We have been burning a long time
Jul 15, 02:46 PM
This is a poem in Dari about the fire that devastated the Moria refugee camp in September 2020, leaving many thousands without shelter. It's by a young Afghan called Zabi who recorded it on his phone and sent it to me for a radio documentary I was making about the fire's survivors a year later.
I never met Zabi, but he kept in touch as he smuggled himself to Athens in the back of a truck and then on to Italy and Germany where, last I heard from him, he has managed to remain. "A candle needs fire, a meal needs fire, but we don't need fire. We have been burning a long time... In this fire, we lost our hopes, we lost our tents, our new homes, here in this host country, in its camps, as we did in the country we fled." | Maria Margaronis
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration
IMAGE: Faktengebunden, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
I never met Zabi, but he kept in touch as he smuggled himself to Athens in the back of a truck and then on to Italy and Germany where, last I heard from him, he has managed to remain. "A candle needs fire, a meal needs fire, but we don't need fire. We have been burning a long time... In this fire, we lost our hopes, we lost our tents, our new homes, here in this host country, in its camps, as we did in the country we fled." | Maria Margaronis
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration
IMAGE: Faktengebunden, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons