UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador

















Ben Stiller
By © UNHCR 
Actor Ben Stiller has been supporting UNHCR since early 2016. He has travelled with us to meet refugees in Germany, Jordan, Guatemala, and most recently to learn about UNHCR’s work in Lebanon, where he called for urgent attention and funds to support Syrian refugees ahead of the eighth anniversary of the start of the Syria conflict. Ben Stiller was appointed as a Goodwill Ambassador in July 2018. 

In Jordan Ben spent time with Syrian refugees living in camps and urban settings. He met families benefiting from UNHCR’s innovative cash assistance program and refugees going through the resettlement process. Ben was particularly moved by the resilience of the people he encountered, the incredible spirit and energy of the children, and the deep longing to return home of many of the refugees with whom he spoke. He wrote about his experiences for TIME, and also posted videos of the refugees he met – along with some memorable moments - on his social feeds following the trip. 

Ben has played a key role in UNHCR projects, including our #WithRefugees campaign. To mark World Refugee Day 2018 he appeared in a special edition Buzzfeed Tasty film, joined by writer and former Iraqi refugee Ahmed Badr, to make chicken shawarma, a traditional dish from Ahmed’s homeland. Ben has also featured in an advocacy film alongside fellow high profile supporters, refugees and UNHCR field staff, encouraging the public to sign a petition expressing solidarity with millions of people across the world driven from their homes by conflict and persecution. Ben spoke in the UN General Assembly Hall at the handing in of the #WithRefugees campaign petition to the UN Secretary General ahead of the historic UN Summit on Refugees & Migrants in September 2016. 

In January 2019 Ben supported the launch of 1 Billion Miles to Safety, a new campaign calling on people all over the world to cover the distance travelled by refugees each year. 



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Article by Ben Stiller
Mar 15, 2019

Actor Ben Stiller: "I met Syrian refugees living on a knife's edge, and there are millions more".

Five minutes after I was introduced to Yazan, I already thought he might be the coolest eight-year-old I have ever met. He has great hair. It’s black and shiny, with some sort of purple mousse he’s put in especially for the occasion. He’s incredibly friendly and has a smile that makes it impossible not to smile back.

We are in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon where Yazan lives with his twin sister Razan, who is as equally personable and cute; his brother, Salah; and baby sister, Rajaa. We’re in their home, a two-room concrete shelter we found at the end of a muddy alleyway off the main road to Syria, which is only about an hour from here.

His parents fled Syria in the middle of the night when the shooting and killing became too intense outside their home in Damascus. They bribed a border guard and crossed into Lebanon. They thought they would return home in three days. It’s been eight years. 


UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Ben Stiller visiting an informal settlement in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, standing with a Syrian refugee. UNHCR/Michael Muller

Millions displaced, struggling to survive

Their story is not a unique one. I went to Lebanon last week with the UN Refugee Agency, to meet refugees who have fled the Syrian conflict which has gone on since Yazan was four months old. The conflict is complicated and while a small number of people are starting to return home, the vast majority feel it is not yet safe to do so. In Lebanon alone there are believed to be more than a million displaced Syrians. In a country of only four million locals, the issue is overwhelming. On a basic subsistence level, the refugees are living on a knife’s edge.

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For Yazan’s father, Raed, who worked as a taxi driver back home, providing for his family in Lebanon is incredibly hard. As a refugee he’s limited as to what he can do for work. So, in addition to being deep in debt, they have been constantly on the move.

The family’s three-day trip that has stretched to almost a decade, has been harrowing. Binnana, Yazan’s 23-year-old mother, told me that there was a time they lived in a stable when the twins were infants. They lived in a stall with rats and other animals, where everything was dirty. It’s where she gave birth to Salah. While the biblical imagery is hard to avoid, there is nothing divine about this reality. They had gotten to the point where Raed considered selling a kidney. A friend suggested selling their infant. Binana couldn’t do that.

When the children were hungry at night, she would tell them to imagine their favorite meal and go to sleep dreaming about it, together. This shared illusionary family meal would still leave them waking up hungry. In the end, they found they could make a little money buying vegetables at a wholesale market and giving them to eight-year-old Yazan to sell on a cart by the road. They regretted having to do that, but thought it was better than having their child beg. UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Ben Stiller visiting an informal settlement in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, standing with a Syrian refugee.

I turned to Yazan, who was doodling a picture of an airplane with some markers, and asked him if he was a good salesman. He smiled that winning smile and the answer was obvious.

We walked out to his vegetable cart by the road. And, as he showed me where he worked, the reality of an eight-year-old having to provide for his family sunk in. Even crossing the road was an ordeal, which would be enough to concern a parent, yet here he was showing me how he actually supported his family.

For refugees, childhood is cut short

While physically surviving this crisis is challenging, the psychological effects on these kids and parents is just as concerning.

I remembered talking to a 13-year-old boy I met a couple of years ago in Jordan. His family had fled Aleppo in 2013. He worked in a garage in Amman, the capital, for 12 to 14 hours a day to support his brothers and sisters. When I told him he was a hard-working kid, he told me proudly that he isn't a kid, he's a man. When I look in Yazan’s eyes, I still see a kid, but I wonder how long that will be. The war has lasted his whole life. It’s all he knows. Ben with children at Zouq Bhannine informal settlement in Lebanon in March 2019.


Ben with children at Zouq Bhannine informal settlement in Lebanon in March 2019.
The United Nations Human Rights Council/Michael Muller

In northern Lebanon I met a troupe of puppeteers who go from settlement to settlement performing shows for refugee children about the different towns and landmarks in their home country of Syria. While the show is entertaining for these children who are living in a bleak environment, its main purpose is to connect the kids with a place they don’t remember or, for most, have never been. The man who performs the show told me his concern as a Syrian is that these kids are the future of his country. They are the ones who will have to rebuild Syria. How can they do that if they don’t know anything about their homeland?

So, what can we do? In the face of complicated international conflicts that are the root cause of these problems, we need to put a face to the numbers of innocent people affected. Humanize it. We need to cut through the political malaise, especially as it fades from the headlines, to remind the world this is a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. There are more than 68 million displaced people in the world. There are more than 5.6 million Syrian refugees. Within Syria itself, there are 6.6 million more internally displaced.

We need to support organizations like UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, so they can reach these people in need and provide them with life-saving support like shelter, medical assistance, access to education and psychosocial services to help them cope. On a broader level, we need to support the countries that are overwhelmed on an infrastructure level.

And, most importantly, we need to stand with these people. We must remember a refugee is a person, not a statistic. A refugee is a parent trying to protect their child from rats in a stable. A refugee is a boy doodling a picture of an airplane, who wants to someday be a pilot, but right now is selling vegetables on a busy road in a place that isn’t home.

Ben Stiller 
UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador 
Published 10:15 AM EDT Mar 15, 2019 on USA TODAY


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Article by Ben Stiller
January 25, 2017


One percent. That is the surprising percentage of the world’s 21 million refugees who will resettle in another country after fleeing their war-torn homes. I had to ask the United Nations worker twice. “Just one percent of all refugees?” “Yes, and the number is shrinking.” 


Ben Stiller meets Syrian refugee children in Jordan's Azraq refugee camp, where more than half of the 54,000 refugees registered there are children. Photo Jordi Matas/UNHCR.


I was talking with a UNHCR Field Officer as he was verifying the biometric data of a Syrian family being interviewed for resettlement at the UN’s refugee registration center in Amman, Jordan. The fact that such a small fraction of those displaced people are even identified for resettlement to the United States or other countries — after undergoing a rigorous vetting process — seems to fly in the face of the politics and news about refugees.

This was one of many things I learned on a recent trip with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, to visit camps set up with the Jordanian government and a number of international NGOs, to deal with the influx of over 655,000 fleeing to Jordan from the civil war there since 2011.

Like a lot of us, I am trying to reconcile how to be open-hearted and empathetic to the plight of our fellow human beings while also being concerned about our national security. The problem is complicated, and sometimes the easiest way to deal with it, which I have personally been guilty of, is to ignore it. We become anesthetized to the constant news of suffering children in Aleppo and horrific violence and destruction in the region. How do we help those in need in a way that makes a difference and doesn’t compromise our safety here and abroad?

I, Ben Stiller, star of Dodgeball, do not have the answer. But by meeting with refugees and those assisting them, I was able to get a better sense of some of the realities.

Nobody wants to be a refugee.

This was the running theme at Azraq Camp, which sits in the middle of the Jordanian desert. Approximately 54,000 of the 655,000 registered refugees in Jordan from Syria are here. Over half are children. They live in small, anonymous shelters with no electricity (though the solar grid comes online soon), no running water and dirt floors.

This is where I talked to Mohamed and Alaa Salah and their two children. Mohamed is a veterinarian; Alaa, an agricultural engineer. They are both young and vivacious. They fled the carnage when bombs hit their neighborhood in Homs and the trauma damaged their 4-year-old son Hussain’s vision. They are grateful for safety, but stunned by their plight. “I miss my family so much,” Alaa said. “But right now I can’t take my children back to death.”

These people want to go home.

Azraq’s makeshift marketplace has shops run by an equal number of Syrians and local Jordanians. I asked one storekeeper, from Aleppo, who sold everything from soap to soccer balls, if he wanted to go back. He looked at me as if I was asking him whether he liked to breathe. After a moment, with a deep-eyed smile, he said, “even the word ‘Syria’ gives me chills, because I so want to go home.”

These children need a chance, for the world’s sake.

In the lower-income neighborhoods of Amman, one in five refugees are living with the help of UNHCR cash-assistance programs that use iris scanners to prevent fraud. One couple I met there, Haitham and his wife Um Khalil, fled Aleppo three years ago with their eight children. While they are safe in Amman, the danger they escaped continues for their family members remaining in Syria. Um Khalil’s sister was killed just three months ago when she stepped on a mine going to pick up clothes for her five children…

Haitham’s son, Khalil, is thirteen, with a cherubic face and round green eyes that look like they have seen too much. His hands were stained with engine grease. His father explained the boy worked as a mechanic, the previous day from 7 am to 11 pm, to support his family. His family needs his income to survive. Taking that in, I turned to Khalil and said that was quite a responsibility for a boy. He listened to the translator then quickly and proudly replied, “I’m a man, not a boy.”

While Khalil works, his twin sisters, like many refugee children, don’t have access to education. I had an opportunity to meet with Jordanian King Abdullah II and Queen Rania, who explained that due to the crushing load on under-supported host countries like Jordan, which already has 170,000 Syrian children in their free public schools, they can’t accommodate them all. Young girls like Khalil’s sisters can help around the house but as they get older they run the risk of being targeted by terrorist groups who indoctrinate at-risk youths.

How we can help?

Every family I met shared a pride for their home country and the hope to live a normal life. While a few were ready to move on to wherever the resettlement process might take them, all professed a profound desire to eventually return home. These are sentiments we — the public — can all connect with. UNHCR’s #WithRefugees campaign is one way in which communities can reflect their compassion.

I hope the new Trump Administration will conclude that compassion and security are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are mutually reinforcing. The roots of the Syria refugee problems are complicated, and so are the solutions. While a resolution of the conflict should be a priority, we must support the humanitarian programs of UNHCR. We need to support our allies like Jordan, who, with an astonishing 20 percent of their population made up of fleeing Syrians, cannot carry the burden alone. What countries like Jordan do profoundly affects us.

In this time of unrest in the Middle East and change in our country, when frustration and xenophobia seem to dominate our news cycle and social media, I hope we can all look at the faces of those we fear and see what is sometimes hardest of all to recognize: ourselves.

Ben Stiller
Published January 25, 2017 on TIME



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