"I went to a rehabilitation centre, supporting and helping the women who had been sex slaves and who managed to survive with their children [...] They had just managed to escape. I’m coming and holding all this pain with them, and they were physically and mentally sick. And we had to take them to the hospital." Adiba Qasim is from the Yazidi minority in Northern Iraq. In August 2014, her village was stormed by Islamic State militants who killed and enslaved thousands of Yazidis. Adiba and her family managed to escape just before the militants arrived. She was 19 years old.
Season Two
"Often for people who get on boats, it’s not the first point of trauma. They’ve experienced starvation. They have been shot at. They have travelled miles without any medical aid. Their children are at their wits’ end, already traumatized, when they get on the boat. These are not ill-informed, unintelligent, reckless individuals. They are doing this, because they are thinking profoundly about their children’s future. They are the people who are being washed up on the beaches. Just think about that, as you’re drifting off to sleep, you know." Cate Blanchett reflects on how meeting refugees has profoundly altered her perception of human suffering and the capacity to hope.
:: Cate Blanchett interviewed by Melissa Fleming
“There were others who were saying ‘Now we’re coming to kill you. We’re organizing. You will not find a safe place in this country.’ There were others that were just wishful thinking: ‘You will get cancer and die tomorrow. Your family is cursed. We will find you. We will make you disappear’.” When Boris Cheshirkov spoke out against the shooting of an Afghan asylum seeker in the border between Turkey and Bulgaria, on Bulgarian territory, he himself became the target of a virulent online hate campaign. The threats were so severe he had to leave his country.
:: Boris Cheshirkov interviewed by Melissa Fleming
"Maybe I say that now, as a nearly 50-year-old, but I think we underestimate maybe the importance of making the children part of the process that you’re going through as a parent, when you’re going into exile." Shahrzad Tadjbakhsh, an effective and tireless advocate of human rights, a lawyer who holds a senior position working on refugee protection, carries in her heart the legacy of her own experience as a refugee when she was just 10 years old.
:: Shahrzad Tadjbakhsh interviewed by Melissa Fleming
"There is a level of need, which goes well beyond our standard ability to deliver psychosocial counselling. So as a protection agency, we have been facing this dilemma: How far can we go to make a meaningful contribution, beyond the individual compassion that you feel and you show and you share when you meet these persons?. " Even in the middle of a war zone, Bruno Geddo manages to light up the room, make people smile. He may sound like he’s just been on a long and magical holiday, but Mr. Geddo has been helping the victims of conflict in the world’s most dangerous places; his most recent posting: Iraq.
:: Bruno Geddo interviewed by Melissa Fleming
"You hear the stories. And it is this 'survivor guilt' that you feel when you go back." Monique Sokhan fled from the terror of the Khmer Rouge and the genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s, when she was just a child. Many family members who stayed behind did not survive. "I felt like having a responsibility somehow to do something that would make them proud of me." It’s that feeling that drove Ms. Sokhan to work for refugees. But her first job for UNHCR was in Thailand, as a Protection Officer in camps for Khmer Rouge refugees – while the Khmer Rouge were the very people responsible for the killing of family and friends.
:: Monique Sokhan interviewed by Melissa Fleming
"And then, I plucked up my courage, because I was so ashamed of how I was feeling, I thought I was literally going crazy and felt full of self-recrimination, and I saw a British Forces doctor, who told me that, yes, I had post-traumatic stress disorder, and that was the first time I heard of it." Fabrizio Hochschild felt invulnerable and impervious to danger, but the savagery he experienced in the 1990s during the Bosnian war brutally stripped away all his mental defences. Rising to the position of UN Assistant Secretary-General, he is now committed in helping others to fight the stigma of mental health problems.