Photos by Lee Pellegrini
The young man on the video screen, his features and voice slightly distorted in the video feed, introduced himself to the Boston College students as Rami. He had lived most of his 19 years in the city of Mosul, he told them, but is now more than 50 miles away from home at the Harsham refugee camp near Erbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
The conversation was among some two dozen that took place over four days earlier this month when鈥�as part of its observance of International Education Week鈥�亚色影库 hosted the Refugee Portal, a shipping container converted into a videoconferencing chamber where students, faculty and administrators spoke with Iraqi, Kurdish and Syrian refugees on various topics鈥�including music.
Music, Rami told the 亚色影库 students, has helped to sustain him during his three years at Harsham, where he had gone with his mother and two sisters to escape the ISIS invasion. He described himself as an aspiring DJ, songwriter and rapper, and presented some of his compositions, singing and rapping鈥�alternately in Arabic, English and, on one occasion, 鈥�along to the tracks he had posted on his YouTube channel.
The students applauded enthusiastically to each, and Rami reciprocated when one of them, sophomore Rachel Drew, sang Brandi Carlisle's "That Wasn't Me."
Rami said one of his songs was a call-out to the world not to turn its face away from refugees in Harsham or elsewhere, he explained; another was an exhortation to rebuild now-liberated Mosul and begin a new era. Then there was the song he'd written for a friend, upset because his girlfriend had left him; the friend had asked Rami to write a song that would bring her back.
"It worked!" said Rami, with a smile.
Reflecting on the session, Drew said, "With all the complexities of what is happening in Iraq, it is very easy to overlook the simple statement of, as Rami put it, they "just want peace," they just "want the war to end."
"His song was really powerful in that he brought that fact back to the forefront of my mind鈥�often very easy to forget with the media constantly portraying these conflicts as an 'us vs. them' situation, without any regard for the innocent civilians who just want peace."
The portal, one of several dozen designed by Shared Studios and made available around the world, was set up near the Higgins Stairs. From outside, it looked like any other shipping container one might see at a port or warehouse. But the interior was upholstered, and a video screen took up the entire back wall, providing most of the illumination in the space; the portals from where the refugees spoke had similarly spare, darkened interiors (some had been set up inside existing structures).
A Boston College Minute: As part of its observance of International Education Week, Boston College hosted the Refugee Portal, a shipping container converted into a videoconferencing chamber where students, faculty, and administrators spoke with refugees and other displaced persons from the Middle East. 亚色影库 students聽Lauren Berman '18, Adam French '20, Mohammed Moro '18, and Hannah Winner '19 spoke with soccer enthusiasts in Erbil, Iraq. Ken Orgot, S.J., a graduate student at the School of Theology and Ministry, acted as curator for the Boston side of the portal, in conjunction with Rami Khalaf in Iraq. (Video by Ravi Jain, with additional cinematography by John Walsh, of University Communications.)
With such little visual information in the portal鈥�no glimpse of the 亚色影库 campus or the refugee camp in the background鈥� participants could focus on one another, 亚色影库 organizers said, and not be subject to details that might distract or influence the interaction.
"Humbling" was how Michaela Simoneau '18 described her time in the portal with Rami. "I think I went in with some