As you enter this space, we invite you to practice silence, open your heart and gentle your gaze.

Malusu – Sierra Leone

“I feel like the world map is labelling people to where they stand in this world.”

Anonymous – Kurdistan

“In Canada, it’s better, but I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but at least it’s better than how our government treated us.”

Imalus – Sierra Leone

“Here, I am not rich, but I believe I can eat a balanced diet every day, my children are happy. I am a happy man now.”

Bongo – South Sudan

“Perhaps there is more technology here when you have money. Your demand increases.”

Nauris – Bhutan

“We were requesting freedom of language in our country. The Government of Bhutan abandoned Nepali books in our schools and started burning our books. We started agitating the government for our rights. So in response the government decided to evict us forcefully and so 120,000 Nepalese forced to leave our country, their rights, cultures, traditions. Greatest injustice was my mother tongue was burnt out by the Government of Bhutan.”

Hawa – Sierra Leone

“Coming here, sometimes seeing racist things happening in Canada, you just feel like what’s happening on the other side. I saw it on the other side and I’m here and see it happening again. You’re just in the middle, you don’t know who to trust and where you can go if you need help.

Canada is more quiet and peaceful than where I came from, apart from what is happening. I have been here for five years and haven’t seen someone pointing a gun at someone, and that is the difference I will see.”

Joseph – South Sudan

“Here justice is embedded in freedom and sometimes freedom is misunderstood. Back home, we have chiefs and elders who enforce and solve outcomes.”

Ester – South Sudan

“When the war came, I had to run and slip under the tree. It is really painful for me. I remember one day in the morning it was 7am early morning and I saw some people coming and without brushing our teeth, we had to run. We stayed in the mountains for the whole day without food.”

Martin – Kurdistan

“I think it’s pretty bad that Kurdistan is not on the map because our country has been taken over so it doesn’t belong to us anymore. That’s all I have to say.”

Liberty – Kurdistan

“I drew our home town being destroyed this last year. Turkey decided to think that our town was taken a step too far, and even though they are all their own civilians and Turkish citizens, they still just came in, defying any human rights, kicking teachers out of school, and bombing the city for whoever would not want to leave. All of this was happening as our family was there, we would just keep hearing from them, trying to talk to them over Skype. Burned. Burned alive in basements. And that’s just our home town. This just happens constantly throughout our country. This was the biggest injustice.”

Anonymous – Syria

“In Canada, everything about justice is different. There’s system in place to defend you, but it’s not the perfect system either, …but it’s still better. It’s a human right, you can’t buy the right, you’re born with justice in Canada. It’s really important for us to know what our rights are. So if we experience it in our home country, we can speak out for it. Back home you just have to deal with it.”

Anonymous – Kurdistan

“Back home they don’t get freedom of self expression or any kind of expression and here in Canada it is a dream come true. I wouldn’t dream of having these dreams back home.”

Hawa – Sierra Leone

“I feel like they are just separating people. In my opinion the world is one round, when the world is going around, when it turns to the sun, others have the light and others have moon and darkness. Maps tell you where you belong, where you have to be. The only thing that can show the difference is the culture. Map just something that makes everyone grow apart.”

Sabi – Bhutan

“This is the refugee camp we lived in for about 20 years. This picture described the injustice we faced there, this is the local area by the camp, the police station was to protect the camp from the outsiders, but I feel it was injustice. We were not allowed to be outside the camp. Great injustice. Even for grocery, we had to get the permission of the police. You’re bound to live under someone’s rules at all times.”

Anonymous – Kurdistan

“When I think of a world map, the more general thing is a map of the continents to see where they are, but the more meaningful side is if you think of the world, you should think it as one, not divide it into different things where some people have more power over others. We’re all one species. In general, world map would be a map of the world.”

Imalus – Sierra Leone

“The picture you are seeing here is showing a village and the way the rebels attack the village and the destruction. This is a house on fire, if you can see, one of the rebels is carrying a ball inside which is petrol. You can see that they are throwing the liquid onto the house and they set the house on fire. That is exactly what we witnessed during the war. Voicing was senseless. Rebels come and kill people and burn houses. Some people who cannot go out will die inside the house. The other picture that I see here is a man lying down on the ground and the man carrying the gun, he shot himself and shot man on ground. This is exactly my own experience.”

Bhuvin – Bhutan

“Image of a crying, she doesn’t have one leg, she’s holding her baby in one hand. He’s drunk (her husband) and is hitting her. The police officer caught me and my friend in Nepal. They took me and punished me. In Bhutan, this is how we came, family violence seen in community.”

Sirjina – Bhutan

“Houses were on fire. Locals fired our schools. There was no freedom in Nepal, to even leave after 7pm. It was in control by the police, but they didn’t provide security. There was no freedom for us back home.”

Omar – Syria

“There’s a difference between the work life. Here you get paid for every hour, but there you don’t get paid fairly.”

Jalal – Kurdistan

“In Edmonton, justice is a fairly independent thing. Sometimes there is racism and discrimination here.”

Srijana – Bhutan

“Well I don’t really know the exact definition of justice, but I feel it is fairness and equality for everyone. Comparing the justice system here and back home, I find that there is no such thing like justice in Bhutan. Only rich people enjoy justice and poor and marginalized people are deprived of it in Bhutan. But everyone is equal here in Canada, despite if you are rich or poor. Here, you can express your opinions freely which is not possible back home.”

Anonymous – Kurdistan

“My mother used to work with the city in Turkey of marriage licensing. Despite my mother working in the city, when someone would come from the village, even when they spoke Kurdish and my mom spoke Kurdish, my mother was not allowed to speak Kurdish. She could not get their paper work done. Once my mom tried to speak Kurdish, but she was taken to court for treason because she spoke Kurdish. Ever since then she has been getting prosecuted for becoming a terrorist for her heritage and it’s been 28 years since she’s been able to go see her family. NO matter how bad someone is treated in Canada, it can never be that bad, where someone is just prosecuted for something they can’t control.”

Martha – Sierra Leone

“We left because our house was burnt down. There was shooting by rebels. Our father was the registrar at the university. Rebels would send out letters of people they would kill, stating they would cut off our father’s head and drink our father’s blood. Everything was gone. We were all captured and taken to a forest. Our father was killed there.

How I left, I don’t understand.

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Imalus – Sierra Leone

“I find myself when the war broke out, my mind was not steady, I was leaving my country, but even in a neighbouring country the way you live is all different. Language barriers, medical facilities are all different. So we experienced all those things. Today I bring myself in Canada, when you are in a country as a refugee even a diet is difficult.”

Anonymous – Kurdistan

“The way that they treated the First Nations, is the way our government treated us, they don’t have language, they don’t have religion…

Whenever it’s the same job and you’re an immigrant, of course you’re not speaking the first language perfectly.”

Niga – Iraq

“In Iraq, if you have money and power, the system is very just to you, but if you’re poor, there isn’t much justice. There is no system in place to defend justice. Rich people use it how they want to use it, for their own benefit. But at the same time there are other forms through community leaders and members who take justice into their own hands, so it’s not so much like the government, but people take it in their own hands.”

Anonymous – Iraq

“The government controls everything. Here, there are human rights for women and children, and freedom of speech. Back home, the government cannot control the people. In our countries, there is no justice, each regime decides for something.”

Sabah – Kurdistan

“We all suffer somehow from injustice. We need to overcome, to try to not be the cause of injustice and fight for those on whom there is injustice. We need to overcome the ‘feeling’ of injustice. Everyday life has some unfairness, we need to overcome and deal with it in a peaceful way. Life is not fair all the time. From the self to politics, all over the place we experience injustice. We need to overcome hate and revenge. At every level of life, every day, you win as a human.”

Moses – South Sudan

“The standard for living in Canada, when compared to Africa, I can say it is proportionate. Our standard equates our justice. In developing countries, standards equate justice.”

Martha – Sierra Leone

“Winning to me is a greater accomplishment of being successful, achieving goals, accomplishing what you want to do. It is being an achiever.”

Moses – South Sudan

“The world map means colonisations, inter-marriages, different denominations, cultures, directions, the climate, vegetation, creating our culture. We have snow, others don’t. Temperatures vary in the world.”

Hawa – Sierra Leone

“Justice means fighting for something or someone if you think something is going wrong, or going wrong with them, they don’t have a voice of their own. You have the ability to speak for them and fight for their right and help them to raise their voice and know what they can do for themselves.

The war that happened back home, for me, I was young. I grew up in the war. Everything that happened, up to now, nothing was done about it, or the damages done in my country or my family. Everything just went silent. All the dark nights I spent in the forests, the people that were killed, no voice was raised, or the innocent kid that was used for fighting underage, justice was not there for them. All the years we spent in the camp just living on hope, living in poverty, nobody ever came and said something – just to speak for anybody. It was just quiet and instead everything was just blamed on us, and telling us that we are the fault of what happened and we have to go clean up our mess again and all those things.”

Jalal – Kurdistan

“Justice is a system to figure out the right way of solving problems. The real meaning includes solving in a fair way. In Middle Eastern countries justice is run by political parties, politicians and government.  It is often dealing with independence movements and revenge. I wrote a book called ‘Muktada,’ affirming that the majority and the minority will always be in constant conflict. You can’t separate the justice system from the rest of society.”

Tigist – Eritrea

“Justice means not being hurt or heard. It means not being included. It means not responding or providing support to the hurt. In Ethiopia, tribal injustices are consistent and/or growing, revenge cheating…

Minorities become empowered, they gain a deeper sense of their identity; once they have power, they can be even more dangerous, they act far more boldly. Boldness comes with money, it’s poverty versus affluence of filth – the heart recognizes injustice. Minorities think they’ll never get this chance again, so they’ll overly do it, because they’ve been overly forgotten. There are constant conflicts between the majority and the minority.”

Sabah – Kurdistan

“Justice is a political term, not a cultural term, dealing with control by power or government. Fairness is a controlled entity, it is not shared socially or nationally.

Even democratic powers have control over justice/injustice and there’s some how an imbalance. Saddam Hussein was executed by a minority who after decades gained power saying ‘muktada.’ Fighting for something to bring something else – fighting injustice to bring injustice – it’s really another kind of corruption. When justice is done in a form of revenge, in a tribal way, it is not a civilized movement. ‘People who live in fear, practice power in fear.’ Internal justice means no revenge.”

Malusu – Sierra Leone

“Winning to me is not just to win the big lottery ticket, it’s when people put you down, you get back up and show them it’s not what you think, you can do better.”

Hawa – Sierra Leone

“To me, winning means to be happy with my family. Being around them all the time. Although I don’t have much to offer, but being around just sharing the relationship as a family, after a long day you have a home to go and tell someone what happened today and you have the family to tell and listen to you and you laugh about it. All the painful things go away, like nothing happened, you just get ready for the next day and that will give you courage to help others. I like helping a lot. I love talking to other people like friends, that’s what winning means to me. Be around my family and helping in the community, and sometimes to raise my voice in a good way.”