“It is important to understand these children,” says Samira Sinai, a member of SOS Hungary’s Mobile Team. Samira, an intercultural mediator, works with unaccompanied refugee children in Fót, a town outside Budapest.
This may seem an obvious point, but getting to the root of the problems of refugee children actually requires quite a multifaceted approach.
The first step is getting children to open up about their problems. Samira finds that young refugees often come from cultures in which it is not socially acceptable to talk about not doing well, so she focuses on really getting to know the children so that she can familiarize herself with their struggles.
Samira also puts considerable energy into helping the children assimilate into the host country’s culture. “One important challenge is to motivate the young refugees to learn and grow – grow in mind and spirit,” Samira says. “They have to know that they need to study and learn. Sometimes they don’t know how important that is.”
In order to get to the bottom of problems, as well as to her and her co-workers’ deep support, Samira partakes in a playback theater group sponsored by SOS Hungary. The premise of playback theater is people in the audience share their personal experiences, and actors act them out. In this case, it is the refugee children’s stories that are told.
Samira finds that playback theater is therapeutic and liberating for young refugees. It shows them that people care about getting to know them and want to listen to their stories. It is also a way to psychologically process often impossible situations.
In her job, Samira must also be adaptable. Recently, Samira dropped everything she was working on and went to a hospital where a young Afghani woman was delivering a baby. She explains that if she had not been there, the inability of the woman and the doctors to communicate with each other could have been dangerous. “I would have never have forgiven myself,” Samira says.
Though the work is challenging, Samira finds it rewarding.
“It’s seeing the happiness in the other person’s face because someone actually understands them,” Samira says. “It is so sad when people close doors on someone without even knowing who they are closing the door to. For me it’s hard to see when people don’t even want to get to know each other.”
It is thanks to people like Samira that children are able to work through unimaginable trauma. For Samira and her co-workers, the children – and their right to feel themselves again – are what is most important.