fear of attack or even murder as they flee. The universal refugee experience is something that child refugees experience more severely than adult ones. They face poverty, attack, and ostracization from their country of asylum, all without an adult understanding of why all these bad things are happening to them. Ha experiences an example of the universal refugee experience in children. She experiences a lack of food on her trip from Vietnam, poorness in her new country and living through donations from her sponsor, and bullying from her classmates, who taunt her and constantly make racist remarks. Before Ha fled from Saigon, …show more content…
The universal refugee experience is not just a minor inconvenience, but it is a term describing an entire fearful and often violent reality. During their migration and resettlement, refugee children are violently pushed and pulled between two world, and they experience prejudice in both their old countries and their new homes. They have their lives twisted “inside out” as they experience war, attack, poverty, and depression in a cruel beginning to their lives. Even so, these lives were full of the only consolement these children knew, and going “back again” is something most refugee children are reluctant to do, for fear of ostracization, racism, and being stuck between two cultures and never really learning to belong to any. Many cannot even fathom the pain and hardships that refugees have gone through. It is hard enough for adult refugees who are allowed to understand what they are going through and call the shots, but children have it even harder, with their parents trying to protect them from