Refugee Boy

Amhara tribe of Ethiopia.

When I hear politicians saying that we are being ‘flooded’ by refugees, I always remind myself that each ‘refugee’ is a person, a person who for some reason has left everything they know and love to find safety in a strange and sometimes hostile country. I wrote Refugee Boy because I realised that every day I was meeting refugees, and each one of them had a unique and usually terrifying story to tell.

tanding before him was his father. His arms were outstretched and his smile said, Come and get me! Alem leaped from the bed straight into his arms. He hugged him hard, speaking to him in Amharic.

Alem missed seeing animals that weren’t just pets, he missed the sounds of home, he missed the smell of its earth, the smell of its people and

Could you believe it? I was asking this question, I, the great Pan-Africanist.

War is eating away at our souls, young man, it is terrible.

Alem’s father shuddered with fear; his voice trembled as he replied, ‘I am an African.’

in the cab, whispering the words as he read them: ‘No smok-ing. Li-censed Hack-ney Car-riage. Red light in-di-cates doors are locked. This seat-belt is for your per-son-al safe-ty.’

After a while his attention turned to the road outside, the M4. It was so straight and wide; the ride was so smooth, no potholes, no wild bends, just the sound of the engine and the tyres on the road.

They had travelled for only about seven miles when they turned off the motorway and headed towards the village down Majors Farm Road. It suddenly went quiet; there were very few cars on the road and no farms to be seen, just a few empty fields. As they neared the village, Alem looked towards all the semi-detached houses for any sign of life. He could see the houses but where were the people? All the houses had cars in their driveways, usually two, and many had cats in the windows, but no people. He looked up at the chimneys and wondered what they were there for.

When they entered the village, things became a little busier but still remained very orderly. And now Alem began to see animals; they were only dogs that people had on leads but he was sure that he would soon see the local goats and chickens.

The taxi pulled up outside the hotel. It was an old-fashioned building that looked to Alem more like a big house than a hotel, after all, he had seen the Holiday Inn in Addis Ababa and he thought that was a big skyscraper, so he expected English hotels to be even bigger.

‘Here you are, guvs,’ said the driver, ‘the Palace Hotel, wot a lave

Besides, I’m not a politician. What interests me is people.

As the family lay sleeping, soldiers kicked down the door of the house and entered, waving their rifles around erratically and shouting at the top of their voices. Alem ran into the room where his parents were, to find that they had been dragged out of bed dressed only in their nightclothes, and forced to stand facing the wall.