A broken Abdullah Kurdi buried his two toddlers and his wife in their hometown of Kobani, Syria even as thousands of his fellow refugees continued on their harrowing quest for safety - marching hundreds of miles from Hungary to Austria and Germany, eventually helped along by buses provided by Hungary; breaking out of camps where they charged they were mistreated; barricading themselves on "Freedom Trains" grounded at the station. Some sprayed shaving cream messages on the sides of trains - "No Camps. No Hungary. Freedom" - while many wrote and held high their plaintive signs: "Help, Europe...We Want Germany...S.O.S....Here Big Guantanamo...Where Is the World?" The first refugees have now begun reaching Austria and Germany after officials there opened borders.
Kurdi, meanwhile, broke down at a Turkish morgue after claiming the bodies of hisdrowned family - his wife Rehan, five-year-old son Galip, and three-year-old son Aylan, whose small body washed ashore became the image that for many made a formerly abstract refugee crisis suddenly, grimly real. Having left their battered hometown in hopes of reaching Greece and ultimately Canada, Kurdi said, “Now I don’t want anything. Even if you give me all the countries in the world, I don’t want them... My kids were the most beautiful children in the world. They are all gone now...We want the whole world to see this. Let this be the last."
For now, the catastrophe goes on. There are ways to help - see here, here, here, here, here,here.
There is, too, a need to understand - that "no one would leave home/unless home chased you to the shore," that "no one puts their children in a boat/unless the water is safer than the land," that all of this happens when "home is the barrel of the gun." From the Kenyan-born Somali poet Warsan Shire: