The Archive Speaks

In this first chapter of Merveille’s oral history, we travel to Katana, a rural community in South Kivu, Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Long before she became a university student, a teacher, or a woman navigating the realities of conflict and displacement, Merveille was a child growing up in a large family shaped by faith, education, and hard work. Raised by a father who taught school...

In this first oral history from Benue State featured on The Archive Speaks , we hear from Elizabeth, a displaced mother whose life was shaped by poverty, motherhood, violence, and survival. Raised in rural Benue after losing her father at a young age, Elizabeth grew up helping her mother farm and care for her siblings before marrying and starting a family of her own. For years, life revolved aroun...

This is why she chose to stay. In this final chapter of Ruth’s oral history from the Democratic Republic of the Congo 🇨🇩, she reflects on life in Goma under rebel control, raising a young daughter alone, and surviving a conflict that has shaped nearly every stage of her life. Ruth remembers fleeing violence in Walikale as a child, only to experience war again in Goma years later. Today, she lives...

What happens when the future you imagined for yourself disappears almost overnight? In this second chapter of Ruth’s oral history from eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo 🇨🇩, she speaks about becoming a young woman, experiencing love for the first time, and the events that led her into single motherhood. What began as a relationship built on trust slowly became isolation, abandonment, and sur...

How would you look back on your childhood after living through war and displacement? In this first chapter of Ruth’s oral history, we meet a young woman from Walikale in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo who remembers life before conflict altered its course. Today, in Goma, where insecurity continues to shape daily life, Ruth sits with us and returns to memories of family, faith, school, an...

What does it mean to carry a household on your own—every day, without pause? In this third chapter of Marie’s oral history, we move into the structure of her daily life in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Not as a single moment of crisis, but as a system of responsibilities that repeat, accumulate, and rarely ease. Marie describes what it means to raise three children as the sole pro...

Goma is a city where life continues, but not freely. In this second part of Marie’s story, we return with her to a place she knows well, yet experiences differently each time she comes back. She speaks about living in Goma now—not as a child moving between homes, but as a mother responsible for three children, navigating a city shaped by conflict, uncertainty, and watchfulness. She describes what...

What does it mean to grow up in a place where conflict never fully leaves? In Part 1 of Marie’s oral history, we meet her as a daughter of eastern Congo—born in Masisi, raised between Bukavu and Goma, and shaped early by movement, family expectations, and instability. Long before she became a displaced single mother, Marie was already learning how quickly life could change. She speaks about childh...

What does life look like when displacement stretches into years? In the final chapter of Kolima’s oral history, we hear from her as she lives now — inside the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. Her days are shaped by sickness, ration schedules, paperwork, and the quiet labor of keeping a household together without a husband or extended family nearby. Kolima speaks about managing illness with li...

What does it mean to learn survival before you have words for it? In the first chapter of Kolima’s oral history, we meet a Rohingya woman whose early life was shaped by family, restraint, and the quiet labor expected of girls as they grew into womanhood. Her story begins in Rakhine State, Myanmar, where daily life unfolded inside the boundaries of tradition, poverty, and increasing restriction. Ko...

In Part 2 of Lucille’s oral history, she returns to the morning everything changed in Goma. One moment, the neighborhood hummed with its usual rhythm — children walking to school, women bargaining at the market, the soft echo of church songs drifting between houses. And then, without warning, the city fell quiet in a way only conflict can silence a place. Lucille recounts the moment she knew the r...

What does childhood look like in a place where conflict is always humming in the background? In this first chapter of Lucille’s oral history, we meet a daughter of Goma, North Kivu — a girl raised between volcanic soil, family tenderness, and the constant shadow of armed groups moving across her homeland. Lucille grew up in a house where her father taught strength through discipline, her mother ta...

In the final chapter of Sakena’s story, we return to her quiet corner of Cox’s Bazar, where life moves between memory and prayer. Each morning begins with the call to fajr and ends with the sound of her children’s laughter — reminders that even in exile, life continues. Sakena reflects on what it means to raise her children alone, to live in a tent that has become home, and to keep faith alive aft...

In this chapter of Sakena’s story, we return to Cox’s Bazar — a place where survival is measured in queues. Every morning, women like Sakena rise before dawn to stand in line for water, for food, for the small things that keep life going. These lines, long and winding, have become more than just systems of aid — they are places of quiet resilience, where mothers trade stories, laughter, and the st...

When danger came to Gudusara, Sakena’s home in Northern Rakhine, it didn’t arrive all at once. It came in whispers first—then in fire, and footsteps, and the sound of people running. In this second part of her story, Sakena recounts the night her family fled Myanmar. The smoke behind them, the river before them, and the choice no mother should ever face: to leave everything behind and carry only h...

Before displacement. Before the border crossings. Before the word “refugee.”There was a girl named Sakena, in a small village called Gudusara in Arakan State, Myanmar — where blue skies meant freedom and family filled every room. In this first part of her oral history, Sakena, a Rohingya mother and widow now living in Cox’s Bazar, takes us back to the world she knew before exile — the scent of tur...

Female heads of households are often the invisible backbone of displacement. They carry a heavier weight in society. Raising children, holding families together, and nurturing the next generation even while enduring loss themselves. Their voices are rarely heard, yet they shape the future in profound ways. Noor’s story is one of them. Across three episodes, we’ve followed her from her roots in Gaz...

In Part 3 of Noor’s 4-part series, we follow her through the most difficult turning point of her life: leaving Gaza. After losing her husband Khaled in the bombings of northern Gaza, Noor became the sole head of her household. With her son at her side, she faced impossible choices — surviving without clean water or electricity, navigating family negotiations about evacuation, and gathering the fun...

In Part 2 of Noor’s story, we step into the turning point of her life in Gaza. October 7, 2023 — a date the world came to recognize in headlines. For Noor, it was the day her life split apart. What are arguments and debates on the tip of our fingers were Noor’s lived reality: bombs falling, orders to evacuate, and the sudden knowledge that her family’s home, built brick by brick, memory by memory,...

In this first chapter of Noor’s story, we trace the threads that formed her identity long before war and loss. Her roots run through Gaza, from her grandmother’s stories of being displaced from Al-Masmiyya in 1948, in her father’s belief that daughters should be educated, in the elegant stride of her mother, and in the traditions of proposals and marriage that carried both duty and pride. For Noor...

What does it mean to become the head of a household overnight? In this final chapter of Ataa’s Story , we follow her through one of the most overlooked transformations in displacement: the moment a woman becomes everything—mother, father, provider, protector. After her husband’s sudden departure from Za’atari Refugee Camp, Ataa was left to raise four children alone. With no roadmap, no partner, an...

"I’m one person—but I have to be a mother, a father, a teacher, a provider… I have to be everything." Ataa speaks from her shelter in Zaatari Camp, where daily life for a woman raising four children alone is both routine and relentless. In the third chapter of The Archive Speaks , we trace Ataa’s evolving life in displacement—beginning with her arrival in Zaatari and following her through marriage...

"Do you know when you have two lives? Like on your left, you have this life—and on your right side, a completely different life…" Ataa describes how she felt crossing the border of Syria and Jordan. As Syria’s uprising turned into full-scale war, hundreds of thousands of civilians were forced into impossible choices—many leaving homes, jobs, and dreams behind. The Jordanian border opened to receiv...

In this moving first part of the 4-part series of Ataa’s Story , titled From Books to Bullets , we are invited into the early chapters of one woman’s life in Syria— before she became a refugee, before she was forced to flee, before the war redrew the shape of her days. Ataa was raised in a modest two-room home in a small town outside Damascus, shared with her parents, siblings, and twin sister. Te...

The Archive Speaks: Trailer Welcome to The Archive Speaks —a podcast by The Refugee Archive , a digital oral history project focused exclusively on the lived experiences of female-headed refugee households (FHHs) . In this introductory episode, we share why this archive exists, what stories we seek to tell, and the voices we believe the world needs to hear. At the heart of this project are the wom...