Awake At Night

Extraordinary personal stories from people who have chosen to put themselves in harm's way, to help refugees. From UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

Amy Pope has always championed humane and orderly migration as an opportunity for societies, not a problem. Now the first female Director General of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) she is campaigning for a fundamental shift in attitudes towards newcomers.

“You just give somebody a little space. Everybody has purpose. Everybody has dreams, everybody wants to be seen.”

Human migration is likely to rise over the coming decades, with the IOM predicting that hundreds of millions of people could be displaced due to climate change alone. In this episode, Amy Pope reflects on how better to prepare communities and why celebrating the contributions of migrants is a win-win for societies around the world.

“The evidence is pretty overwhelming that it doesn't even take very long for migration to actually pay out pretty significantly for the communities who host the migrants, and definitely for the communities that migrants are coming from.”

Monique Sokhan survived the Cambodian genocide, having fled the Khmer Rouge terror when she was just a small child. Now, working as Senior Protection Coordinator, at UNHCR’s Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific, she is still searching for answers about the atrocities that killed many of her family members.

“It’s difficult because you’re wondering why others have died and you’re alive. And for those who did not survive [...] I felt like having a responsibility somehow to do something that would make them proud of me.”

Dedicating her life to humanitarian work, Monique soon found herself face to face with the very people who were responsible for killing her own family and friends. In this special bitesize episode, she reflects on her quest to understand the perpetrators of genocide, on reserving judgement, and on the unanswered questions that continue to haunt her.

Karolina Lindholm Billing was posted to Ukraine less than a year before the full-scale Russian invasion. As the UNHCR Representative in the country, she draws hope from witnessing the power of community volunteer networks in supporting displaced people in their hour of need.

“Volunteers from all areas of society have helped people who have been directly impacted by the war. They're cooking meals, giving clothing, giving money, opening their homes.”

War has forced around one-third of Ukrainians from their homes, in what is currently one of the world’s largest human displacement crises. UNHCR is assisting them with housing, cash, and legal assistance. In this episode, Karolina Lindholm Billing reflects on Ukrainian resilience, the drive to rebuild, and why people long to stay in their own homes, even in a war zone.

Adiba Qasim is from the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq. In August 2014, her village was stormed by Islamic State militants who killed and enslaved thousands of Yazidis. Adiba and her family managed to escape just before the militants arrived. She was 19 years old.

“At 7:00 in the morning, relatives called my father and said: ‘We are now coming to the North, because the Islamic State are 3:00 in the morning attacked us and many people have been killed and it is very difficult. So, run away! Get out of your house’!”

She was haunted by the knowledge that many of her friends and relatives were taken captive by Islamic State – and held as sex slaves. Some survived – and when they were freed, Adiba was there to help.