Ideas & Impact

On the 75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR),

I’m Your Neighbor Books and DiversifiED Consulting held a conversation with award-winning author Dina Nayeri about the 2022 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award-honored The Waiting Place: When Home is Lost and a New One Not Yet Found (Candlewick Press).

If the world could uphold the promises of the UDHR, would there be an international crisis of refugees and displaced people?

Dina Nayeri, a child refugee from Iran and explorer of immigration in her adult fiction and non-fiction, collaborated with photographer Anna Bosch Miralpeix to bring us (ages 8  and older) an astounding profile of children in a refugee camp or “waiting place.”

To depict both the length of time families spend in refugee camps and the toll that waiting for resettlement takes on children, Dina transforms the camp into a “true and tangible villain.” This monster “craves your hours, weeks, minutes” and wants refugees to become dull, uncurious, and even unkind in that interminable period of waiting.

Dina, however, presents fiercely tender profiles of the refugee children who are “waging a private war against this monster.”

“They are becoming braver, kinder, more astonishing versions of themselves. They are building their strong arms. their resilient minds, for when they finally rejoin the world.” —The Waiting Place (Afterword)

Watch our conversation, read the book, discuss the book, and explore the Universal Declaration of Human Rights …to prepare to fight the “monster” that is our apathy and overwhelm for the crisis of the displaced. Let’s become “braver, kinder, more astonishing versions” of ourselves!

Giveaway Winners
Thank you Candlewick Press!