We know the crisis in numbers: 65.3 million people forcibly displaced around the world,sex marriage and eroticism in contemporary islamic advice literature 21.3 million refugees fleeing conflict and persecution across international borders.
But while those stats are important in context, they can make it hard to remember who refugees are as individuals: engineers and lawyers, nurses and small business owners, parents and children -- many families from across the globe, all seeking safety.
A new short film series aims to put their personal stories front and center.
SEE ALSO: Seeing through new eyes: Refugee children paint the wars they've survivedStories of Human Kind: Searching for Homeis a joint effort from Save the Children, Johnson & Johnson and Facebook, focusing on the lives of refugee families at the Tempelhof refugee camp in Berlin, Germany. The goal of the video project is to help humanize the crisis, and put faces to those often intangible statistics.
Starting Wednesday, four three-minute films will appear in millions of Facebook users' News Feeds over the next few weeks. Housed on Johnson & Johnson's Facebook page, the posts will target people who have shown an interest in refugees, aid organizations, and women's and girls' issues.
"The objective is to really try to remind people that refugees are just people," Carolyn Miles, president and CEO of Save the Children, told Mashable. "They're families -- they're moms and dads and kids ... So, we've been doing this project to film these families who have kind of made it to the end of the journey."
"The objective is to really try to remind people that refugees are just people."
Tempelhof, the camp where these families live, is a large, decommissioned airport currently housing more than 1,000 refugees. The location, Miles said, is almost symbolic -- it's the site of the Berlin airlift in 1948, through which the U.S. and its allies sent food and supplies, ultimately freeing West Berlin from a Soviet blockade after World War II.
But now, Tempelhof Airport's seven hangars are filled with numerous "cabins" -- essentially high-walled cubicles, 25 square meters each, where families of five or six sleep on bunk beds.
Save the Children has set up "child-friendly spaces" at the refugee camp, which "give kids the chance to just be kids, get some sense of normal routine," Miles said. These spaces are bright, colorful rooms, with games, toys and various educational programs. For example, children at Tempelhof are learning German, so they can meet the requirements to enroll in local schools.
According to Miles, the facility was set up with the thinking that each family would only be there for a matter of weeks. Most of the families she met, however, had been there for at least five months -- many of them longer. Some are waiting for housing; others are still waiting to get through the asylum process.
"We had to leave our life in Syria so that the girls could forget what they had lived through."
One family stuck out in Miles' mind: a woman who had been a pediatric nurse in Syria, her husband who had owned a laundromat, and their two daughters, ages 3 and 5.
"Basically, these two little girls -- all they have known is being surrounded by war," Miles said. "And the mom was describing to me how there were bombings all the time. The girls would be crying, they would be upset. That's all they knew, really, was this world of complete chaos."
The family, featured in the short film above, decided they had to leave.
"We had to leave our life in Syria so that the girls could forget what they had lived through," the mother said in the video.
The other films in the series include a Save the Children aid worker from Syria, a mother and her two sons who escaped war in Afghanistan earlier this year, and two Afghan sisters hoping to continue their education in Berlin.
"Here, my heart is at peace," one mother said. "Here, my children have security. What's important to me is that my children make something of their lives. They're more important than anything."
Every family Miles spoke to at Tempelhof said they wanted to go back to their home countries. It reminded her of when she visited the Za'atari refugee camp in Jordan five years ago, where a family told her everything would be fine, because they would only need to stay there for a few months.
"They were so convinced that it would be safe enough so they could go back within months of the start of the war," Miles said. "I don't know where that family is now, but they certainly aren't back in Syria."
Miles said working with Facebook was an opportunity to distribute these films to the social network's extensive reach. It gives Save the Children and Johnson & Johnson the power to show a different side of refugees than what many people might be seeing in the news or hearing in the political arena.
"Social platforms can do a huge amount to change people's minds about things."
The ultimate goal is two-fold: to get people to share the videos so it isn't only likeminded people seeing them, and to donate to Save the Children.
"We want people to give to Save the Children's work, and to learn more about what these refugee families are going through," Miles said.
She hopes the social media-focused approach will help people come up with their own actions -- not just advocacy, but also educating people on refugees and who they are.
"There's a lot of discourse right now that refugees aren't people who deserve our support, or people we want to open our doors to," she said. "We're trying to educate people a little bit more, and social platforms can do a huge amount to change people's minds about things."
The film series is part of Save the Children's main campaign during the United Nations General Assembly and surrounding events this month, focusing on the refugee crisis and education for kids. The organization is working toward ensuring that no child misses out on school for more than 30 days.
You can learn more about these efforts, the film series, and how you can help by visiting Save the Children's website and Johnson & Johnson's Facebook page.
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