“So it begins. You take a step. You exit one life and enter another. You walk through a cut border fence into statelessness, vulnerability, dependency, and invisibility. You become a refugee.” - Paul Salopek, Fleeing Terror, Finding Refuge
What started as the Arab Spring has now become a very hard winter for the Middle East, with Syria in the eye of the storm. In a recent article published by National Geographic entitled Fleeing Terror, Finding Refuge, journalist Paul Salopek studies the history that led up to what Doctor’s Without Borders goes so far as to call the “world’s most grave humanitarian disaster.” After 9,000 years of occupation and civilization, Syria has become a country where 7.6 million people are internally displaced and 3.2 million are refugees, 75% of which are women and children. As Salopek so eloquently writes, “It was here that humankind first settled down, founded cities, invented the idea of a fixed home. Yet for months I had been stumbling across a vast panorama of mass homelessness.”