‘It’s a miracle to be in Hong Kong’: a refugee’s tale, one of 70 million
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Abdul Patient was only 12 when his mother’s tribe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was murdered by his father’s over a long-running feud between Congolese and Rwandans. He fled with his younger brother and slept in a cinema for four years before arriving at the Kakuma refugee camp, one of the largest in Kenya with some 190,000 residents.
“Being a refugee, our life is like a movie – it has a lot of challenges,” he said.
Patient, now 27 years old, knows a thing or two about making films. After graduating from training programme FilmAid International, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) helped him travel to Hong Kong last week to screen his documentary Kakuma, my city, in honour of World Refugee Day on Thursday.
The film, which Patient made along with Australian director Harrison Thane, follows Anne Nyandeng, a young female basketball player and a visually impaired man from the Turkana community in a refugee camp.
“It’s a miracle for me just to be here in Hong Kong,” he said. “It’s a big challenge with a refugee passport. Can you imagine all the procedures that I passed through to get this little chance?”