November 28, 2007	Wednesday	Ziqa’ad 17, 1428

LONDON: When Amir arrived in Britain last December he was 16, fleeing Iraq on a false passport after the kidnap and murder of his father. He landed at London-Heathrow airport with nothing except a scrap of paper on which his name was scribbled in English. “I did not know where I was; I could not speak English,” Amir recalls, his hands fidgeting nervously. “I was scared — I had no family, no friends. Who is going to help me? Who is going to give me support?”

In the stark terminology of Home Office (UK Ministry of the Interior) bureaucracy, Amir is one of an estimated 4,000 “unaccompanied young refugees” who arrive in Britain each year from everywhere from Iraq and Afghanistan to the Congo and Rwanda. Separated from their families and far from home, many suffer from depression, insomnia and anxiety.

The vast majority — 80 per cent — settle in London and their experiences are rarely understood.

“Mainstream society only hears certain things about immigration,” says Tiffany Fairey.

“They never hear direct stories from the people who are coming here or what they are dealing with.” Fairey is the co-founder of PhotoVoice, a UK charity that uses photography to enable marginalised groups to tell their stories.

It has been working with young refugees since 2002, most recently on New Londoners, in which 15 of them have been mentored by professional photographers.

The photographs can be viewed online and a book is being planned for next summer. “The biggest barrier to integration is misunderstanding,” says Fairey. New Londoners enables the young people “to tell their own stories from their own perspective”.

PhotoVoice was helped in the project by Dost, a London charity that supports young refugees. Dost is based in Trinity Centre, a converted redbrick church in East Ham in east London.

“People don’t live in a vacuum,” adds Yesim Deveci, who set up Dost. “If everyone who has been part of your life does not exist any more you need to feel that someone cares about you.”

For the young refugees who visit Dost, most of their interactions with mainstream society are institutional — social workers, the Home Office, their housing office and their solicitor; the New Londoners project allows the young people to transcend their refugee identity.

The recurring themes in New Londoners’ images are, perhaps unsurprisingly, being far from home, and the contradictory emotions that come from being in Britain.

Mussie, a 17-year-old from Eritrea, photographed food that he had cooked. “This picture is about my new life in England,” he says. “In my country I had never cooked before.”

Amir also photographed one of his meals. “For someone here, it’s just my breakfast,” he explains. “Two eggs, some bread, tea. But if I showed this picture to someone in Iraq they wouldn’t believe it because in Iraq we imagined English breakfasts to be tables full of lots of food.”

Another of Amir’s photographs shows dinner being eaten by candlelight. “They hadn’t been able to pay for electricity so it had been cut off,” he tells me.

“In Iraq we don’t believe things like this happen in England.” Many of Amir’s photographs are taken in the dark; like many young refugees, he finds it hard to sleep at night. “Many of the kids are so anxious,” explains Liz Orton of PhotoVoice. “When we first gave them cameras, they came back after a week with dozens of images of each other taken during the night. You could just see the time passing.”

Artist and photographer Gayle Chong Kwan, found that working with the young refugee opened her eyes to her own Chinese heritage. “It was not about me teaching, so much as having a conversation,” she says.

“With photography there is none of the frustration of having a limited language. These young people can express thoughts that they could not do in English.”

It is almost impossible to imagine the journeys that have led these young refugees to Britain. Many have been orphaned by war; most of them are having to grow up without things the average Briton takes for granted. Their photographs are hopeful, but tinged with loss and uncertainty.

Many of the refugees are still awaiting Home Office decisions on whether they will be allowed to remain in this country. Those who have been granted the right to remain have complicated feelings about the prospect.

“I feel safe here and I have a chance to do something with my life,” says Amir, “but life here is not easy. I want to use my photographs to tell people in Iraq, ‘Don’t think that living in England is easy, don’t think this country is better than Iraq. Life here is very hard.’ I would like one day to return to Iraq, my country, and when I go I will take a camera.”—Dawn/Guardian News Service