Ahmed's Essay

I do not know where to start and I will not finish well. I will leave my pen to write its crying letters, from here, from the other end of the world, from Samos, from this beautiful and quiet island. Here, dreams are buried daily... 

Imagine the line of the perfect, beautiful life meets the remnants of the line of an unhappy life....  Imagine your children living in a plastic tent during the heat of summer and cold of winter, and during the rain the tent is filled with water and at that moment one of your children asks you, ‘Daddy, why don’t we have a house?’!!!!!

Imagine that they see other children playing with their beautiful toys, wearing their clean clothes, and worrying about your children with sorrow and tearful eyes ... What would you do at that moment!!!!!!

Imagine that you do not have money to buy food or medicine for your children or to give to your pregnant wife, except for the rotten food that is presented to you and that rats will share with you anyway. The lesson is, ‘to stay alive’!!!!!!

Here, you see doctors, engineers, academics, thinkers, innovators, and sports heroes, and no one cares about them. They are treated racially as criminals without mercy or respect, and every one of them sheds his tears on his pillow alone at night before bed and asks himself, ‘What am I guilty of‘?  

Their fault is only the colour of their skin, or that they are from outside a country!!!!! And now they are between the hammer of their unjust country and the oaks of this unfortunate situation.... No treatment, no respect, no shelter, daily protection and racist attitudes, and the law of the jungle is the current one...  Allow us these rights or allow us to go home and die there with honour!  Ladies and gentlemen, history repeats itself, dreams kill, humanity ends, and Nicolas Machiavelli begins!!!

[Remains of a man in Europe]

During the long months of lockdown we invited all the Samos community to join in a Essay Writing Competition. The topic of the 2 pages essay was an open question:

What do you want the world to know about refugees?

Participants could answer this question with complete freedom: they could talk about the conditions in the camp, their perspective on the situation, their daily routine, important stories they wanted to share, their wishes and hopes for the future.
We received 11 entries, all of them were praiseworthy and valuable. They have been evaluated by our language teachers based on creativity of content, vocabulary usage, orthography and argumentative structure.

Here is the essay wrote by Ahmed, runner-up in the medium-hard category.

Photo sent to us by Ahmed