A beautiful but tragic story from Syria

Syria has been host to 450,000 Palestinian refugees for decades. (Their families found refugee there from the fighting when Israel was founded in 1948.) More recently, Syria has been host to some 700,000 refugees from the fighting in US-occupied Iraq.
This photo is from a lovely story from Syria about a project in which two choirs– one made up of Iraqi refugee children and non-refugee Syrian children, and the other of Palestinian refugee children– came together to sing a program that included Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi music.

photo by Ibrahim Malla
Too often, people in the international community think of refugees as, at best, “a problem” to be solved through merely technocratic means, or at worst a “menace”, and a potential source of instability. People forget that people who are refugees are every bit as human as those of us who are not (yet) refugees. They have amazing capacities and capabilities that can be either nurtured or stifled by the way they are treated. They have agency, resilience, and amazing capacities to love, to be kind, or to experience the whole range of other human emotions. And they have rights, codified in international law but “honored”, too often, only in the breach.
I look at the photo of these children– who seem to be part of the Iraqi portion of the choir. I imagine the work it took for their parents or older siblings to get them looking so neat and beautiful, even though many of them probably have horrible living conditions. I see the range of ways they’re engaging with the task at hand (or looking mischievously around). I look at their joy in artistic creation and in working together. I notice that they’re reading words and perhaps also reading music.
Imagine where any one of these children might be in another two, or 20, years time! Will they have returned to their respective homelands and be living a peaceful and productive life there? Might one or more of these children turn out to have real musical talent, now being well nurtured, and end up a Barenboim or a Yo-Yo Ma? Where else might this experience of musical education, group activity, and the nurturing hands of adults lead these kids?
A Happy New Year to people everywhere. And especially, in our conflict-riven times, to all people everywhere who are refugees.