Meltem’s Journey: A Refugee Diary

Recounts the story of Meltem and her Kurdish family from Eastern Turkey, who journey to the United Kingdom, and whose courage and resilience lead them to a new home and a new life.

How I Learned Geography

A 2009 Caldecott Honor Book. Having fled from war in their troubled homeland, a boy and his family are living in poverty in a strange country. Food is scarce, so when the boy’s father brings home a map instead of bread for supper, at first the boy is furious. But when the map is hung on the wall, it floods their cheerless room with color. As the boy studies its every detail, he is transported to exotic places without ever leaving the room, and he eventually comes to realize that the map feeds him in a way that bread never could. Based on the artist’s childhood memories of World War II.

One Day We Had to Run! Refugee Children Tell Their Stories in Words and Paintings

In an anthology of words and drawings compiled by a United Nations relief worker, refugee children from Somalia, the Sudan, and Ethiopia share their feelings about their loss of their homes and their families.

The Island

Poignant and chilling, this allegory is an astonishing, powerful, and timely story about refugees, xenophobia, racism, multiculturalism, social politics, and human rights. When the people of an island find a man sitting on their shore, they immediately reject him because he is different. Fearful to the point of delusional paranoia, the islanders lock him in a goat pen, refuse him work, and feed him scraps they would normally feed a pig. As their fears progress into hatred, they force him into the sea.

See the review at WOW Review, Volume 4, Issue 2

Refugees

A small green swamp just past the edge of town is home to two wild blue-billed ducks. But one day huge, rumbling, grumbling machines crawled, scraping and gouging towards the swamp and out poured the swamp’s precious water. Refugees tells the story of the duck’s misadventures in trying to find a new place to live.

The Silver Path

This tale tells of a young refugee and his mother through his letters to an English penfriend. Niko and Penny are pen pals on opposite sides of the world, but their lives are separated by more than distance. Penny lives in a peaceful world. Niko lives in a world racked by war. This moving and thought-provoking story conveys Niko’s unwavering hope for a better life and is told in simple words and pictures.

The Whispering Cloth: A Refugee’s Story

A young Hmong girl in a Thai refugee camp in the mid-1970s finds the story within herself to create her own pa’ndau.

Christophe’s Story

Life has been very lonely for Christopher. The young Rwandan refugee is having trouble getting used to his new school, new language, and new life. Worst of all, he misses his grandfather who had to be left behind. His teacher persuades Christophe to share his story with his classmates — so he tells them of the terrifying day the soldiers came to his house and killed his baby brother. The spoken story fills the air and his classmates are spellbound. But when his teacher asks him to write it down and read it out at an assembly, Christophe is horrified. In his culture, it is believed that once a story is written down, it loses its potency. Will Christophe find a way to break through the barriers and share his story?