Grandpa and the World Refugee Day
20 June is the UN World Refugee Day.
It was held globally for the first time on June 20, 2001, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees.
According to the UN,“[e]very minute 20 people leave everything behind to escape war, persecution or terror.”
There are different categories of forcibly displaced persons. And there are several means to coercibly displace someone.
In the 1950s, my grandfather left Portugal with his family to seek a new life and a new work in Brazil.
My father once told me that one of the reasons why grandpa left his land was to escape the Salazar dictatorship. During the last months of my father’s life, he told me this story again, and again.
Grandpa was a hard-working man who used to own a small piece of land in the countryside of Portugal. A humble worker of many crafts — mining worker, subsistence farmer, shoe craftsman, and many more.
Grandpa was not a political activist and was not individually persecuted — at least not that we know of.
Nonetheless, he was tired of living under military coercion and fraudulent elections.
Indeed, he told my father in detail about the last time he went to vote in Portugal.
As he stood in the back of the line, grandpa saw armed soldiers coercing everyone to vote for the dictator Salazar.
And grandpa too was coerced, when the line moved on and it was his turn to put the vote inside the ballot box.
He promised himself that he would never vote again after that.
It was not long after that when grandpa crossed the Atlantic ocean in a ship with his wife and children, to settle in Santa Luzia, a small historical town in the Minas Gerais province.
Decades later, the dictatorship in Portugal came to an end, and the news eventually reached Santa Luzia, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
There in the small historical town, in the house of a certain Portuguese hard-working man, a worker of many crafts who used to own a deared, small piece of land in his home country, and who once crossed the ocean in search of better days, never to return again;
when the news eventually reached Santa Luzia, there, in that very house, a working-class house among many, someone grinned a very special smile.
