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I first encountered refugees fifteen years ago when I accepted a job in a resettlement agency in Abilene, Texas. Originally from Riga, Latvia, I was new to Texas and the United States myself and could identify with newly-arrived refugees’ struggles. During my ten years with the agency, I met and helped hundreds of people from a variety of countries. It was a totally new learning experience for me, because in the past, I could only imagine what life was like in countries like Bhutan, Cuba, Congo DR or Rwanda. Refugees sometimes told me stories about their past lives, and, being a folklore scholar, I thought, “Well, it would be an exciting project, to interview them and publish their life stories”. Still, I was too busy at resettlement work. With time passing, I felt that a refugee life story collection is becoming more urgent, mostly to prove to everyone around me that refugees are just as individual and unique as we feel about ourselves. It does not matter that I may be in a power position in the agency and a newly arrived refugee has just landed with all his possessions in one duffel bag. We are all human and we each have only one life that is filled with aspirations and dreams for future.
Also, readers rarely know what “resettlement” means and what is going on at the agency every day. I filled that gap by telling short stories of “my agency life” to tie all refugee stories together.
Reviewed by Romuald Dzemo for Readers' Favorite
Ten Cultures, Twenty Lives: Refugee Life Stories by Daina Jurika-Owen is a powerful book that explores a socio-political phenomenon — the refugee problem. In this spellbinding, eye-opening book, the author shares the lives of refugees who, after numerous tribulations and gruesome experiences, arrive in the US and settle in Abilene, Texas. They come from different cultures and backgrounds, men and women, driven away from their homeland by war. They come from Cuba, Rwanda, Liberia, Bhutan, Congo, and other places. They are people leaving behind a whole culture and way of life to search for a place of refuge, but there is more to these stories than that. These are stories that open a whole new world to readers, allowing them to touch the very soul of the refugee and feel the conundrum from a whole new perspective.
Daina Jurika-Owen does a wonderful job in bringing these stories — both heartbreaking and inspiring — to readers. This is a book about courage, about the dreams of millions of people fleeing their countries, but it is also a book about the long road to freedom these people have had to travel. The book answers the question: What does it feel like to be a refugee? Readers are introduced to compelling characters and powerful stories that will bring tears to their eyes and inspire a deep sense of pathos in them. It is a compelling indictment of war and violence and man’s inhumanity to man. I couldn’t help thinking about a powerful video documentary as I turned from one page to the next, encountering the characters and their tenacity and grit as I read through Ten Cultures, Twenty Lives: Refugee Life Stories.
