1. Preface

While we go about our days, we often forget what is happening in other areas of the world. Some choose not to read the news anymore, because it is depressing, when they hear about yet another crisis in some unknown country far away. The news is full of numbers. How many people are affected in the most recent drought, war, conflict, terror attack, earthquake, flood, or food crisis. Growing bigger as more and more people are displaced, running for their lives, not knowing how to find food for their children or where the next missile will hit.

339 million people need humanitarian aid. That is every 23rd human on this planet. 108.4 million people have lost their homes. 828 million people suffer from hunger.

We read these numbers and are outraged for a few seconds then we continue with our lives, watch the next TikTok video or Netflix, and forget about the numbers. But what is lost and often forgotten: Behind every single number there are individual people with their own hopes and dreams. The media too often reports about a war of tanks, munitions, and rockets, about a conflict of parties and interests, about a hunger crisis, of inflation, prices, and poverty. But not about a conflict and crisis of people. People who are dying, starving, and losing their homes and their loved ones.

But we cannot change anything anyway, and we have our own lives and problems to worry about. We are only even slightly interested when the media mentions that among the 300k people who have died in the most recent tsunami, that two of our own countries’ people also died. The other 299,998 are just that: numbers in an event far away and which we forget almost immediately after the next cat video. And who wants to hear about people starving somewhere else, every time that we cannot empty our plates? Who wants to hear about how other people are sleeping in cold bunkers, hiding from missile attacks, while we complain about the rainy weather? Or about girls walking for three hours to find water, while we stand under a hot shower. We just want to live our lives and remain ignorant about the horrors of the world.

 I was just like this until recently. Happy in my own little bubble. But when I started to talk to the faces behind the numbers, looked them in the eyes and heard their stories, it changed for me. I now carry these stories with me everywhere. So, to the statement that we cannot change anything, I say that we can listen and pay attention. Because otherwise the suffering remains silent and that is the darkest and most hopeless corner of the world that I have ever witnessed.

The following voices are just a glimpse of reality. A few minutes of a life being lived somewhere on this planet. An echo that needs to be heard. That needs to be listened to. It is based on real life and real events. So please, take your time and let them speak for themselves.