When you read the individual stories of these refugees, it makes you realize how lucky we are not to have to undergo something like they are.
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Refugees find dizzying freedoms and unexpected dangers in Brazil
DEC. 29, 2015 | REPORTING FROM SAO PAULO, BRAZIL
BY CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD | PHOTOS BY RICK LOOMIS
Soon after she arrived, she began to feel conspicuous. On the street, on the bus, in the subway, people looked. They didn’t seem hostile, just puzzled. Even in Latin America’s biggest city, a woman in a headscarf stood out.
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“Everyone was staring, and I was feeling alone,” says Dana Balkhi, 27. “I felt like I was choking.”
She had come to Brazil by herself, an anomaly among unmarried Muslim women. In Syria, she had studied English literature at Damascus University and loved the novels of Jane Austen.
After a missile hit her house, she fled to Turkey with her sister, but couldn’t find work there.
Canada said no, then Sweden said no, and in the winter of 2013, she faced a choice. She could return home, as her sister did, even as civil war obliterated the country. Or she could try Brazil, which was handing out fast, low-hassle “humanitarian visas” to Syrians escaping the carnage.
She went on Google and typed: Sao Paulo Arabic community helping refugees, and found some Brazilian-based Muslims who offered to help.
Who would she be coming with? they wanted to know.
Just me, she said.
They picked her up at the airport in December 2013 and gave her a bed. She learned to brace herself for the questions, when local Muslims discovered she was on her own.
Continue reading at:
http://graphics.latimes.com/syria-to-brazil/#nt=outfit
,
Refugees find dizzying freedoms and unexpected dangers in Brazil
DEC. 29, 2015 | REPORTING FROM SAO PAULO, BRAZIL
BY CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD | PHOTOS BY RICK LOOMIS
Soon after she arrived, she began to feel conspicuous. On the street, on the bus, in the subway, people looked. They didn’t seem hostile, just puzzled. Even in Latin America’s biggest city, a woman in a headscarf stood out.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Everyone was staring, and I was feeling alone,” says Dana Balkhi, 27. “I felt like I was choking.”
She had come to Brazil by herself, an anomaly among unmarried Muslim women. In Syria, she had studied English literature at Damascus University and loved the novels of Jane Austen.
After a missile hit her house, she fled to Turkey with her sister, but couldn’t find work there.
Canada said no, then Sweden said no, and in the winter of 2013, she faced a choice. She could return home, as her sister did, even as civil war obliterated the country. Or she could try Brazil, which was handing out fast, low-hassle “humanitarian visas” to Syrians escaping the carnage.
She went on Google and typed: Sao Paulo Arabic community helping refugees, and found some Brazilian-based Muslims who offered to help.
Who would she be coming with? they wanted to know.
Just me, she said.
They picked her up at the airport in December 2013 and gave her a bed. She learned to brace herself for the questions, when local Muslims discovered she was on her own.
Continue reading at:
http://graphics.latimes.com/syria-to-brazil/#nt=outfit
