The podcast aims to Humanize refugees’ Experiences by Sharing personal Stories about Conflict.
October 30, 2020 - Written by admin
Two
sisters are using their award-winning podcast On The Things We Left Behind to
share their family’s stories as Somali refugees. Their goal is to humanize and
empower refugees in the process.
Shurki
Aden Camey was 22 years old and studying in Italy when the Somali Civil War
broke out in 1991, forcing 800,000 people to flee to neighboring countries and
displacing 2 million people within the country.
Suddenly,
she became her family’s lifeline. She put her studies on hold to help her older
siblings find a way out of the country and tried to send her aunts and uncles
any extra money to keep them safe.
Nearly
30 years later, Camey’s daughters, Surer and Saredo Mohamed — aged 26 and 24 —
are navigating their own lives.
The
two sisters now live in London where Surer is pursuing a PhD at Cambridge
University in politics and international studies, and Saredo received her
masters in migration and policy from the London School of Economics and is
working as a policy researcher.
The
careers they each chose to pursue were shaped by their own experiences and
influenced their decision to launch the podcast.
“I
was sitting in a lecture hall and hearing someone talking about these
theoretical things like ‘what do we do with the migrants’, or ‘where should we
put the migrants,’” Saredo told Global Citizen. “And I took a second and went,
‘they’re talking about me!’ like these things actually affect me and my
family’s life.”
Surer
added: “Refugees are human beings, let’s talk about their particular
experiences and interactions as humans.”
Saredo
and Surer started the podcast after they entered the UK’s first large-scale
podcast competition, LaunchPod, in June 2019. They were chosen from hundreds of
entries to produce a pilot episode and, after a year of work, they completed
their first season of six episodes.
An
expert judging panel declared Surer and Saredo’s podcast one of three finalists
of the competition.
The
sisters take turns hosting each episode, but their storytelling styles are
complementary to each other. Some episodes also include appearances from guests
who share their own stories about conflict and migration. The personal stories
of the Mohamed family and anecdotes from others are used to create an honest,
emotional portrayal of the refugee experience.
For
the season finale episode of the podcast entitled The Architect, which aired on
Sept. 27 and was broadcasted in both English and Somali, Surer and Saredo
interviewed their mother, who spoke from the same home that she had to leave in
Mogadishu, Somalia.
“We’re
kind of tracing [her experiences] out and figuring out what this means at this
moment in our lives,” Surer said. “It’s very much full circle.”
“It’s
a bittersweet kind of melancholic moment,” Saredo added. Camey’s episode aired
exactly 26 years after Camey became a mother, on Surer’s birthday.
Saredo
and Surer are actively trying to reconstruct the stories lost in wars and
conflict through their podcast. One of their central questions is “in what
ways does leaving your country behind shape the life that you rebuild?”
This
is a question that has shaped the women’s lives, as neither of them was born or
raised in Somalia –– Surer was born in Italy and Saredo was born in Canada.
When Surer was five and Saredo was three, their parents moved to the US after
their mother found a job there.
The
family then moved to Columbus, Ohio, a swing-state that leans conservative, in
1998, and were still living there when the US 9/11 attacks happened. Surer
described it as a “very political, intense time,” and Saredo noted that it was
also “their formative years.”
The
sisters said they experienced “othering” in their early childhoods in
Columbus. They described Saturday mornings watching American cartoons and
feeling connected to their American friends but also belonging to the growing
Somalian community.
“There’s
this whole other world you’re a part of,” Surer said. “You feel almost like a
translator, you’re in between two things.”
In
another episode entitled The Space Between Stories, Surer described what it was
like reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and the singing My Country Tis of Thee,
in a school gymnasium covered in American Flags.
One of the lines in the song is “the land where my fathers died.” Surer acknowledged that her father had come with her to the US and that no one in her family had died in the country. She described the feeling of being asked to sing the song as “being asked to put on someone else’s clothes and walk around in them.”
Although
the sisters do not consider themselves as activists, they’re hoping that their
podcast will help everyone from world leaders to the average person remember
that the theoretical questions about refugees and migrants cannot be divorced
from the humans living those experiences.
Surer
said: “One of our goals is to have this material out there to start
conversations that we thought needed to happen.”