From child refugee to Guardian reporter: one journalist’s extraordinary story

Aamna Mohdin was a young rookie reporter when she got her first foreign assignment. She was being sent to Calais to write about “the Jungle”, an informal refugee camp that had sprung up, made up of people hoping to cross the Channel for a better life in the UK. She was nervous about doing a good job but as she walked around the chaotic maze of tents with people cooking on open fires she began to feel strange and uneasy.

It wasn’t just the sadness of the stories she was hearing but something more like deja vu. When she told her mother about her trip, her mother asked a question that astonished Aamna: why would she want to go to a refugee camp when they had risked everything to flee one themselves? The question sent Aamna spiralling as she realised she had repressed her own memories of living in a camp in Kenya as a child, and how they had fled to the UK.

Helen Pidd hears how that moment, and reporting on the Black Lives Matter movement, made Aamna realise she had a complicated relationship with her identity as a refugee. Aamna, now the Guardian’s community affairs correspondent, explains how she began unearthing her family’s story and piecing together her own childhood memories, visiting Somalia and the refugee camp in which she had once lived, to try to understand what it meant to her.

With the refugee crisis showing no signs of abating, and increasingly harsh rhetoric about “stopping the boats”, Aamna tells Helen what she wishes people understood about the lives of many refugees. And how the political discourse has affected her life.