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Storytelling plays a significant role in the lives of emigrant, immigrant, and trafficked child characters and in the lives of teachers and their students.
Story is rooted in the need of every one of us: children and adults, readers and writers, Indonesians and Americans and Chinese and New Zealanders, the whole of the family. (Wrightson, 1996, p. 161)
HOW MIGHT WE understand the experiences of the millions of displaced children around the world on a personal rather than impersonal level? How might we understand in a way that is immediate rather than abstract? The relevance of these questions becomes clear in the context of the civil war in Syria. According to a senior advisor to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Syrian conflict has created "a children's refugee crisis" (Mosbergen, 2013, para. 5). This observation is supported by the fact that in September 2013, the number of Syrian children forced to flee their homeland exceeded 1 million. Nearly 750,000 of these children were under 11 years of age, and over 3,500 were unaccompanied minors. An additional 2 million children were displaced within the country. By March 2015, over half of the Syrian population, 7.6 million people, were internally displaced, and 3.9 million had fled to other countries (United Nations Population Fund, n.d.). Recounting these numbers does not convey the impact of this crisis on individual lives; numbers this large become impersonal.
Yet, the photograph of a 3-year-old boy lying dead on a beach in Turkey brought this crisis to a personal level. Taken in September 2015, the photograph of Alan Kurdi resonated with people throughout the world and created a public outcry. It did not depict a graphic image of a maimed body, nor did it depict a devastated war zone; it simply depicted a child lying utterly alone and dead on a beach. The Independent published the image because of "the telling nature of it" (Gunter, 2015, para. 23). This photograph brought the Syrian crisis to a personal level because of the story it tells. Syria represents but one humanitarian crisis in the world today; there are many, many others, and children caught up in these crises often become displaced youths with their own stories.
Displaced children tell "stories of home,...