“I wish I could have done more for her. Her life has been nothing but struggle. She hasn’t known many happy moments. She never had a chance to taste childhood. When we were getting on the plastic boat, I heard her say something that broke my heart. She saw her mother being crushed by the crowd, and she screamed: ‘Please don’t kill my mother! Kill me instead!’“ (Lesvos, Greece)”.
I particularly chose this post because of my attraction to the picture prior reading the story. Looking at the picture and realizing how there is an unpleasant feeling or living in fears in the eyes of the father and daughter. The father explained how the daughter hasn’t experienced childhood as she should due to the circumstances of their life. As a result of this, the daughter’s mentality is passed her age. There are several things that she understands and feels that normal children her age wouldn’t know how to manage. She comprehends the meaning of death and knows what the word “kill” signifies. When the incident occurred with her mother, she stated “kill me instead”. Personally, she had knowledge of what that meant and knows the value of her mother’s life. From the father’s perspective, he doesn’t see how the daughter us developing into a mature child but feared that she is skipping her childhood and growing straight into adulthood because of their life situations. And in a sense I can relate to the part where I understood certain things that people the same age as me wouldn’t.
I chose this post because, like mine, it deals with the dangers of children being exposed to war. In this post, the young girl has seen her mother die and in my post, the young girl is terrified when someone even asks to see her mother. Both of these young girls have been affected mentally by the war and have been robbed of their childhood. In addition, these photos tell us that war has no age limits and everyone is susceptible to all the effects that it brings.
This story relates to the one I posted because they both address the impact the Syrian Refugee crisis has on children and their families. In your post, Ashleigh, the little girl’s father explains how she watched her mother get physically trampled by a crowd, and that his daughter expressed how she was willing to do anything in her power to save her, including giving up her own life to save her mothers. In my post, two brothers experience similar circumstances when they have their father taken away from them to be physically tortured by the army. In both these stories, the negative situations that the parents experience also end up having a major impact on their children. In this story, the father describes how the struggles the little girl faces doesn’t allow her to have many happy moments, since she never had a chance to “taste childhood.” I think this is also true for the story I posted, since the father describes how his sons went several days without eating because he wasn’t around to put food on the table.
In addition, the strained smile the father depicts in this photograph gave me the impression that he is willing to push through any tough situation, and do whatever it takes to make his daughter happy. This is also similar to my post’s photograph in that the fathers slightly-strained facial expression and tight embrace of his sons shows how much cares for his boys.