Day 17 & 18: Dignity and human rights

Part of a series on my journalism faculty-led program through Italy and Greece.

We visited the Kara Tepe and Moria refugee camps over the past two days. The director of Kara Tepe really spoke to me when he started talking about dignity, freedom, and other human rights. I ended up re-reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and some of the background behind it's creation.

I'm still processing the Moria camp, and how to tell its story. There's a slight possibility that we might go back tomorrow, so I'll just post a short snippet from the interview we conducted today with a 23 year old Syrian photojournalism student (basically me, but from a war-torn country and not from immense privilege). One of his friends translated the Arabic to English for us, and I'm paraphrasing the quote.

"Would you rather be at Moria or in Syria?"

"Syria. We're not safe here, we weren't safe there. But at least in Syria we had the freedom to go wherever we wanted and we could see our family."

Salam, Ibrahim.