How does it feel to report on the refugee crisis when it’s also the story of your own family? Aamna Mohdin explains
Aamna Mohdinwas a young rookie reporter when she got her first foreign assignment. She was being sent to Calais to write about “the Jungle”, an informal refugee camp that had sprung up, made up of people hoping to cross the Channel for a better life in the UK. She was nervous about doing a good job but as she walked around the chaotic maze of tents with people cooking on open fires she began to feel strange and uneasy.
It wasn’t just the sadness of the stories she was hearing but something more like deja vu. When she told her mother about her trip, her mother asked a question that astonished Aamna: why would she want to go to a refugee camp when they had risked everything to flee one themselves? The question sent Aamna spiralling as she realised she had repressed her own memories of living in a camp in Kenya as a child, and how they had fled to the UK.
With the refugee crisis showing no signs of abating, and increasingly harsh rhetoric about “stopping the boats”, Aamna tells Helen what she wishes people understood about the lives of many refugees. And how the political discourse has affected her life.The Guardian is editorially independent. And we want to keep our journalism open and accessible to all. But we increasingly need our readers to fund our work.
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