Four young women from Malibu have just returned from a mission to help refugees in Greece — the entry point for many fleeing war torn countries and the center of the refugee crisis in Europe. There are currently 21 million refugees around the world and these young women, all in their early twenties, went to help on their own without the auspices of a group to guide them.
“What has been a shock to us is a lack of awareness from people in the United States about what it means to be a refugee. For Europeans, it’s right on their doorstep, but we don’t see it,” Majd said. “There’s a lot of ignorance about what the reality of the situation actually looks like. We want to share in our film about the hardships and the reality these people face every day.”
Majd related stories about a woman she met from Iraq who was six months pregnant without money to afford to buy her child any necessities, so was planning on returning. Another person she met was running from the Taliban in Afghanistan after they came to his house and killed his brother thinking it was him. His father told him not to return. Later, he was nearly killed in a terrorist attack while praying at a mosque, where 160 people died. He put another victim’s blood on himself and pretended to be dead in order to avoid being killed.
“What I would very much like to get across to people is that violence is the reality these people are escaping from. When we say we don’t want refugees coming to our country because they’re terrorists — that is a complete misunderstanding. They’re running from the terrorists. They’ve suffered more than I can explain and they’re now being treated like animals in camps or they’re homeless on the streets facing incredible destitution. No one wants to become a refugee. They want to go back home but they can’t.”
Megan Majd, “born and raised” in Malibu but now living in San Francisco, received a grant last year to promote peace in the world. She went to France and Greece for her first attempt helping the displaced in Europe and help film a documentary about the dire situation. She called it “an impactful experience and pretty heartbreaking at the same time.” Upon her return, she vowed to go back and do more so she set up a crowd funding campaign with a goal to raise $5,000 with the intention of giving it to nongovernment agencies helping refugees. When she posted her plea on social media, seven of her friends asked to join her. Rose Massett, Rebecca Banks and Hayley Bosworth, childhood friends from Malibu, and four others joined Majd. The group spent two weeks in Greece, visiting Athens, Lesbos and Thessaloniki, all hot spots for arriving refugees from the Middle East. In total, they raised over $25,000.
“We implemented a series of projects while we were there,” Majd explained. “We created two different arts centers, helped fund a computer center and a children’s center, bought laptops, smart phones and tablets for different individuals and NGOs and bought equipment for a soccer and cricket team.” The women also filmed a documentary while there, intending to shine a light on the crisis and bring stories to the world. The group hopes to have the film ready to submit to festivals by next year.
What Majd says she found interesting was that all the people who volunteered were women.
“It was all women stepping up to be a part of this and to be helpful,” she said. “When we were thinking about it we noticed that almost all the people we were coordinating with — almost all of them were women. We started thinking about why there are so many women that are reaching out and stepping up and trying to be involved and be helpful in this crisis.
“We found that actually it’s a trend all over the world with the refugee crisis,” she continued. “There are more women volunteers than men. So we made that a center point to our film — about women trying to restore dignity to other people who don’t have it anymore — who have kind of lost an element of their humanity when their choice has been taken away from them.”
The women have created a grassroots organization called RefugeeReliefProject.com where they hope to raise money for future trips and a more sustainable model for actively providing help.
