Maria Hayward: Devastating refugee photos not telling full story

A Syrian refugee boy cries while he and his family try to board a train at the station in Tovarnik, Croatia. AP photo / Manu Brabo

Our news is full of stories of despair; of exhausted, bedraggled refugees fleeing from one hopeless situation, only to be met by different desperate circumstances in the next.

On the one hand, I am pleased these stories are being told. I am pleased New Zealanders are being made aware of the level of need that is out there. I am pleased that our government has been moved to take some action. I am pleased that people realise that this is a story that must not be ignored.

But I worry a little that when we look at the pictures of those exhausted parents and children huddled with their few meagre possessions, we see a group that is nothing like us - we see "refugees". We look at them and we make assumptions about their lives based on the way they are being forced to live right now.

I have worked with former refugees for over two decades and at the AUT Centre for Refugee Education for almost 14 years. I know that in some ways, the people who come through this Centre are not "nothing like us" but in many, many ways "just like us".

I always remember the words of a young Rwandan girl who said, "You don't start off being a refugee, and if you're lucky, you don't end up as one".

Like many of the Syrian refugees who are now without homes, she lived a normal life with her family until her country erupted into violence, and within a few minutes they fled "leaving the TV on and kettle boiling". One minute she had a home, a happy life and the next she was stateless.

"When you become a refugee", she said, "within a blink of an eye you lose much more than your loved ones, your home, your livelihood. You lose your dignity, your humanity, your identity, your whole being gets stripped off you. The refugee world - a world that once seemed so far from us, without knowing that tomorrow it would become ours - knows no colour, race, religion, gender or age, not even education or professional or social status. It does not discriminate."

So, when we look at the photos, I hope we can remember that these people had lives before they were forced to flee and that is what they are seeking now - an opportunity to rebuild that life.

Where there is resistance to accepting refugees, one of the arguments is that refugees simply want to come to New Zealand for a better life. In fact, they come for a life - they come for life as opposed to death. Gruesome as that sounds, that's the reality. They flee because they fear, indeed they know, that they will not survive in the environment they are in. They just want to be able to be safe. They want their families to be safe. They want all the same things we would want if we were to walk in their shoes.

My job is a privilege because I see these families once they have been granted that safety and they are able to take the first steps toward rebuilding their lives. The moment a person enters New Zealand under a refugee programme, they are not a refugee anymore, so there are no refugees where I work, just people like us.

Maria Hayward is a senior lecturer at AUT's Centre for Refugee Education - part of the Mangere Refugee Resettlement Centre that helps prepare refugees for life in New Zealand.