Build culture from rubble by Sabine Fischer

Let’s get one thing straight: refugees are not waiting around for pity. They’re too busy starting businesses, running classrooms, building theaters out of tarpaulin, and bartering for fresh okra in marketplaces they've built from scratch. While the world often sees camps and exile as places of despair, there’s a different story pulsing beneath the surface, one of extraordinary resilience and grassroots brilliance.

Yes, wars displace people. Yes, borders close, and headlines frame refugees as burdens or faceless statistics. But somewhere between the breaking news ticker and the latest humanitarian report lies an inconvenient truth for every self-satisfied policy wonk: refugees are some of the most self-organizing, culturally rich, and determined communities on the planet. Not victims in waiting but survivors in action.

Let’s take Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. Established in 1992, it’s now a small city, unofficially. With over 200,000 residents, it has everything from bustling markets and hair salons to tech startups and fashion shows. Refugees there have set up their own internal governance structures. Some even pay taxes, to each other. Because when you’re left out of someone else’s system, you don’t wait for a seat at the table. You build your own.

In Greece, where I’ve seen firsthand the sea-tossed rubber boats arrive, refugees have turned tent corners into poetry slams. In Lebanon, Syrian refugees have recreated their local dishes and offered them to the world with pop-up kitchens. From Za’atari in Jordan to urban Berlin, a pattern emerges: no matter how constrained, people reweave the fabric of their cultures, one thread at a time.

And don’t get me started on education. Parents in these communities will teach algebra with a stick in the dirt if they must. Informal schools bloom everywhere, even under plastic sheeting and corrugated roofs. Children gather on repurposed cardboard, not for pity’s sake, but because tomorrow still matters. Tell me again how this is passive victimhood?

In a world obsessed with measuring worth by productivity, one would assume that refugee communities, showing this much initiative, would be met with admiration. Instead, they’re told they’re lucky to be fed. Imagine telling an entrepreneur who just launched a bakery from inside a displacement camp that they’re a burden. Imagine informing a mother running a clandestine kindergarten that she’s a drain on society. It’s not just insulting, it’s categorically false.

The global narrative is long overdue for an overhaul. International aid helps, yes, but it often comes with bureaucratic foot-dragging and condescending top-down structures. It’s time to start trusting the people who are already doing the work. Give them tools, not cages. Fund their efforts, don’t just study them. The UN might host a conference on refugee agency every five years. Refugees live it every day.

In true Kalamidas fashion, let’s toss in a bit of sharp honesty here: the problem isn’t the so-called helplessness of refugees, it’s the helplessness of our imagination about them. We are terrified of empowering the displaced because it breaks the tired dichotomy of savior and saved. We fear their strength, because it reminds us that perhaps resilience doesn’t come from privilege, but from losing everything and rebuilding anyway.

So the next time you read about a refugee, picture not the queue for rations but the teenage girl teaching herself coding on a donated tablet. Think less about tents and more about tenacity. Because these aren’t broken people. These are future city planners, poets, and professors, just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with the reality they’ve already created.

Their story isn’t one of tragedy. It’s one of power. And it’s time we started telling it that way. Because xenophobes and anti-immigrants, (including certain authorities and states) hate this.