Running from Terror, Not Causing it
Coming into capstone, I felt I already knew everything that there was to know about what was going on in Syria and the refugee crisis as a whole. My main concern was that other people didn’t know what was going on. I knew people who were blaming Islam for what ISIS was doing, and I knew people who thought refugees shouldn’t be let into the country because they are the terrorists. The intention behind my paper was to guide people away from that. The refugees have the same enemy we do; the only difference is that they are much closer to them than we are. I gathered information focusing on the stigma against refugees for my paper. The hardest thing to do was keeping my own bias out of my writing. The more I read about the topic and the more I wrote, the more I wanted to help these people in some way. My main goal in capstone became trying to break this stigma and teaching people what was happening in Syria and why these people—and many other refugees all over the world—need help. I soon came in contact with a family who fled from the Taliban in Afghanistan, and their family sounded to me so much like the families I had read about online. I helped them as much as I could, until they left Connecticut and went to Texas. Afterwards, I sold ribbons, did bake sales, and taught classes in the high school about the conflict, in hopes of making a difference to at least one person who didn’t know what these people were going through. As I researched more, the more I learned what I didn’t know. Beyond connecting my research paper to my capstone, I was able to connect it to myself. I learned that Pakistan receives the 2nd highest number of refugees in the entire world—most of them cross the border from Afghanistan. I learned that the same issues I had been writing about in my paper, regarding poor conditions of refugee camps and stigma, although not as bad, were happening in my own mother-country. That is what made my capstone so personal to me and drove me to help the Afghani family I was in contact with, even more.
Research Paper |