Refugee Refugees Essay

Recreating Home: Integrating the Displaced into Their New Communities

Personal Statement

Until mid-2015 - with nearly 1.61 million Afghan refugees - my home country was host to the largest refugee population in the world. Between 2005 and 2010 - after a devastating earthquake in the country’s north, military operations against the Taliban in the north-east, and severe flooding that impacted one-fifth of the nation’s land area - it became home to approximately six million internally displaced people (IDPs) as well. Thus, while the “refugee crisis” might have become a bit of a buzzword in recent years, growing up in Pakistan, it was nothing less than an everyday reality.

The first wave of Afghan migration into my home country began in the 1980s, when nearly three million people fled Afghanistan after the advent of the Soviet-Afghan war. The majority of them entered Pakistan with little to no

I first started working with refugee children while I was still in high school, volunteering with the Master Ayub Street School in Islamabad, where I taught “street” children - a significant portion of whom were Afghan refugees - English and Mathematics. My experience as a tutor, and my observations of the administrative flaws and shortcomings of the project, galvanised me into starting my own project in Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which aimed to teach socioeconomically underprivileged women basic, working-level English language skills in order to improve labour market performance. Given the city’s close proximity to Afghanistan, and its historical and cultural links to the country, Peshawar served as a center for hosting refugees during the 1980s, a majority of which still live in the area. Consequently, a significant portion of my students also happened to be Afghan