Come on Naomi! You Can Do It

It is possible that a mother and her child will die today in the exodus from their native land, dreaming of reaching a perceived haven of safety and heaven of jobs in abundance. There are reports of deaths and other horror stories affecting the people on the move but they remain largely a faceless mass.

In 2022, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a UN-related agency’s Missing Migrants Project documented “the deaths of 6,876 people during migration worldwide, an increase compared to the 6,083 recorded in 2021 and the highest death toll recorded since 2016”.

“The majority of people whose deaths are documented in the MMP database in 2022 and prior years are unidentified,” the IOM’s web site states. “More than 3,500 individuals were recorded with an unknown country of origin in 2022, including 1,395 people who were reported missing at sea and presumed dead.”

People are leaving their native countries in vast numbers seeking a better life in other countries. There are daily reports of their movement in land caravans marching through hundreds of miles/kilometers of jungle, on overcrowded sailing barracoons falling apart at sea and in the freezing wheel wells of passenger jet airlines.

ABENG365.com is initiating its Exodus Project that aims to give the invisible masses faces and spaces to share their stories. Whether they are from junkets trying to sail across the Pacific from south Asia to Australia, those risking Mediterranean and Atlantic rides on rafts and glorified canoes hoping to get to western Europe, or the armies marching through jungles to get to North America, we welcome their stories.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), citing its UNHCR Global Trends 2022, reported that at the end of that year there were 35.3 million refugees, 62.5 million internally displaced people and 5.4 million asylum seekers.

The UNHCR said, “52 per cent of all refugees and other people in need of international protection came from just three countries”, Syria, Ukraine and Afghanistan.

The Exodus Project wants migrants to tell their migrant, refugee and asylum seekers’ stories in their own words and or images. They need to register as a guest on the site then log in and tell their story. The page is set up in English but the questions should be able to be viewed in other languages.

In the coming weeks and months we will be speaking also with people working with the global movement and those studying the phenomenon.

While most of the articles on this site are restricted to registered users or are behind a paywall, the Exodus Project reports will be freely accessible to all visitors to the site.