Observing World Refugee Day June 20
- juliafw
- 15 hours ago
- 3 min read
What if you were forced from your country, fleeing with only what you could carry? What if you lived in a refugee camp, unable to communicate with anyone around you? What if, after finally reaching a safe country, you still couldn't access basic services — no language classes, no job training, no way to rebuild your life?
What if you succeeded anyway?
Bhawani did. Now a proud American citizen, he was a Deaf refugee from Bhutan — and his journey represents a hidden crisis within a crisis. Between 15% and 30% of refugees live with disabilities, including deafness. That means double marginalization: invisible and isolated in the camps, underserved in the countries where they resettle.
Fortunately, in Goldhap refugee camp, the National Association of the Deaf Nepal offered limited classes in Nepali Sign Language — giving him and other Deaf refugees something most of us take for granted: the ability to communicate, learn, and belong to a community. In America, separated from his friends and without access to ASL classes, he had to start again from the ground up, finding a way to learn ASL, access the resettlement services other refugees received as a matter of course, and gathering together the other Deaf refugees to learn ASL and form a community.
Today is World Refugee Day, observed June 20 to honor the courage and resilience of refugees everywhere. The UNHCR counts 42.5 million people currently living as refugees. That number doesn't include asylum seekers or the millions more displaced within their own borders.
Behind every statistic is someone like Bhawani.
Here’s his message:
Hello, I'm Bhawani.
I was born in Bhutan just before serious political turmoil came to a head. The Bhutanese government forced a portion of its population to flee for their lives to Nepal as refugees.
There were seven refugee camps in the eastern portion of Nepal. I lived in one of the smaller camps, Goldhap, which housed around 7,500 displaced people. Some of those people, like me, were deaf. I attended school in the camp, but lessons were conducted in spoken language. I tried to keep up through lip reading, but ultimately the lack of effective communication made school inaccessible to me.
When we needed to see a doctor, family members often acted as the sole communicators with the doctor with little to no input from the deaf person. The deaf were left to get whatever information they could get from resources around the room, or simply looked out the window.
Around 1996, the National Association of the Deaf Nepal began teaching Nepali Sign Language classes in all seven refugee camps. This brought us Deaf individuals together and gave us a way to communicate with each other, and fostered a sense of community among us. From that, we would frequently get together for picnics, games, and any other reasons as we saw fit.
In 2011, with the help of the International Organization for Migration, my family relocated to New Hampshire, USA. Upon arrival, those of us who were deaf found no classes that were accessible to us. While our hearing counterparts had ESL classes where they learned English and were able to begin to rebuild, Deaf refugees had no ASL classes and were left isolated in our new communities. There were cultural orientation classes, but there were no interpreters.
The United Nations estimate that there are currently 42.5 million refugees around the world. The United States plans to accept 7,500 of these people this year, which is a greatly reduced number.
