“Why is this booklet called Refuge? Because every day, more and more people are becoming refugees“ Refuge! brings together storytelling, poetry and visual art. It is the result of a collaboration between the St. James Episcopal Church in Florence, the Nuova Associazione Culturale Ulisse (NACU) and SIS Intercultural Study Abroad in Siena. The booklet was…
“Voci da altri mondi. Racconti di vita, speranza e coraggio di chi ha scelto l’Italia come nuova casa” is a collection of short testimonies gathered during the “Voci da altri mondi” events held in Siena in 2022 and 2025. All the stories featured in this brochure are based on real experiences. Their protagonists are young…
Mahdieh Samsami (Mahi for short) is a 24-year-old Iranian migrant seeking refuge or a work permit for residency within Serbia. We first met at the MILAGRO Summer Camp, hosted in July 2025 in Belgrade. Her kind-hearted and extroverted personality made it easy to become friends nearly immediately. Through a brief 10-minute interview on her favourite…
Miško Stanišić was born in 1966 in Sarajevo, former Yugoslavia. He became a refugee from his hometown at the very beginning of the war in Bosnia in April 1992. He lived shortly in Belgrade, and then moved to Stockholm, Sweden, in 1993. He lived in refugee camps, working various jobs, finally settled in Amsterdam, Netherlands….
Rehab Darwish used to be a political journalist in Egypt. Now she is doing a traineeship in project management and volunteers to help Arabic-speaking newcomers navigate Dutch bureaucracy. The distance between those two sentences contains eleven years, three countries, four children, a violent divorce, a brother who has been in prison for seven years without…
Simmi (a pseudonym chosen for her safety) and I met through a mutual friend who was also a migrant. As we shared South Asian descent, we bonded over our shared culture and language. The stories told by Simmi were difficult to listen to; her time in Serbia has often been boiled down to intense moments…
Wessam and I met through the ‘Introduction to Arabic Language and Culture’ class she is teaching at University College Utrecht (Spring Semester, 2026). In many ways, I am simply a student of the Arab language. However, this holds true only if one could confidently say Wessam’s lectures are just classes. While she is teaching me…
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