So recently, I haven been thinking about what it would be like to be a refugee. When I came across this picture I thought it summed it all up. These were a few of about 15,000 refugees who had fled to a chicken-breeding farm in Batnoga, Croatia. There were 20 large houses in which they could live, each one housing around 700 people. They were not free to live as they pleased in this new country they had stumbled upon during their exodus, and they certainly could not go back to what was left of their homes, so they lived as livestock. Once a week they would be able to receive mail from loved ones, all of which was first checked for sensitive material and marked as "read". Devoid of home, many family members, and dignity their last bit of humanity was stripped away from them as they lost their privacy too. This is what it is like to be a refugee. To live somewhere and be labeled as an outsider, you are safe, so to speak, but are you really living? Their are many who would argue that it would have been better for them to have died than to go to a refugee camp.
Refugees. They are feared in masses around the globe, these issues are not singular to Croatia. Salgado took these photos but he soon realized that he was just beginning a ver long documentation of the spectrum of human cruelty and bias that exists in a world as large as ours.
Maybe this is not how all refugees are treated, but for the many around the world it is just like this, accepted,yet exiled; brought up, yet humiliated.
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