A refugee describes losing all agency over basic life decisions. You can't choose where to live, whether your kids go to school, or how to feed your family. Everything that defines normal life gets taken away.
This is something I talk about quite often, where most of my listeners and most of the listeners of this podcast probably have never pondered what it's like to be a refugee. And if someone asked me about what's it like? What is the refugee experience like? The best way that I can picture it for people is that it is like, the complete absence of choice or agency over your life. And if I were to break that down further, what I mean by that is everything that you take for granted, that you have agency over, like the decision to be able to go to school, go to work, have food in the fridge, or go buy food, or go to school, or ensure the same safety of your kids, all of that is completely stripped away from you. So your ability to make a decision that will have some sort of meaningful impact in your life is completely gone.
