TRAVELLING LIGHT

More than one hundred million people in the world today are refugees. In 2015, more than 300,000 people undertook the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe. Syrians call this journey ‘the journey of death’. For a lot of money they put their lives and the lives of their families into the hands of smugglers, who promise to take them across the sea. Crammed into small, unseaworthy boats – often for many hours, if not days, without any food and drinking water – they hold out in the hope that they will get rescued before the boat gives in. So who are the people that risk their lives in the Mediterranean? I wanted to know what people, who leave everything behind to embark on such a gruelling journey, manage to take over into a new life, and what these items mean to them.