Lawand is a pupil at a primary school for deaf children in Derby, England.
Some months earlier, a photographer captured the bewildered and traumatized boy being handed from a small boat to a beach on the south coast of England. Born deaf, in Iraq, he had been stoned and bullied at school, which then expelled him ‘for being disruptive’. Anxious and isolated, his lifeline was his brother and they communicated by touch and gesture. His parents, hoping to give Lawand a better chance in life, decided the family had to leave Iraq.
