‘Refugee crisis’ participatory media project
How did the 'refugee crisis' become part of your daily life?
Burak Sayin is currently studying Media and Communication (MSc) in Lund University. He started his journalism journey in Ntvmsnbc, a Turkish news website, as an intern in 2009. It was followed by an international online outlet as a freelancer in 2011. In 2013, during the Gezi protests, he started working for Associated Press Television News as a freelancer on a long term assignment basis; in October 2014, he covered the events in the embattled town of Kobani and the humanitarian crisis that was taking place in the region. The same year, he travelled to almost every city in Turkey’s southeast for different stories with different media outlets. Witnessing the pre-conflict stage in the southeast of Turkey was a turning point for him to focus on more building cultural bridges and to narrow the gigantic gap between political sphere and social sphere.
Lund, Sweden
I crossed my first border in 2010. I was sitting on the behind of a taxi heading from Antakya to Aleppo. I was completely freaking out while the taxi took the last turn into Syria. I was in country I haven’t been before. The guy next to me was obviously nervous. I later realised that I just couldn’t stopped checking my cell phone signal. It took me while a start the conversation in random hand signal with a mixture of my very limited Arabic vocabulary I inherited from Turkish language. He taught I was a police and my nervousness my him nervous. He was a daily worker just trying to reach home and had 4 children waiting for him in front of his house. Very normal I thought all of my stress and strangeness went away not when I saw his house but the moment he started to tell his story to me. That was my ‘Alice’s rabbit hole’ moment. I am listening stories from day on till today. Names of the people don’t stay with me the stories do however… I am trying my best to pass the stories along. That’s why I am trying to be the vanishing mediator that gives the voice to untold and unheard stories whenever and wherever I can. That’s why I am studying media and being a ‘hub’ here to barely pass along stories that would help to build bridges instead of borders. I think there is a story around every corner that deserves be heard or there is a person around every corner that deserves to hear a story .
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