The Documentary: Me, the refugee
BBC World Service

The journalist, Sahar Zand, left Iran 20 years ago as a 12 year-old girl. Her father was a cosmopolitan-sounding, English-speaking civil engineer who had what were euphemistically referred to as “political problems with the government”. Her mother was an artist and teacher. Shortly after Mr Zand was taken away for the second time, his wife, daughter and Sahar’s younger sister, Sharja, were smuggled out of the country on a flight to Denmark.

Me, the Refugee, originally aired in May and part of the ongoing “Migrant Stories” series (BBC World Service), covered the next three years of what, at various points, was literally a hand-to-mouth existence. After 15 months in a barbed-wire-enclosed asylum-seeker’s camp whose bleak single room contained a solitary bunk bed, the family learned that they were about to be deported back to Iran.