Stories of Courage
Its tough growing up as an Iranian
refugee in icy Finland.
"I can use my experiences as a refugee to help others understand the truth behind the issues involved, and gain an insight into how it feels to be a refugee". Baharak
Bashmani
UNHCR/United kingdom
In the late 80s, aged just
nine, I had to flee the turmoil in Iran with
my family and escape to Pakistan. Then after
nearly four years of living there we were told
by UNHCR that the family would be resettled
to Finland. It was a moment of relief and excitement;
living in such tough conditions, with no hope for the
future, no secure home and the constant risk of persecution
by the Iranian government, its not easy. As a 13 year
old the thought of finally moving to a new country sounded
amazing. My parents were also looking forward to leaving,
but were more cautious about the challenges ahead. I
should have been as well.
The first day in Finland was, to
say the least, strange. I woke up and immediately went to
see what my new surroundings looked like. I went outside
and was surprised by how fast people talked, and the way
they seemed to take deep breaths while speaking. I ran back
upstairs explaining to my mother that everyone had asthma!
She tried to explain that surely the entire population could
not have asthma, and in any case it is not infectious. But
still it took me a while to believe her, because people talked
really fast, and kept taking very deep breaths as they talked.
I actually have that "asthma" myself now when speaking
Finnish, because that’s
the way it is usually spoken. So my mother was wrong!
It was
soon time for school. I was really excited to see my new
school, and had this naïve idea that I would
make lots of friends and have a great time. How wrong I was.
Straight away I was singled out as the refugee kid, and was
soon made fun of on a daily basis. It didn’t help that
I didn’t speak the language, but I could still understand
when I was being made fun of. You don’t need language
skills to realize that you are not liked; what makes it worse,
and shatters your self-esteem (especially as a teenager),
is what’s behind the jokes: your hair and skin colour,
and all the prejudices that go with the stigma of the word "refugee".
I
was determined not to let people see my despair, so I had
to gather my courage and prove people wrong. But it is hard
to stay strong day after day when your self-esteem is being
eroded little by little. During my time in middle school,
which lasted for three years, I always sat alone at the school
cafeteria; nobody would sit with me because I was a refugee.
For the same reason I was always the last to be picked for
any group work or team sport – and
I was always having chewing gum thrown in my hair and
snow balls hurled at me.
No, it isn’t easy for a lonely
teenage girl with no school friends to understand why all
this is happening to her. My parents knew about my difficulties
but I did not want to trouble them, as I felt they had enough
problems of their own to deal with. So there was hardly anyone
to talk to or confide in. But I believe nothing lasts
for ever, though at the time it felt like eternity. So
I simply decided that I would be fine -- I would get
through this stage of life and move on.
Nowadays I can look
back at my harsh times of growing up in a foreign country
and see how it has made me the much stronger person that
I am today. I feel that I have overcome all those difficulties
of integrating into a new society, with its new language,
culture and customs. These difficulties have helped me to
believe in myself and to ignore people’s prejudices.
And I can use my experiences as a refugee to help others
understand the truth behind the issues involved, and gain
an insight into how it feels to be a refugee.
Currently I
am doing an internship in UNHCR’s London
office. Because of my background not many people even
believed that I would finish high school. So to have
made it through university and start gaining work experience
has proved those people wrong.
Instead of listening while
others told me how incapable I was because of being a refugee,
I decided instead to set my own goals. Today I have achieved
some of them, though I still have many more things I want
to achieve. But I have proved that is possible to integrate
into a new society, to preserve one’s ethnic identity,
and most importantly, remain true to myself.
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