My writings: THE WALL

You can force your people to think that it's something wrong with me, with my people, because we don't look like you, don’t eat the same food because we speak another language or just because we are not as privileged as you. We might not have your money, cars, education or time or knowledge to fight for our human rights. We have to use our time to survive. To survive from famine, from diseases and sometimes from wars. We use our knowledge and money to find someone who can help us to come over the border into your country. The country we hope will give us a job so we can eat and have peace so we don't have to be afraid that the next bullet will be the one that ends a life, perhaps my life.


You can spread false information to make us out to be the bad guys in your history, instead of owning up to all the wrongdoings your government did and you are still doing. Is history just a word without meaning to you? People have been moving from country to country throughout history. People from all corners of the world have met and changed how we treat diseases, how we see the world, how we apply our knowledge to help each other. To help each other to handle the things we can't change: diseases, earthquakes, and other disasters.


You can build a wall to deny us the right to move physically into your space, your country but it doesn't make us different. It doesn't make us less human. A wall makes you less human. A wall shows how detached you are from your own needs and your oblivion to others needs. Perhaps you think that we cost too much, but how much does it cost to build and maintain a wall? And how much is a life worth? Or do you think that your lives are more worth than ours?




By © Dolores Meden 2019

I wrote this text for ‎Kulturno-umetniško društvo Poiesis‎ / Za svet brez zidov (A world without walls) and Peter Semolič translated it into Slovene. The text is inspired by the book "Selamlik" by Khaled Alesmael who fled from Syria and now lives in Sweden.