Fiction - Children's - ISBN: 074755983X, 1582347638, 0747550867 more
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Alem, the product of an Ethiopean father and Eritrean mother, is left alone in London, his fate resting in the hands of the Refugee Council and the British justice system. This...more...story charts Alem's fate as he is moved from children's home to foster family, and in and out of court hearings. From the AuthorIt's a hard life being labelled `political'. It seems that because I'm constantly ranting about the ills of the world I'm expected to have all the answers, but I don't, and I've never claimed to, besides I'm not a politician. What interests me is people. When I hear politicians saying that we are being `flooded' by refugees, I always remind myself that each `refugee' is a person, a person who for some reason has left everything they know and love to find safety in a strange, and sometimes hostile country. I wrote `Refugee Boy' because I realised that every day I was meeting refugees, and each one of them had a unique, and usually terrifying story to tell. I have seen refugee camps in Gaza, Montenegro and other places around the world but when I met Million and Dereje Hailemariam, two teenagers who were being denied asylum in Britain, I knew that I had to write a story that would illustrate the suffering and the struggles that many asylum seekers have to endure. Million and Dereje's parents feared for the lives of their boys, they did not want them to grow up in an environment where they would witness war on a daily basis. I have also met children whose parents were executed in front of them, or who themselves had been kidnapped and tortured. For `Refugee Boy' I borrowed from the many stories that I have heard and created a story that I believe many refugees would recognise. I would like to know that anyone who reads the book would think before they accuse refugees of looking for a free ride. We all want to live in peace, we all want the best for our families. The Celts, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jamaicans are all refugees of one sort or another. What kind of a refugee are you? And what are you scared of? --This text refers to the Paperback edition. See all Product Description