Me, the refugee

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2019

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is it like to be taken away from your childhood home, to be brought to a strange new country where you are locked away? That is what happened to reporter Sahar Zand when she became a refugee from her home country of Iran at the age of 12. She had to leave with her mother and sister after her father got into political trouble with the regime. Sahar explores the complex and often painful role reversals, deceptions and sacrifices that the three of them experienced during those often desperate days.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Kevin Fong, and the music you're listening to is by Hans Zimmer, who's composed
0:08.8	the theme for our new podcast, 13 minutes to the moon, which is available now. It's the definitive story of the Apollo
0:15.8	Moon Landings, is told to me by some of the people who made it happen. That's 13 minutes
0:21.1	to the moon, a new podcast from the BBC World Service.
0:25.0	And I'll be back a little later to tell you more about it.
0:31.0	I missed them and they were right in front of me I hugged my granddad and I smelled him and I just wanted to
0:40.2	I just wanted to breathe him in.
0:47.8	Because that...
0:59.7	They were the only people I knew and I thought what if I never see them again and I thought what if I never see them again and I just wanted to breathe him in so that I could carry him in my lungs even when he's not physically there. Mm-mm-M-Mhmm.
1:15.0	The-M-O-Mhmm. BBC World Service, I'm Saha Zand.
1:25.0	Over the next hour, I'm going to be telling you the story of what it feels like to be
1:32.3	a child refugee alone in a
1:35.3	strange country with just a mother and a sister. I know this story well because it's
1:41.4	my story. This is me, the refugee. And the It was my mom's mom and my mom's dad who took us to the airport.
2:07.0	I remember my mom's dad who took us to the airport.
2:10.0	I remember that close up of my granddad's jacket. He was wearing one of those checkered
2:18.6	jackets and it was like brown but if you looked really closely it had like white spots and I remember that
2:26.6	because I was holding him so tight and just breathing him in and I could see
2:30.8	every single detail of his jacket and I could see every single detail of his jacket.
2:33.0	And I remember going up the escalators and looking down and looking at my
2:38.0	grandmother, they're just waving at us.
2:41.0	And smiling, they were just like, it's going to be okay, it's going to be okay it's going to be okay
	...

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