Shakiba's Essay

My name is Shakiba, I’m 15 years old and I’m from Afghanistan.
I am a refugee girl living in the camp on Samos.
We have been living here for ten months. Life is really difficult here.
I don’t know how I can explain to you.

Actually, we can’t call this life. It’s not life.
It’s a punishment that Greece/United Nations are giving to refugees.
We are living in the Jungle, in tents.

In this bad, horrific, hard and painful situation, refugees have got used to live in here.
Refugees like myself arrive here on Samos with many problems that we were dealing with in our lives.
We are forced to live here.

The population in the camp of Samos is very high. There are many different countries. Refugees are not safe here.

Every day we experience death. Every day there are fights and fire burns in the camp.
People lost their houses, their clothes and all the items they had left.

Another large problem in the camp is that people don’t have enough food, clothes, or clean toilets and we don’t have showers.
Actually, they are giving out food, but it’s very little and it is often out of date.

Also, refugees don’t have any schools. They can go somewhere for learning, but it’s not enough.

Finally, one of the most important things I want to share with all the world.
The United Nations don’t understand refugees and they don’t recognise us. If they want to recognise refugees, they will accept our cases. But no, they are giving rejections to refugees who have many problems and they can’t go back.

I just want the world to please understand refugees.
No one comes here for enjoyment. If we didn’t have problems, we wouldn’t come.

We are not guilty. We are not animals. We are also human, like you.
Please salvage us from this Jungle.
We need to go to school. We can’t tolerate more.

Written by: Shakiba
Class: Level 5. Alpha♡
Teachers: Jane♡ and Anna♡

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 Shakiba, winner of the medium-hard category.

Photo of Samos camp sent to us by Shakiba

Photo of Samos camp sent to us by Shakiba