I would like to begin by expressing my sincere gratitude to Ismail AA, a veteran thinker and fellow traveller whose acquaintance has greatly enriched the quality of our conversations at Awate. His thoughtful response to my earlier reflections on shemgelena and the borrowed umbrella encouraged me to return to a question that has stayed with me: How did refugees extend trust while living with uncertainty, and what made such trust possible? Our exchange in the Awate forum helped me see that question from another angle. Ismail’s reflections did more than respond to an earlier piece; they opened a path of inquiry that became part of the inspiration for this article. I am grateful for the generosity and seriousness with which he engages ideas, and for a conversation that continues to deepen my own reflections on memory, trust, and the social worlds refugees created around themselves.
Imagine travelling on a city bus in Sudan as evening approaches. The streets are becoming less familiar and the sense of exposure is growing. You do not know the passenger near you. You know nothing about the person’s family, character, or history. Yet something in the accent, the language, the clothing, or the manner of speaking suggests that this stranger may also be Eritrean. You consider asking for help: where to get off, how to reach a safer street, or whether you might walk together for part of the way. No relationship has been established. There has been no time to test reliability. Still, the stranger is no longer entirely a stranger. Something has happened before trust: recognition. For refugees, recognition can become a practical resource. Displacement separates people from the familiar settings through which trust ordinarily grows. Family, neighbours, occupations, and long-standing reputations may be absent. In their place are crowded buses, unfamiliar streets, temporary rooms, offices, markets, and encounters with people whose histories are unknown. Under such conditions, the ordinary time required to know another person is not always available. A judgment must sometimes be made quickly and with incomplete information.
Recognition offers a small amount of social knowledge when complete knowledge is impossible. It says, in effect: I do not know you, but I recognize something that may connect you to me. A language may suggest shared memory. An accent may point toward a familiar place. A name may carry a history. Among women, recognition may also grow from shared vulnerability: travelling alone, caring for children, moving through the city without the support networks that once made ordinary life more secure. This does not mean that recognition is the same as trust. Recognition creates an opening; trust takes a risk. The first makes an appeal possible. The second places some part of one’s safety in another person’s hands. I did not fully understand this distinction when I lived as a refugee in Sudan. Many acts of assistance appeared ordinary because they belonged to the texture of daily life. Someone explained a route, accompanied another person, offered a place to wait, introduced a newcomer to a family, or helped with an office whose procedures were difficult to understand. These acts rarely entered official accounts of refugee life. Yet they helped people move through uncertainty.
When I later returned to Sudan as a scholar, I discovered the limits of what personal experience had taught me. I had assumed that having been a refugee meant that I understood refugee life. I did not. Memory gave me one position within that world, not a complete view of it. Policies had changed, social relations had shifted, and the experience of others could not be reduced to my own. Returning as a researcher forced me to distinguish between remembering a life and understanding the many structures that shape it. That return also allowed me to see the small practices of assistance differently. They were not merely expressions of kindness. Together, they formed an informal infrastructure. Refugees learned whom they might approach, which doors might open, who could interpret an unfamiliar situation, and where help might be found. These networks had no office and issued no document, but they made movement, communication, and sometimes survival possible.
Formal accounts usually describe refugees through categories such as legal status, registration, documentation, camps, borders, institutions, and international organizations. These categories matter. They determine access to protection and resources. But they do not capture the full social life of displacement. A person may be officially identified and still not be humanly recognized. Identification answers an administrative question: Who is this person according to the record? Recognition asks a more difficult one: Do we see the person behind the record? A registration number may establish status while leaving history, fear, responsibility, memory, and capacity unseen. Conversely, a refugee with little formal protection may be recognized by another displaced person who understands immediately what it means to be exposed in an unfamiliar place.
This difference matters because institutions often expect trust as a consequence of authority. A title, uniform, stamp, or document is treated as if it should settle the question. But trust cannot be commanded. Official authority may require compliance; it does not automatically earn confidence. Refugees learn to watch conduct. Does the person behind the desk listen? Are rules applied consistently? Is vulnerability treated as a claim to dignity or as an opportunity for control? Recognition becomes meaningful only when it is followed by responsible action. The same test applies inside the refugee community. Shared identity can create an expectation of solidarity, but it cannot guarantee it. To recognize someone as Eritrean is not to know that person’s character. Language and origin may encourage an approach, yet exploitation and betrayal can also occur within familiar circles. Recognition may open the door. Conduct determines whether the door should remain open.
For this reason, refugee solidarity should not be romanticized. The identity that includes can also exclude. If recognition depends on a particular accent, appearance, religion, region, or way of speaking, who remains unseen? Who is judged insufficiently familiar? Who has the power to decide what an Eritrean is supposed to sound or look like? The signs that help one vulnerable person locate assistance may also become boundaries that deny another person belonging. Recognition is therefore both necessary and incomplete. It narrows the distance between strangers, but it can also rely on assumptions. It can begin solidarity, but it cannot replace ethical judgment. The task is not to abandon recognition. It is to understand what we are asking it to do.
Distinguishing between trust inherited from symbols and trust made credible through conduct are of monumental import. The first attaches itself to age, title, family, position, religious appearance, or shared origin. The second grows from what a person actually does. Refugee life often requires the first small wager before the second kind of evidence exists. Someone asks a stranger for help because a recognizable sign makes the risk bearable. What happens next determines whether that initial confidence becomes living trust. The bus encounter makes this sequence visible. A woman senses danger or uncertainty. She notices someone who seems connected to her social world. Recognition makes the request imaginable. She extends limited trust. The other person responds, or fails to respond. In a few minutes, identity has been tested by conduct. Such an encounter may look too small to matter. It may never appear in a policy report or a history of displacement. Yet these moments reveal how people create forms of security when formal security is distant, weak, or feared. Refugee survival is not only the search for shelter, food, documents, and legal protection. It is also the search for people who will see vulnerability and respond without exploiting it.
To be seen is not the same as being known completely. No one needs complete knowledge of a stranger in order to recognize fear or offer a modest act of assistance. Human beings often act on partial knowledge. The moral question is what we do with it. Does partial knowledge become suspicion and prejudice, or does it become the beginning of responsibility? Trust among refugees often begins in precisely this uncertain space. We recognize a sign, make a careful appeal, and hope that the other person will act responsibly. It is a fragile form of trust because certainty is absent. It is also one of the most human because it admits our dependence on people we may never fully know.
The deeper question, then, is not only, ‘Whom do I trust?’ It is also: Who recognizes me? Whom do I recognize? And what responsibility begins at the moment when a stranger is no longer socially invisible?
What people said