A refugee’s journey MADIHA’S LONG PATH TO P EACE

Ididn’t even know what a refugee was before I became one,” Madiha Ali Changezi admits, reflecting on the traumatic journey her family endured to escape persecution in Pakistan.

The 21-year-old student and activist was just 14 when she, her three siblings and their parents sold their home in Quetta to pay smugglers to help them seek safety, travelling across land and sea to reach Indonesia.

“When I think back to that night in the. “All we could do was carry on. We were illegal, so if the police had seen us, we’d have been in trouble. I remember my young brothers being on the shoulders of the smugglers. At one point, the swamp water was so deep, it reached my shoulders.”