It could have been me.

Today is World Refugee Day. According to the BBC, 1 in 113 people on the Earth today are either refugees, asylum seekers or internally displaced.

I was lucky enough to be born in the UK and because of that fact, I have lived a life of extraordinary privilege. Thankfully, I didn’t have a complicated birth. However, had things had gone wrong during my mother’s labour I would have probably survived due to the fact that I live in a country with a health system committed to providing free care to all who need it. I went to a good school, also free, and (despite having to learn Welsh) got a pretty decent education. Growing up as a girl I never even questioned whether some things were out of reach to me as a women. Maggie T was the boss and so, presumably, could I be, if that’s what I wanted. But I didn’t have to be. I could be the leader of the country or I could be a bus driver and none of those options were unavailable to me because of my gender. I could go on to higher education, if I wanted. I could have a career, if I wanted. I could get married to someone I loved and had chosen, if I wanted. And so I grew up, went to University, got a job, bought a house but never really questioned whether those things were my right.

But it could so easily have been me. 

I could have been born in Syria. Or Afghanistan. Or Iraq.
I could have died before I even really got the chance to live. I could have had my rights stripped away from me for being unlucky enough to be born the wrong gender. I could have been forced into early marriage to someone I neither knew or loved. I could have seen my family and home blown apart by a war that I had no power to stop.

An anti-immigrant wave of hatred is sweeping over parts of our country, and other parts of the world, fuelled by the likes of Farage and Trump and it’s sickening. I’m not blind to the fact that our NHS is struggling and that our Social Services are pushed to their limits and schools are trying to educate children from many different cultures and languages. What I find hard is that people are adamant in proclaiming that these things are our right and that it is only us, the lucky few, who are entitled to them. That somehow, by the sheer luck of being born in this country and the sheer privilege of being able to have a job which allows us to pay taxes, they are rights that are only ours.  

But what if it was us?