Someone Once Told Me

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It Is Impossible To Make Someone A Happy Person, Who Had Already Been Written As A Miserable One

1011 Refugee Week, a series of events organised by several UK agencies including Amnesty, Oxfam and the British Refugee Council, is running from 14th - 20th June 2010. It was the latter group that invited SOTM to help mark the occasion, and supplied both the images and volunteers for this week's shots. All their subjects are refugees currently living in the UK.

The purpose of Refugee Week "is to deliver positive educational messages that counter fear, ignorance and negative stereotypes of refugees, through arts, cultural and educational events that celebrate the contribution of refugees to the UK, and promote understanding about the reasons why people seek sanctuary" according to its organisers.

So, to kick things off we have Bakri Alnajeeb from Sudan, whose beautiful SOTM - taken in Hounslow, London - is in Arabic. It says: "It is impossible to make someone a happy person, who had already been written as a miserable one."

Bakri explained: "Every body has a luck in this world, but i feel my luck has disappeared and has gone far from my life. Like the sudanese philosopher Idress Jamma, who once said: 'My luck is like flour which spread over the thorns, and then they asked barefoot people to collect it. But when it became difficult for them to do so, they have been asked to stop. Because it is impossible to make someone a happy person, who already had been written as a miserable one.'"

Picture taken in Hounslow, London by Farida Stanikzai of the British Refugee Council.

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