Few things hit home as hard as children facing hardships and crises. Kids deserve to grow up in safe, healthy, happy environments, but in many places around the world, that's just not the case.
Many of us see videos, news footage and pictures of conditions in migrant camps, but nothing exposes just how bad they are like a child breaking it down first-hand.
Through Our Eyes is a six-part documentary web series that reveals the squalor inside migrant camps and the challenges within one of the most serious humanitarian crises of our lifetime. Episodes feature the experiences of seven kids between ages 11-16, exploring where they live, their daily challenges, and their dreams.
(via Still I Rise): Each episode explores a different theme: life in the hotspot, the struggle for the right to education, integration as a mirror of a possible world and the enormous challenges that are connected to this, up to the negative psychological implications of life in these difficult contexts, without friends and without being able of going to school. All this is recounted by Faizuddin, Nahid, Rostam, Milad, Mobina, Mahdi, and Madalena: children who dream with all their strength of a fair and better future in Europe despite the great daily struggles.
For children dwelling in migrant camps like these around the world, those raw, dank conditions could ultimately have long-term effects on their bodies and minds. Eleven-year-old Faizuddin calls out the camps for being so unhealthy and unsafe.
"The camp is not a safe place, it is very dirty. There are too many mice, rats, insects. Even if you don't have coronavirus and you are healthy, if you live too long in the camp you will automatically get sick," says Faizuddin, 11 years old.
Watch him in Episode 1 of Through Our Eyes below:
The web series Through Our Eyes integrates the photographic book Through Our Eyes (Attraverso i nostri occhi, Bur Rizzoli 2020 – only in Italian), written by Nicolò Govoni, Nicoletta Novara and the students of Mazì, the school of Still I Rise in Samos. According to InfoMigrants, both the book and the web-series are the result of the homonymous photographic exhibition that has already toured more than 36 cities around the world.
