Jim Lommasson

Baby Clothes, Damascus, Syria

Rama Youssef: When I was 12 years old and getting ready to move to America, I made sure to bring this jumper with me. All my older sisters wore it […]

A Resilient Daughter of the Arab Spring

Rama Youssef was 12 years old when she left Syria, escaping violence caused by the beginning of the Syrian Civil War. But life didn’t get easier for Rama when 

John Rudoff

Helping Others as a Lifelong Mission

Just days after the terrorist attacks on New York City of Sept. 11, 2001, Hazar Jaber’s landlord gave her one week to leave the Boston apartment

Sankar Raman

Tending a Garden and Her Dreams

Salsabel Al Masri’s garden was the center of her world. She and her five brothers spent every day after school chasing each other among the olive, orange, apple,

©2014 Jeffrey Ball

A Doctor with No Cure for His Country

The rigid, highly competitive public education system of Syria sent Hisham Amin Bismar into engineering. Leaving his country and then watching it

Sankar Raman

Leaving a Land of Chaos

Toys are everywhere in the small apartment in Vancouver, Washington. A sheet of paper posted at a child’s eye level shows the first, impressive attempts of a

Jim Lommasson

Tea Pot and Glass, Homs, Syria

Ola Helal: This kettle is my favorite. I brought it from my country on 5/29/2008. We like tea, and when we left our home we took this kettle with us.

Sankar Raman

What Would You Take with You

A portrait of an Iraqi refugee’s family propelled award-winning photographer Jim Lommasson on a mission: to ensure that Americans hear the stories of Iraqi and

Sankar Raman

Reprogrammed Like a Cell Phone

Amidst the thick darkness of a city just before sunrise on the day he arrived in Portland, Abdulelah Aldabea imagined his brain was an iPhone restoring to

A Resilient Daughter of the Arab Spring

When Rama Yousef was born in the Syrian capital of Damascus in 1999, her father cursed and cried tears of frustration. She was his fourth child and not the son […]

Sankar Raman

Broken Glass to Breakout Senior

In 2013, when a bomb exploded and shattered all the windows of 15-year-old Sara Mohamed’s classroom in Damascus, Syria, she better understood