This was a very interesting and sobering look at stories of migrants in different regions of the world. This really brings to the fore the absolute terror and chaos that some survive around the world. It’s easy to forget that many person around the world live in a perpetual state of panic and fear and displacement.

I’m not a huge non fiction reader but this was a good one for sure.

Too many people are still obliged to pack everything and leave behind their homelands because war, violence and extreme poverty has transformed their existence into an unbearable challenge. These people that we commonly and wrongly label as ‘refugees’ are continually moving here and there, just to find a place where to start life anew. They are the easy target of populist politicians that have made them the perfect enemy of their country’s safety and stability and the germ to eradicate. Fortunately, in a century of rampant individuality, there is still in most of us a sentiment of empathy towards those who suffer the most and a general awareness that even today peace in too many places in the world is a mere illusion.
This book extensively tries to describe who these refugees are, why they decide to migrate, how do they travel and what routes do they take to finally arrive in a safe haven. However, many of those people are continually hindered in their route and they generally end in anonymous refugee camps. Journalist Agus Morales has finally given voice to many of those displaced people that must be heard and helped because it is our moral duty to render this planet a more peaceful place and to give everyone the possibility to develop its potentiality as human being.

A hard book to read from the comfort of my own home, definitive a book that I needed to read. I like reading books which gives me perspective I normally would not get.

Over 65 million individuals worldwide are displaced because of war. However, when it doesn't directly impact us, when we have comfortable homes and uncomplicated lives, we can be calloused and untouched by the reality of those who have lost everything.

Agus Morales, a journalist who has spent time with Doctors Without Borders, traveled to various countries to learn individual accounts of those who are displaced and compiled them into We Are Not Refugees: True Stories of the Displaced.

Repeatedly we read of men, women, and children who have faced countless dangers. While I think accounts like these are important to read, I found the book disjointed and uneven. Perhaps it's due to having been translated, perhaps it's due to organization, but I imagine it could have flowed better if structured differently. Looking at the table of contents, it seems that it should be solid: we begin with why they are forced out of their homes, then who these individuals are. Then the author continues to delve into their current living conditions and their travels, ending with their destinations. However, enough overlap exists in these stories that I found it repetitive. All the same, this can be an introduction to a timely crisis.

(I received a digital ARC from Charlesbridge via NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion.)

We Are not Refugees

Agus Morales


This book was given to me by the publisher, via Netgalley, in the hope of an honest review. It is now available from all good bookshops.

This book, set against a background of growing intolerance against immigrants and asylum seekers, gives the stories of refugees. It explores; the trends that lead the refugees to leave their homes, their journeys to 'safety,' and the welcome which they receive from their new country.

We are Not Refugees explores the language that these individuals use, to tell their tale, recounting the stories of individual refugees. Agus Morales places these tales within a wider immigrant narrative, outlining the histories of many of the world's trouble spots.

This book manages to be, at the same time; both, incredibly compelling and informative. I highly recommend this work.

Agus Morales is a Spanish poet and journalist who has spent the last several years covering wars and refugees in SE Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. We Are Not Refugees is his effort to capture the vastness of the crisis while taking it from the large abstractions of numbers to the particular experiences of people. There are about 68 million people who have been forced to leave their homes for many reasons, most often war and persecution.

We Are Not Refugees is organized into five sections that address the common questions most of us have about refugees with the stories of real people. He asks why they are fleeing, who are they, where do they live, how do they travel, and when do they arrive. His answers come from interviewing some two hundred people in fourteen countries.

Much of the story of displacement is told through the voices of the people he meets and interviews. This takes the narrative of this crisis away from the big numbers of faceless “refugees” to the individual exigencies of people, men, women, and children with whom we can and must identify.


Morales brings the magic of a poet to his writing in We Are Not Refugees. Using his art, he focuses on the essential point of his stories, the humanity of the people he interviews. As a poet, he understands the power of language and illustrates how it is used to separate us from each other. He points out that refugees seldom refer to themselves as refugees. He notes that people like to add modifiers like economic to qualify and disqualify refugees. He writes about how important the words are, though. For example, if you flee violence but stay in your own country, you’re an internally displaced person and have no international protection from the United Nations. Refugee is another important word because it offers protection while migrants have none. As a poet, he not only notes the legal power of these words but how effectively they are used to distance us from what is true of all, they are people.

If we can always remember to think of people who have been forced from their homes, whether they are legally called displaced persons, migrants, or refugees, as people first, as fellow humans, we will do a better job of demanding our national and international governments do a better job of treating them with dignity and humanity.

We Are Not Refugees is fascinating, inspiring, and heartbreaking. It is particularly shaming for an American when our selfish and xenophobic response has been so feeble while smaller, poorer countries do so much more. Calling ourselves a nation of immigrants seems like such hypocrisy when we are doing our level best to turn the tide against immigration and abandoning our obligations to asylees and refugees.

I received a copy of We Are Not Refugees from the publisher through NetGalley.

We Are Not Refugees at Charlesbridge | Imagine | Penguin Random House
Agus Morales author site
Agus Morales stories for 5W


★★★★

We are not refugees is a poetically written novel that highlights the life and death struggles of refugees and migrants who have been displaced from their native lands. In an effort to find safety for themselves and their families, they set on a usually circular journey, often ending up in refugee camps set up by NGO’s or facing deportation orders to their native lands. The book is very thorough and covers many areas of violence and unrest, some of which I have familiarity with, and some I did not. The stories in the pages of the book are all at once uplifting and heartbreaking, as we learn the fates of some refugees who are fortunate to find asylum, while others become lost in the cycle of violence and endless nomadic movements. There are others still whose fate remains unknown as the turbulent nature of their existence cuts them off from contact with the outside world.

This novel is especially vital in today’s political world where refugee’s and migrants are vilified in the name of tipping a political scale in favor of candidates who exploit and expand fear’s of the electorate. For the refugees of the world, they only ask for acceptance, and a place they can safely raise their families. We learn they are not so different from the rest of us.

Thank you Netgalley and Charlesbridge for letting me read this ARC in exchange for an honest review. After reading this title, I wish I had been able to get to it sooner!

"Many do not identify with the label refugee - because they haven't obtained asylum, because they don't want to become refugees, or simply because they don't want to be labeled at all."

Refugee, Migrant. IDP. Immigrant. Do we really understand these terms, and do we really understand who the people are that swell at the borders, live in unimaginable conditions in crowded camps, or commit desperate acts to cross into a safer country? I would argue that there is an iceberg, and we only see the very tip of it; the rest is below the surface, the waiting, the not knowing, the fear, the do-I-stay-or-do-I-go mind trap ... and even if someone is granted asylum - will they actually go, knowing they make have to leave family behind?

Morales explores not only the terms we hear bandied about on the news but also digs deeply into the stories. The why. Why are they fleeing? Where do they want to go? When will they be able to find freedom and safety? He explores the historical implications of war, famine, disease and fighting, and he looks at the entire voyage of the refugee (if they indeed want to be called that at all). The history of each location is fairly pointed and kept to the barest minimum for understanding the current issues and conflict(s). Though this can take a bit of patience to get through and understand, it's worthwhile to understand the reasons for leaving. What led to the point of exodus.

"The paradox is that we tend to focus precisely on these moments of crisis, and fail to understand what happens before or after they flee ... we tend to define these people exclusively by their wounds."

Morales's full story approach gives a better picture of the refugee experience than any singular news article does. As a social studies/history teacher, I found his book to be the best illustration of the current refugee issue without merely listing numbers. Numbers are important, but numbers stop being tangible to people after awhile. His writing is people-focused, and through the people he interviews, through the humanity and self-awareness that he possesses, we feel more deeply, commit more strongly, to finding out what our own beliefs are regarding the crises we hear about it.

If, as Morales points out, "asylum is for the minority," then how do we wrestle with this in our own countries, and how should governments react? I imagine only time will tell, and one day, history books might be dissecting what our generation did or didn't do. A recommended read for all, and if you're examining social justice issues with your class, this book can certainly do a great deal for your students' (and anyone's!) understanding and empathy.

Do yourself a favor and pick up this amazing book. Now more than ever we need to open out eyes to the plight of others who are displaced for their homes. It's very well written and filled with stories that need to be read. Happy reading!

A compelling account of the lives of displaced people, those who have been forced to flee their homes due to war and oppression , compiled by a journalist who has travelled to the sites of some of the worlds largest conflict zones such as Syria, Afghanistan and the Congo, as well as the largest refugee camps in Jordan, and the exiled Tibetan parliament, and spoken to the men and women whose way of life has been turned upside down. Using their individual stories and experiences he illustrates the problem on a global scale. By showing us that these people are just that, people, not just numbers and statistics, he seeks to put a human face on the issue, an issue which has become something of a political hot potato in numerous countries around the globe. The title reflects the attitude of these displaced people, they often do not see themselves, or refer to themselves as refugees. It also highlights the fact that many people are not considered refugees, but rather Internally DIsplaced Persons, if they have not left their country of origin but merely been forced to migrate within its borders .
A powerful, impactful and important book.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

This book was definitely out of my normal genre and confort zone. I was offered a chance to pre-read from Netgalley right at the time of a caravan of people approaching the USA border with Mexico. The media seemed to be covering every step they took. We were inundated with "facts" about these people. The media seemed to be focused on manipulating our emotions regarding these people. Somehow I thought this book might give me some insights into what was happening there, especially since the author had a Spanish name.

I was partially correct. While most of the book focused on non-refugees and Europe coming from Africa, Afghanistan, and Syria, there was a small portion of the book that talked about Latin America. I certainly gained insights into the global problem of displaced people and their problems. When a young man commented that people from war zones have no place to go home to and pointed out a picture of bombed out buildings in Syria. his mother, a German who survived WWII, told him that that is exactly what German women did after the war - working to rebuild a bombed out nation. I now understand that the problem is not the buildings being bombed out, but the never ending strife there.

The main reason I gave this book only two stars is the obvious political bias of the author. It began in the first chapter only pages into the narrative.

"This is an image that President Donald Trump would like to suppress. With Trump's rise to power in the United States, the construction of the refugee as an enemy - a criminal, a terrorist, a threat to U.S. Safety - has reached its peak. The fact that most people seeking asylum in the United States and Europe are like Khalid - ordinary people trying to escape violence - is a reality that Trump and his supporters deny."

The author appears to believe in totally open borders, one world government, abolishment of nations and states. in the way he writes and phrases certain sections. I do not agree with these politics, but I especially an upset he purports that everyone who believes that immigration should be done legally and people should be vetted properly before given entrance as immigrants is an unfeeling, uncompassionate person who hates the refugee. To paint with a broad brush everyone who wants their country and people to be safe as morally corrupt is to not acknowledge the crimes that have been committed both in this country and others by illegal immigrants in this country or those primarily in Europe who do not have the same cultural and moral underpinnings that those in the country they are living have. Here in the United States where we have had allowed fairly easy entry (many have come on visas and never left - they are also non-refugees) we must be aware of those who would like to destroy our country as they attempted on September 11, 2001. We know those people are out there - we have managed to stop some of the attacks planned on our people. We have also failed at times (Boston Marathon bombers). But the point is that we should be allowed to vet people coming into our country so that we can be certain they are not those who would wish us harm.

Because of some the author's comments, the reader might begin to think that all the refugee (or non-refugee) problems stem from President Trump. Many of these problems predated by decades (at the authors own admission) long before he was even contemplating a run for the office. He has nothing to do with the problems Syrian and Sub-saharan people face in Europe and it is unfair to suggest, even hint, that that might be the case.

The situations these people are fleeing from are indeed horrible. If I were in their situations, would I try to escape? Of course. Would I want someone to take me in and offer refuge? Of course! But I like to believe that I would also realize that those people would be taking me, someone unknown to them, and risking not only their own lives but also the lives of their loved ones if I turned out not to be who I said I was.

It is for the blatant political bias that I gave the book only two stars. The information is valuable. But the reader must be cautioned to beware of the bias of the author and not swayed into believing that self-preservation of a nation is wrong.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the review copy of this book! It’s on sale March 5th.

We Are Not Refugees was an important and very interesting book to read. Agus Morales is a journalist who has spent years traveling the globe, interviewing people who’ve had to flee their homes.

What has come out of those travels are stories and stories and stories. Stories of people who do not think of themselves as “refugees,” because the world has cast “refugees” as poor, destitute, helpless beings. And many these people came from a home where they once lived comfortably, once had a livelihood, once (perhaps still) had a family.

These people are people, and all they want is a safe place where they can go back to being productive members of society.

I think the point that really stood out the most for me was about their smartphones; many people look at these people who come with Nikes, and iPhones, and other consumer goods from our world, and that doesn’t jive right. So they say, “If they’re so poor, why do they have iPhones?”

And to that Morales says: As if a map isn’t the one thing you need when you’re lost. And he says: If I had to flee my home, my belongings, and my family because of danger, the last thing I’d leave behind would be my cellphone.

And despite the valiant effort, I still found it so, so hard to tune into these stories — to keep myself from viewing them at a distance. It’s hard to look at that kind of pain and suffering and feel it consistently. So I think the only thing I can do here is to keep reading stories like these — more and more and more. Maybe then it will stick.

An amazing story from a very brave journalist, who travelled from one refugee camp to another. The descriptions of the camps and stories that he relates brings to life atrocities that one can barely imagine. The destruction of war, luting, greed, hunger and torture. So many refugees or displaced persons as he often called them, had seen their families, homes businesses and towns destroyed. The living conditions in the camps are appalling, cramped and lacking food, water and other basic necessities. Most people are forced to leave their homes and countries in order to survive.
They dream of a better life, but will it ever happen? Many can’t wait to get back to their homeland, despite the fact that everything they had has been destroyed. A very grave story, but one I recommend you read. Well written.

4 stars
We Are Not Refugees
True Stories of the Displaced
by Agus Morales

This book delivers exactly what it promised, a first-hand look at modern-day refugees and their stories and lives. It is at times heartwarming and at times so very sad. This book is difficult to read in many places but sheds an important light on the struggles of those wishing for a better life.
I highly recommend We Are Not Refuges.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Refugees, migrants, internally displaced people = all human beings. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: nobody flees their homeland with only what they can carry on their back unless they have to. It’s natural to seek out a safer, better place for our families. Those of us who have never been in a situation where we saw no other choice but to run shouldn’t be allowed to decide who is more “worthy” of safety, who “deserves” to be called refugee rather than migrant, whose story is more “important”. But we still do.

We Are Not Refugees is a necessary and very timely read: in these days where a president blanket bans all people from several countries from entering the US, and goes to great lengths to build a wall between the US and Mexico, where European countries are talking of migrant “crises” and closing borders rather than actually dealing with people as humans rather than numbers, we NEED to read these stories.

Agus Morales is a human rights journalist who has spent many years traveling to countries in conflict, talking to people who have been displaced because of war, conflict, genocide, hunger, and poverty. He wrote this book not just to highlight that there is not one “refugee” profile, but mainly to highlight the fact that these people are all human. The book is divided into 5 parts, covering areas such as the why’s, and the how’s and the where’s, and takes us to many different places, such as Sudan, the DRC, Syria, Central African Republic, Central America, Tibet, as well as the Mediterranean Sea.

What happens when all you want is to go home, back to your life of before, but there is no possibility of “before” ever coming back, and/or of your home existing anymore?

There are many important stories in this book, some that will remain with me forever I think, and there are also some extremely important subjects that must be raised. Why are some people called refugees while others are called migrants? Why are different of groups of refugees highlighted when others languish in camps in the dark? Why do we still fear the “other” when the “other” is another human being just like us?

Agus Morales doesn’t hesitate to lay all of the stereotypes on the table in order to debunk them, and doesn’t whitewash the truth either. He tells the stories exactly how he sees them, and expertly mixes personal anecdotes, stories from people he encounters, and hard facts and truths together to create a compelling and heartbreaking read. I really appreciated the fact that he brought together people fleeing war, people displaced in their own countries with no possibility of returning to their homes, and those who have been exiled for one, two, even three generations to create an overview of what it means to be displaced, of what it means to be a refugee but not a refugee all over the world.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy of this book!

This could not be a more timely and apt book as the word “refugee “ has become intertwined with migrant and various other permutations of political prisoners and victims of violence.Morales is an outstanding journalist who uses the stories of internally displaced people or victims from the central Republic of Africa ,Syria, Central America, Afghanistan and Tibet to help tell the narratives that litter the landscape of these people who are affected by unspeakable tragedies. Because there were so many stories , this non fiction expose runs the risk of watering down its power than if just a few countries were focused on more in depth. However it is the commonality that is displayed in all of these narrations that allows the true capacity for evil to rise to the surface.

I believe that this is such an important book to read, especially in today's crisis of humanity. Agus Morales talks with the people who lives have been interrupted by war, drug violence, and collapsed economies. The major consensus among the displaced population is they just want to go back to their homes but they cannot. People risk their lives trying to better. Those who are traveling from Central America through Mexico to get to the United States risk run-ins with criminals, rapists, traffickers and other threats. People fleeing through the Mediterranean risk drowning or being attacked on the open sea. Syrians head for Turkey to avoid being bombed or shot. However, bullets in these places are not the only things causing death. Hospitals are being targeted by bombs and ransacked. Doctors are murdered. People cannot get medical care they need. Basic human rights are being neglected or stripped away. Babies are being born on boats or as I come to call it, the land of the in-between.

I will warn you this book was hard to read. Reading the experiences from the mouths of the displaced was heartbreaking. We need to ask ourselves... what would we do if we were in there position? How far would you go for your friends, family, and children in trouble? We need to look at the origins on why people are on the move and figure out how it can be rectified.

I also learned something else reading this book. Just because they are displaced does not mean they were poor. There was an interview with a man who owned a factory in Syria that made him 1500 a day. It was destroyed during the fighting. Him and his family are currently on there way to Oslo but would rather go back to Syria to rebuild their lives. So when you see a refugee with a cell phone don't assume they don't still need help. That is a ridiculous assumption and one I will strive to keep in mind for the future.

Thank you Netgalley for providing me with early access to this book in return for an honest review.

Read More Book Reviews on my Blog It's Good To Read - Link: http://ebookwormssite.wordpress.com

Summary:
Approximately 65 million people are considered displaced, as of today. This number is roughly comparable to the total population of the United Kingdom, or all of California and Texas combined.

This book attempts the impossible, to put a face to the refugee, to put a name on the internally-displaced person, and a story behind the suffering. It aims to rise above both the alarmist rhetoric as well as challenging the belief that all refugees are essentially the same, to give brief but comprehensive and indicative stories of the people themselves, the displaced, by the people themselves.

Main Characters:
Agus Morales is the main character, as through his eyes we see the stories unfolding, from the current Syrian conflict, to the almost-forgotten Afghan crisis, to the ignored parlous state of affairs in central Africa, and the vulnerability and helplessness of people making the hazardous trip through central South America to the Mexican border. Hazardous is actually too soft and small a word for the experience of all these people, when you read of the stories of kidnappings, rapes, tortures, beatings, exploitation, and the myriad other ways people can inflict pain and misery on each other.

 Plot:
The book covers people and events in four continents, (these being Europe, Asia, South America and Africa). With 65 million people directly affected, the list of countries involved is almost too numerous to count – we are currently familiar with Syria, but the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mexico amongst others all have stories encompassing equal amounts of horror and tragedy.

There are five sections to the book, covering off: why people leave their home, who are the people making these dangerous journeys, how do they survive when they reach a camp, how do they get there, and finally when do they arrive? He bookends this very nicely by inviting the reader to imagine how she/he would manage, if they had to leave everything they knew, and go to a country that didn’t speak their language, and treated them as a huge burden? He challenges us when asking what would drive us to kill our neighbour, or them us, and what would our limits be?

This book attempts to highlight what has happened, and is continuing to happen, to displaced persons. Refugees, by the way, is a word that does not include everybody – people who have left their own town due to conflict but remain within the borders of their own country are “displaced”, and as such “rank lower” in terms of media coverage.

Throughout the author’s experience, and he has been reporting on this for well over a decade, he finds a large number of the displaced people were relatively well-off “back home”, with many being highly qualified, and/or having run their own successful business. One even had a massive factory. These were the people with the wherewithal to pay to be smuggled out of the country. They were not in any sense living in the lap of luxury, it was just that their path was made slightly easier by the ability to grease some palms along the way. By contrast, for those without the means, the book opens with the harrowing true story of a young boy who was alone, friendless, tortured and raped, and finally who died on board a rescue ship, in sight of freedom. The point was made that, had he died in Libya, no-one would ever have known he even existed.

Though the stories are necessarily short, and a lot of people did not want to either be interviewed or give their real names for fear of reprisals, the author gets to the point very quickly. There is no overt moralising, for no-one can dispute the suffering that is involved. No privileged person, of whom I am one, can possibly realise the depths these people have plumbed, in order to gain safety for themselves and their families. A particularly brave doctor in Aleppo, Muhammed Abyad, stood out for me, as he risked death every day for standing up for his patients, and for treating every one of them equally, in spite of frequent warnings and threats to his life.

What I Liked:
- I liked how the author tried to give us the bigger picture, by describing the camps, and giving a deeper context to the huge movements of people.
- I liked the people telling their own stories, direct and unadulterated, without the prism of a particular media source. They were honest and heart-rending.

What I Didn’t Like:
This was a hard-hitting piece of work, based on fact and the author’s own direct research and real-life experience, and one can only respect the danger to which he exposed himself, to bring us these stories.

Overall:
The author makes a good fist of being objective, but his humanity does come through, and between the lines you feel his outrage at how lives are commoditized. He has done this work for years, and while the faces change, the eyes always tell the same story. Most people don’t consider themselves refugees, and most only want to go home, to pick up the threads of their old lives in peace. He readily admits there are bad people making the journey as well, but the vast majority do not want to be there, and are only doing so out of dire need.

The reader is left to make up his/her own mind, as the author lays out cogent facts and statistics to be digested. This is not a dry narrative, as the humanity in each story pervades the whole book. There will always be those who decry the facts, call refugees “invaders”, and seek to be alarmist and so on.

For me, I was left thinking about what I would do. As a parent, I would not let my young child go into the shallow end of a swimming pool without the inflatable armbands. As a parent, I was reading about Afghan women, who being from a land-locked country had never seen the sea, taking their similarly-aged children out on a rickety boat, taking eight days and nights to cross the notorious Mediterranean Sea. It brings home to me the hard, punishing desperate situation these people are fleeing from, and gives me a deeper understanding and compassion.

An important, informative, harrowing book – definitely recommended.

Acknowledgements:
My thanks to the author and to NetGalley, for giving me a free copy of this book, in return for an honest and objective review.

We Are Not Refugees by Agus Morales is a powerful book that prompts lots of questions and emotions from the reader. This book provides a window into the lives of those willing to risk everything in order to have a better life. The author shares stories of people fleeing their country for various reasons. This book is relevant and is so appropriate for opening a discussion on immigration and our recent political stance. It makes you see the human side of this issue – they are people first. It made me question what it would be like to be in that situation. Needing to flee our country for whatever reason and trying to find safety and comfort in a strange land. This is not something you can even begin to imagine happening yet so many experience this daily. Very impactful and important read! This book left me thinking long after the reading ended.

I received an advance copy of this book from Net Galley in an exchange for an honest review.

We Are Not Refugees by Agus Morales was hard for me to read because it depicts the extreme pain of people seeking safety from war, gang violence, extreme poverty, etc. Although safety is their main concern, I think they are also seeking a home where they can permanently settle and live a normal life. The author demonstrates that these people are more than refugees. They are mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, sisters, brothers, etc. This is an important book that I think should be read by everyone, especially in light of what’s happening on our southern border right now. I highly recommend this very important book.