(Dobbs) One Day The Dentist, The Next Day War
Refugees cannot predict the fate that now awaits them.
“One day you are driving to the dentist. The next you are whispering with strangers in a dark basement.”
That is how it sometimes starts. That is how the life of an ordinary, law-abiding, family-focused citizen can be indecorously upended. By war, and sometimes too, though with more weeping than whispering, by a natural disaster.
“It is the shocking realization that suddenly, unwillingly, you are a refugee,” correspondent Sabrina Tavernise wrote for The New York Times after interviewing dozens of women, many with children, who had escaped the war zone of Ukraine, each now “dependent on the generosity of strangers, no longer a middle class person in charge of your own life.”
Now multiply by ten million. That’s the current count of Ukrainians displaced by this dreadful war. Ten million and growing.
What they’re going through, I have seen in war zones and natural disasters both. One day you have a home and a place to earn a living, a store to buy your food and a school for your children’s education, a hospital for health care and a theater for entertainment. The day after, it is all gone, as if it’s been wiped off the face of the earth, and you see no future beyond your very next step.
But a step in what direction? Toward what target? With what fate awaiting you on the step beyond that?
When we see or read about refugees in the news, we don’t always think about all that.
I have covered wars and the refugees they beget. In Lebanon’s civil war, if they couldn’t leave the country, people in Beirut had to leave their neighborhoods if they lived on the wrong side of the Muslim-Christian divide. In the war for black majority rule that turned Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, those in the line of fire had to move entire villages from one part of the country to another. In Iran, if you’d supported the revolution, you could stay. If you’d supported the Shah, or even merely worked for Americans who were presumed to be tied to the Shah (which was a black mark on every Iranian who helped U.S. news organizations, very much like what you heard about in Afghanistan), you had to get out. One friend of mine walked with his family almost the length of the country, all the way to Pakistan, to escape. The alternative was the certainty of imprisonment and the possibility of execution.
Given the unfathomable side of human nature… and the unpredictable side of Mother Nature… there will always be refugees.
But the image of refugees forever imprinted in my head is from right here at home during one of our nation’s major natural disasters, Hurricane Katrina. On the first day after the wind stopped blowing, a cameraman and I floated in a swamp boat with a two-man rescue crew into the worst-hit part of New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward, where a levee had been breached. The water came clear up to the street signs, and more chilling, clear up to the rooftops. It had risen so fast— past the first floors, then the second— that residents had literally punched holes through their roofs and climbed out on top to stay above the flood. That’s where we found them. That’s where we took them off. That’s where we got them into the boat.
Men, women, and children. A few dogs too. We’d pull away from what had been their homes and most wouldn’t look back. What they’d left behind would be uninhabitable. Most every piece of furniture, most every stitch of clothing, most every electric device, most every pot and pan, irreparably water-logged, or coated in erosively thick mud.
In the flick of a hurricane’s eye they were down to nothing. They were refugees.
Most I’ve met— in that disaster and others— have told me that for all they’d lost, they were still grateful because their families had survived, they still had each other. That is the indomitable human spirit. But as we dropped boatload after boatload of these Katrina refugees at a levee still intact, to be transported on flatbed trucks to the fetid Superdome and from there, to some distant city willing to take them in, I found it hard to share the positivity of their spirit. All I saw were these poor souls, having lost everything but their loved ones, climbing out from our boat and stepping onto the levee with small children on their shoulders, older ones held by the hand, and only the wet clothes on their backs.
Each time we pulled away to rescue more refugees, I watched the load we’d dropped on the levee take those first steps into a world unknown, into a future of starting from scratch, into a life they could not possibly predict. Though the circumstance was different, the result in some ways was the same as in a war. Luckily they were in a nation that seeks solutions for people whose luck has been cut short, but otherwise they were little better off than the refugees from Lebanon, from Zimbabwe, from Iran.
A few days later, I rode with a busload of Katrina refugees for the first hour of their flight from the flood. And I couldn’t shake those questions: in what direction were they headed? Toward what target? With what fate awaiting them on the steps beyond that?
Right now, as you read this, those ten-million-plus Ukrainians face the same questions, taking steps down that same unsettled path. According to the United Nations, six-and-a-half million or more are thought to be displaced but still within their nation’s borders, at least until they can make it out. Another 3.8 million have made it out, with more than two million now in Poland, hundreds of thousands in Romania and Hungary, Slovakia and even tiny Moldova, and many more in most of the rest of Europe. President Biden has rightly pledged to bring a hundred thousand war refugees to the U.S.A.
It was little more than a month ago that they were driving to the dentist, but the day after, whispering with strangers in a dark basement.
We should be sympathetic. We should be charitable. We should count our blessings that it’s not us.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.