each one of us is in a different place

I keep thinking about what
 is happening to us
are we going to die
God forbid

are we going to arrive
if we arrive what will happen
this is what we are worried about

we were always afraid
there was always war
where we lived

and once three shells fell
on our neighbourhood
but luckily nothing happened

we didn't know about these things
now that it's happened
we know 
what war is now we know

men were taken 

against their will
they would have made my brothers 


go with them by force
who would work
if my brothers had to go with them

we would be left 

without money
or anything


we were living well with each other
but now it's all destroyed
each one of us is in a different place


in the boat they told us
you have to throw away your bags
you cannot take anything


I wasn't seeing anything
I was sitting in the middle
the guys would say

a wave is coming



From a Unicef Video on Facebook of 13-year-old Mustapha arriving in Lesbos, Greece, as a refugee from Syria, 5 November 2015. Submitted by Laura McKee.

Dissertation and Independence

The problem of ‘ideology’ and ‘politics'
influencing statistics
affects not only their reliability
and validity,
but also their availability.

In some cases this problem was insurmountable,
and statistics on, for example,
the number of young asylum seekers,
were simply not available;

the discussion section deals with this.

However, rather than allow the availability
of statistics – a political issue -
to shape which variables
I chose to present
data on, I felt a moral

imperative to present the findings with 'gaps'
since, in any case, the gaps
in these statistics spoke perhaps
more, than the statistics
which were available.

From Emma, who sent this excerpt from her 2009 dissertation.