Across Women's Lives

Omer Azizi knows what it’s like to be stuck in a squalid tent with only a United Nations-issued ID tag confirming his existence. He fled Afghanistan’s Taliban tucked in his mother’s arms, and spent his childhood in various Pakistani refugee camps. Over the years, he watched his parents fight the odds to get the family out of refugee camps.They finally made it to the United States in 2014, and today, Azizi is a recent graduate of the University of Southern California. But he hasn’t forgotten about his parents’ struggle and what other refugees are still going through. In fact, he spent much of the past year developing an app that he calls Safar, meaning “journey” in both Farsi and Arabic, to solve the information gap that exists for refugees worldwide, and pitching it to potential supporters. These days, a smartphone, something his parents never had, is a necessity for survival in a refugee camp.Related: Young migrants and refugees in Greece wanted to be heard. So they started their own newspaper.Safar, which A