The Waiting Place: When Home Is Lost and a New One Not Yet Found

"The Waiting Place" by Dina Nayeri is a profound and unflinching photo-essay that chronicles the lives of ten young Farsi-speaking refugees, aged five to seventeen, residing in the Katsikas refugee camp in Greece. Nayeri, a former refugee herself, collaborates with documentary photographer Anna Bosch Miralpeix to capture the children's daily realities, dreams, and resilience. The book uses lyrical prose and intimate photographs to reveal their individual personalities and their collective struggle against the "dreary monster" of displacement, which threatens their purpose, dignity, and identity. It serves as an urgent call for readers, particularly young adults, to reconsider the meaning of home and safety in the context of the global refugee crisis.

An unflinching look at ten young lives suspended outside of time—and bravely proceeding anyway—inside the Katsikas refugee camp in Greece. Every war, famine, and flood spits out survivors. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) cites an unprecedented 79.5 million forcibly displaced people on the planet today. In 2018, Dina Nayeri—a former refugee herself and the daughter of a refugee—invited documentary photographer Anna Bosch Miralpeix to accompany her to Katsikas, a refugee camp outside Ioannina, Greece, to record the hopes and struggles of ten young Farsi-speaking refugees from Iran and Afghanistan. “I wanted to play with them, to enter their imagined worlds, to see the landscape inside their minds,” she says. Ranging in age from five to seventeen, the children live in partitioned shipping-crate homes crowded on a field below a mountain. Battling a dreary monster that wants to rob them of their purpose, dignity, and identity, each survives in his or her own special way. The Waiting Place is an unflinching look at ten young lives suspended outside of time—and bravely proceeding anyway. Each lyrical passage leads the reader from one story to the next, revealing the dreams, ambitions, and personalities of each displaced child. The stories are punctuated by intimate photographs, followed by the author’s reflections on life in a refugee camp. Locking the global refugee crisis sharply in focus, The Waiting Place is an urgent call to change what we teach young people about the nature of home and safety.