The brilliance of TodoSomos is in the way they are able to humanize an unprecedented refugee crisis while also offering a tangible way for their audience to interact with the material on an emotional as well as intellectual level.
Having led humanitarian projects for the past several years along the Venezuela-Colombia border, it has been impossible for me to transmit the thousands of personal interactions I’ve had with Venezuelan refugees as they seek a new life in another country. While there have been noble attempts by the press to convey the human-side of the humanitarian crisis Venezuelan refugees are facing, they can often fall back on tired tropes or, worse yet, feed into a larger political narrative.
TodoSomos has found a simple, yet very innovative way to let the people confronting the crisis tell their own story in their own words. What we read through these testimonies does not always fit the broader narrative we’ve come to believe, but it is real and it lends dignity and agency to the storyteller.
My nine-year-old daughter and I had the privilege of participating in a public reading of stories and were forever impacted by the experience. By offering an opportunity to share stories through theatre and public readings, TodoSomos was able to take us from passive consumers of the material to active participants with the storytellers.
