“And so we decided to become journalists ourselves and give a voice to the refugee population.”
It’s time for our end of year review. The lessons of the past will help us plan our future. Twenty months ago, in April 2017, when we took the decision to become the voice of refugees, we could not have imagined how far we would come. We started under the shade of a tree in the Schisto refugee camp, high up above the wire enclosure, where rainbows appear. How many storms have we survived? How many tears?
How many hours have we spent every other Saturday in the National Library? How many lessons in journalism? How many “Make sure you arrive in Klafthmonos Square on time”? How many container doors have we knocked on, in Schisto, Malakasa and Thiva camps, in order to persuade more teenagers to join our group? “Good morning, we are the Migratory Birds!” How much clapping each time we held the new issue in our hands? How much applause from you, when we presented our work in schools, universities, refugee camps, seminars, celebrations and exhibitions, both in Greece and beyond. Thank you. How much pride? How many smiles?
Noora was right: “What is of value in a person’s life is the sum of all the beautiful moments he has experienced in this motion picture, once he has edited out all the bad memories and retained only the good times.”
How many good times in the life of this newspaper? A truly epic film. In the pages that follow, we share stories of starvation and uprooting with you. We write about the difficult road of social integration through education. We meet refugee athletes from the Paralympics and we learn about the challenges they have had to face. So much fortitude. We have brought back in our suitcases writings of children who took part in the “Eurochild” conference in Croatia. Finally, we publish a letter from the Finnish students who visited us in October in Athens.
And on it goes. When it comes to injustice, we remain intractable.
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