Diaspora—The Shifting Winds

“Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - 

just different elements of belonging and not belonging.”   —Jhumpa Lahiri

“Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space. Invite one to stay.”  —Maya Angelou

The shifting winds of February flow like the diaspora that is roiling throughout the world.

From the mean streets in Syria, Yemen, Honduras, and El Salvador to Sub-Saharan African and the plains of Afghanistan families have been uprooted. War, threats of violence, political and religious persecution, climate change, lack of livelihood resources, and natural disasters have forced people to leave their homeland in search of a better life.

Like genetic anomalies finding homes within human cells, displaced refugees move with uncertainty. Food, clothing, shelter, and language barriers all become obstacles in a quest for sanctuary.

Diaspora by Jeff Key

A gust of wind, a coursing bloodstream—conduits of a continual diaspora, scattering organisms of every size and shape on a random journey down the path of natural selection.

Instructions tucked into the nucleus of a body's cells, written in the language of the DNA molecule, forcing a wrong turn on the on the genetic road map—
zika, ebola, malaria, cancer.

Spores set forth by a mother fungus cast their fate to the prevailing breeze—from the jungles of the Congo to a new colony in the mountains of Peru.  

A new location somewhere on chromosome seven—eaten by a spider, deposited on a desert rock—a torn blanket in the shadow of a barbed wire fence—a tenement basement with an unfamiliar tongue. 

The dispossessed, wrested from the sleep of night, thrust on an unwelcome expedition to an unknown destination—roots torn, origins dissolving, destiny declared.

• The number of refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people around the world has topped 65 million. Over half of them are children.

• One in every 113 people on Earth has now been driven from their home by persecution, conflict and violence or human rights violations.

• Each minute 24 people around the world flee their home because of violence or persecution. And if the world's displaced people were their own nation, it would be larger than the United Kingdom.                                                            — Source: the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

• Since 2008, an average of 26.4 million people per year have been displaced from their homes by disasters brought on by natural hazards. This is the equivalent to one person being displaced every second.                        —Source: The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre

 

• Cystic fibrosis, deafness, B-cell lymphoma and other cancer genes are found on chromosome-7.                                            — Washington University School Of Medicine (Chromosome Sequencing Project)