Idris, age 9, Cepal, age 12, and Jehan, age 11, all come from Kurdistan. They travelled through Turkey to Greece and lived in a camp in Northern Greece (see Ahmed’s story). In February 2017 they were living in an apartment in Athens, hoping to be relocated to another country. They drew these pictures to show what had happened to them.

These are houses and inside there is a cake, a special one that we have at New Year. It has candles and six years. It is made in a shop but sometimes we make it at home. When I was in Iraq we had cake in the house every day. The last ‘Happy New Year’ was in Iraq. It’s at night and we have a party. We have a special Kurdish dance called Dabkeh, the men and women do it. All my friends came and the family was there. At midnight we saw the fireworks.

This time we were in Athens, we made the cake in the house. We spent New Year in the house with the family, we had dinner and the cake. It was beautiful, I was very happy but I miss Iraq.

I want to be a policeman in Germany, and I want to go to school and learn English and Greek. But the school here was far away and crowded and it was very cold.

When we left Iraq we went to Turkey. We passed through the mountains and we walked for twenty four hours. In the middle of the night we stayed in this room for about two hours just to have a rest. It was between mountain ranges. Then we walked some more.

This is a picture of our house which had two floors. This is me. I want to go to the bus, to go to school. That is a policeman for traffic. He is wearing medals because he s a good policeman, he is friendly. I liked school, especially maths and Arabic language.

Here in Athens there are a lot of children from other nationalities. I stopped going to the school one month ago because when I went there were so many children I didn’t feel comfortable. We were learning English and Greek, nothing else. Now I draw with my mothers and sisters. We go to the garden to play with children. We use language programmes to learn English. When I grow up I want to be a nurse. The best thing in Athens is Omonia because it’s a square where our relatives meet each other.