There seems to be an age at which refugee girls grow quiet. Toddlers tend to chatter unreservedly and reach up to touch my unfamiliar hair; older girls will ask to play with my camera and giggle when their faces appear on the screen. But by the time they reach eleven or twelve, most of the refugee girls I\u2019ve met have grown still and shy, holding their arms drawn into themselves in a way that seems protective and uncertain.<\/p>\n
Maybe such a transformation shouldn\u2019t be surprising\u2014plenty of kids become awkward or withdrawn around puberty. However, it is hard not to wonder what might lie behind the particular reticence of a refugee girl. Perhaps she has already been exposed to the sexual violence that haunts many refugee women. Perhaps she struggles with memories of the conflict she left behind. Maybe the grueling work of caring for younger siblings or supporting an ailing parent is overwhelming her. Maybe it\u2019s all of those things. There\u2019s certainly no shortage of reasons why a refugee girl in Nairobi would want to make herself invisible.<\/p>\n
Even so, I\u2019ve spent enough time with a few refugee girls to get past the barriers they throw up. And if you can get them talking, what these girls have to say is often stunning in its ambition. Many already know what they want to be when they grow up, and\u2014in spite of deeply ingrained gender roles\u2014it\u2019s not solely to be a wife and mother. Several girls have told me they want to become lawyers focusing on refugee policy. Others say they want to be a nurse, or a doctor. One girl told me she wanted to become the kind of professor who \u201cstudies problems we all have here and decides how to fix them.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard not to see in these girls\u2019 dreams their desperate desire for power and agency, for the ability to control their own lives. Their families\u2019 identities have been defined in part by the strictures of international accords\u2014and so they want to become the people in charge of writing those laws. Their parents\u2019 medical problems led the whole family to poverty\u2014and so they hope to cure them. Their communities have been ravaged for decades by war and corruption, famine and drought, the twin plagues of AIDS and sexual violence\u2014and so they long to know everything there is to know about those problems, in the hopes that they might solve them. To me, the lofty goals refugee girls construct for their futures are a poignant reminder of the instability of their present.<\/p>\n
Still, I\u2019m always impressed by the defiant confidence of these ambitions. It\u2019s true that the likelihood of a refugee girl becoming a doctor, a lawyer, or an academic is incredibly slim\u2014though RefugePoint clients (like Edith and Yar) are among those who prove it is possible. But refugee girls won\u2019t give up hope just because the odds are stacked against them, and neither should we. We should work harder as an international community to help these young girls realize their dreams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There seems to be an age at which refugee girls grow quiet. Toddlers tend to chatter unreservedly and reach up to touch my unfamiliar hair; older girls will ask to play with my camera and giggle when their faces appear on the screen. But by the time they reach eleven or twelve, most of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":{"article_style":"default","extra_image":false,"disable_featured_image":false,"hide_post_date":false},"yoast_head":"\n