17/06/2026
For Refugee Week and last Sunday's One Romsey festival the following speech was delivered outside Romsey Town Hall by Oksana Kravchenko ahead of a performance by the Ukrainian women’s choir Namysto:
Every year in June, Refugee Week is marked across the UK, each time with a theme that helps us reflect on the refugee experience.
This year’s theme is Courage — and I invite you to reflect on it with me.
Some may think refugees flee because they are afraid. But what about the courage it takes to survive in a new country?
Not the loud, heroic courage from films, but the quiet, everyday courage refugees carry inside them.
Courage is waking up in a new country and trying again, even when your heart is still living somewhere else.
Courage is learning a new language when your own still aches on your tongue.
Courage is rebuilding a life from fragments, when the world you knew ended without warning.
Courage is raising children to feel safe, even when you yourself feel suspended between two worlds.
Courage is showing up — to appointments, classes, community events — when years of uncertainty have exhausted your nervous system.
For many refugees, courage is not a choice. It is the only way to keep moving when
the past cannot be returned to and the future is still unclear.
And with this understanding of courage, I want to speak about what the refugee experience truly feels like.
For refugees, uncertainty and loneliness don’t just appear — they become the constant state of mind. Not because life was ever predictable, but because exile
destroys so many anchors at once. Being a refugee is not a poetic “new chapter”. It is a long journey of survival and adaptation.
Most people live with a quiet inner certainty: I know where I live, who my people are, how my tomorrow is arranged.
For a refugee, all of this disappears at once — home, language, social role, plans, the feeling of control. The mind experiences it not as change, but as a break in the line of life.
Orientation is lost too. Even simple things stop being automatic: how to speak, how to access healthcare, how to find housing, what the social norms are. The brain stays on high alert, scanning for safety in situations that used to be effortless.
Then comes a deeper loneliness — the absence of “your people”, your cultural context, the ones who knew you before. The environment where you were understood without explanation simply vanishes.
Many refugees live in suspension: temporary documents, waiting for decisions, unable to plan. When you cannot say where you will be in a year, the nervous system remains in a state of unfinished threat.
Behind all this is trauma — war, loss, separation, fear. Even in safety, the mind continues to live as if danger is still near.
Refugees often lose their own reflection too. We know ourselves through our surroundings — our work, our language, our community. In exile, many feel: “I don’t know who I am now.”
And refugees grieve losses that society cannot see: the loss of homeland, identity, the feeling of home, the future. This grief is deep, and often silent.
And yet — despite everything — refugees continue to build new connections, new routines, new meaning.
This is courage too: the courage not just to survive, but to live.
With time, the mind begins to create new anchors — new people, new rituals, a sense of competence, a predictable daily life.
And slowly, the feeling returns: I can live again.
