Thanks for sharing a story
To keep up to date on UNHCR's latest stories and how you can help sign-up for email updates
You can also follow us on
Their boat heading for Greece sunk at high seas. Hosein’s mother and sister are missing. “I am sure they are alive. I will not abandon the search….”
Photojournalist Darrin Zammit Lupi writes about his experience in covering boat arrivals to Malta in 2014…
Journalist Boglarka Balogh tells how Ahmed lost eight members of his family at sea, when their boat sank with hundreds of Syrian refugees on board…
“During that journey, I lost my most valuable possession: my father’s ring which was the only thing I had to remind me of him…”
We drank sea water to survive. Then, in the middle of the sea the boat’s GPS broke down…
We walked all the way to the shores of Djibouti where we took a boat through the Arabian Sea to Yemen. I almost lost hope after the engine of the boat had broken down…
“I will think about my options, but I’m certainly not going at sea again. I left for the future of my kids; I’m not going to die with them in the sea. Life is not over.”
"We were looking for any country that was safe, somewhere we could live. We planned to stop the first time we saw land. We landed in Thailand. We were caught by men in uniform and pushed back to sea."
Despite the trauma Abdul has been through, he would do it again…
Mislaidy, a Cuban refugee, is happy to be in Colombia, after sailing for seven days …
“My daughter and son-in-law were in Australia. From Indonesia, they had sailed for 15 days…”
Jihan, her husband and two sons from Syria boarded a boat with 40 others. They hoped the journey would take eight hours. There was no guarantee they would make it alive…
We spent four hours on the sea, bailing out water and praying to Allah. The waves had taken us far.
Amina from Afghanistan received a warning from herhusband’s family that her children weren’t safe. The cousins are still chasing them…
Hussein’s uncommon courage and perseverance kept him moving forward and taking enormous risks to reach a better life, he refused to sink.
It was a nightmare that you cannot wake up from, and it will never leave me
I looked around and all I saw was the open sea. At that moment, I feared for my life. I had no air to breathe because the place was overcrowded, my legs started to feel numb from the way I was sitting. We had neither food nor water…
“I was just 17 when I came once more close to dying, this time in my attempt to cross to Samos on a boat from Turkey, along with four more Afghans…”
“At 2:30 in the morning, the engine suddenly stopped. The deadly silence around us was creating a funeral atmosphere… “
Actor Thanassis Papageorgiou had to grow up to understand the “sacredness” of an old photo showing his parents with his two sisters in front of a big ship…
If Yacoub is lucky, he will survive the dangerous journey and find a low-paying job in the informal sector in Malaysia, from where he can send remittances back to his family…
Learn more about our work with refugees at UNHCR.org
