It’s not often we talk about world news or politics on Spin Sucks, but today is a little bit different.

Today I want to bring to light an issue that most of us will never have to deal with close to home. A worldwide problem most of us will never experience. A problem so big yet most of us will never know anyone who is affected by this such as, say, cancer.

It’s refugees.

People who have to leave their homes, sometimes forcibly, and have to leave things behind…including children.

“With smooth features and a calm way about him, Abdullah Omar, 25, comes across as someone accustomed to hard choices. But the decision to send his one-year-old daughter back to war-ravaged Somalia, because he could not afford to support her, was one of the hardest he and his wife Khadija have ever faced.

That was five months ago. “There is not a night that goes by when I don’t lie awake thinking about my baby and worrying about her,” Khadija told me here at the windswept Choucha transit camp just inside Tunisia.

For the young Somali couple, it was the most challenging in a series of ordeals that they have endured in the four years since they fled Somalia – from a 10-day truck journey with people smugglers across the Sahara to serving time in detention and being hounded by racist thugs in Tripoli.”

Think about that for a minute. Even if you don’t have kids, the idea that a sibling or a cousin or a niece or nephew can’t stay with his or her parents is heart-breaking. (more…)