Rana, 37 years old: “I inherited my passion for numbers from my father, who was an economist. I remember him bringing his work home. He used to spread folders and sheets on the table and I was fascinated. Sometimes he would tell me ‘you’ve got such nice writing, how about helping me?’ Thanks to him, I wished to become an economist. At the end of high school, my professor asked me why – ‘why would you do this when you could become a doctor or engineer?’ I got a master’s degree in accounting and auditing, and became bank manager.”

“The tidy world of numbers left a mark on my family life. When Mina and Yusuf are playing and scatter toys all over the place, I feel like walking in their footsteps, picking the toys from the floor right away.”

“My bookkeeping skills come in very handy these days. We need to survive on little money until we are able to get jobs, any jobs. I’ve been educated to think of the future and set money aside so my husband, Karam, and I did the same in Iraq, even when we both had good jobs. We are learning Romanian now to help us get work. My husband always says, only those who don’t want to, don’t find jobs. Soon our life will get better: we’ll work, our kids will go to school. We’ll be fine.”

Rana fled Baghdad for Romania in 2014 with her 44-year-old husband, her 65-year-old mother, and the couple’s two children, Mina, five, and Yousef, three. “I never wanted to leave,” she says, but “for a Christian in Iraq, the past few years had become increasingly dangerous.”

With bomb blasts a daily occurrence in Baghdad, “every morning we were wondering whether we will survive that day.” One day the couple were on caught in crossfire between police, army and insurgents while on the way to work. “We were trapped in our car, all hell broke loose,” Rana recalls. “We thought we would never get to see our children again!”

The decision to leave came the night masked men stormed into the house, stole everything and threatened to kill Rana’s sister. “Then I knew: we had to flee Iraq.”

Refugees. Ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Share their stories.