We Had No Choice But to Run

The first thing that struck me when I started volunteering with refugees wasn’t the numbers or the statistics—it was the silence. In the crowded shelter, amid the crammed cots and the hum of hurried whispers, there was a kind of quiet weight that hung in the air. People sat in clusters, holding onto what little they had left, their faces marked by exhaustion and something deeper—an uncertainty about what came next.

I met Samira on my second day. She was sitting on a thin mattress with her six-year-old son curled against her side, his small fingers clenched around the fabric of her sleeve. They had arrived the night before after fleeing violence in their home country, surviving weeks of travel by bus and foot, slipping past danger at every turn. She had been a shop owner. Her husband had stayed behind, hoping to protect what little they had left.

“We had no choice but to run,” she told me, her voice barely above a whisper. She spoke about the moment she knew they had to leave—the gunfire in the distance growing closer, the neighbors who disappeared overnight, the way her son had learned to recognize the sound of an explosion before he had even learned to write his name.

Stories like Samira’s were everywhere. Each person in the shelter carried their own version of loss, each one fleeing something unimaginable. I met Ahmed, a former teacher who had made his way across multiple borders with his wife and daughters. He carried with him a tattered book of poetry—the only possession he had managed to save from his home.

“I used to tell my students that words can survive anything,” he said, flipping through the worn pages. “Now I wonder if we will.”

For weeks, I worked alongside other volunteers distributing food, organizing donations, helping with translation when I could. But more than that, we listened. Some of us were there to provide legal aid, others to help people find housing or work. But often, what people needed most was to be heard—to remind themselves they were still human in a world that had reduced them to case numbers and asylum requests.

In the middle of all this, there were moments that caught me off guard—flashes of resilience in a place built on uncertainty. A young girl, barely nine, teaching English to other children using an old notebook she had found. A group of women laughing as they cooked together in the communal kitchen, finding some comfort in the familiar scents of home. A man playing a makeshift chess game with bottle caps and a board drawn in pen on a piece of cardboard.

One of the volunteers I worked with, Rosa, had been a refugee herself years ago. Now, she was helping others adjust to their new reality. “I know what it feels like to arrive with nothing,” she told me. “So I try to be the person I needed when I was in their place.”

Even as I left the shelter each night, I carried their stories with me. The father who still dreamed of returning home. The mother who wondered if she would ever see her family again. The children who played as if nothing had changed, even though everything had.

Working with refugees didn’t just change the way I saw them—it changed the way I saw the world. It made me realize how fragile normal life can be, how quickly someone’s entire existence can be uprooted. Because none of these people had planned to become refugees. One day, they had homes, jobs, families. And then, one day, they didn’t.

And the truth is, that could happen to any of us.