Since the start of the Syrian civil war nearly six years ago, refugees have become an abstract fixture in the global imagination. Nearly 5 million Syrians are refugees, out of a worldwide total of 21.3 million, and all of them have unique stories.

Yet policy conversations tend to paint refugees with broad, hypothetical brushstrokes — they may have ties to terrorist organizations or they will have a hard time assimiliating to a new culture. This, in turn, has made arms-length charity and deterrence the primary response to refugee suffering.

A new effort called “The Refuge Project” aims to confront this staggering lack of compassion through a Humans of New York-type approach. By sharing diverse, complicated stories, the team is hoping to break through the stereotypes and show the world that refugees are actual people with real, lived experiences. They may all share the same immediate desire for stability, but refugees are as complex and interesting as any other group of people.

The team traveled to the shores of Greece, which have become an epicenter of the "refugee crisis" currently roiling Europe. They spoke with dozens of refugees and their stories are chronicled in a multimedia project that can be found here. 

The images and text below are from Magna Carta, the organization behind "The Refuge Project." You can watch the full documentary here, for free.

Yarra, from Moria

Settling in for the long dark, Yarra and her family of nearly 15 do their best to stay warm as temperatures drop across Europe. It’s one of those beautiful anomalies of youth that children can enjoy themselves even in dire situations — and indeed, Yarra even seemed to be having fun. Racing to collect anything that would burn in a crowded camp that had already been stripped bare, Yarra made survival a game, and in that, she was winning. Only moments after sharing her family's fire, she offered us food we couldn't accept, and asked us in excited, simple English, "Where are you from?" Compassion runs deep here in a people who would offer everything, when they have so little of their own. And even as we moved on through the camp late into the night, finding new stories and new faces, we would catch glimpses of Yarra, hurrying from campfire to campfire, like a dream.

January's Child

Three generations of Syrian women sit and stand before me, and it’s the youngest that seems to command the wind. Catching sunlight, she stares back, challenging. And as I spoke with her mother and grandmother, and learned about their travels and the waiting game they now found themselves playing for keeps, she continued to watch us, the wind whipping through the camp, sending stray laundry eddying around her like loyal subjects. We’d found a curious one.

Ghoson’s Story

Ghoson lives for her two young daughters. Alone, they made the long journey from Damascus — and here in her hands she holds the official missing persons report from the day her husband disappeared. With no answers, and no help, Ghoson fought for more than two years to find any sign of her missing husband, a conscripted soldier in Assad’s Army. But with money running out, and the war closing in all around her, she made the impossible choice to flee her home and offer her children a future — at the cost of putting her husband forever in her past. Ghoson broke quietly into tears as she recounted the thirteen names of friends and family members killed in the last two years in the violence in Syria. But even amidst all this unspeakable loss, she has hope for a better life: "I live for my daughters, I know that there is more for us out there, that there is a safe place that waits for us all." And I believe there is.

Welcome, Welcome

Standing on the beach in the long dawn, we saw familiar sights and new faces, desperate and desperately happy to be on foreign shores. Volunteers helped families from the boats, and a father, son in arms, took his first heavy steps towards a warm welcome and the long road ahead.

Children

Children play in Victoria Square, while waiting for the bus that will take them to the Macedonian border.

Moria Fence

Clothes that were presumably hung to dry on the formidable fences that cordian off the registration and administration area inside Moria soak in the night’s rain.

"The Refuge Project"

Watch the trailer of "The Refuge Project" here.

REFUGE | Official Trailer from Magna Carta on Vimeo.