John Oliver gets Days of Our Lives actors to pay tribute to Syrian refugee

Noujain Mustaffa’s shy laugh and excited optimism – and her matter-of-fact description of the terror of civil war – had already made her stand out amid the media coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis.
Not only had she the 20-day journey to Germany in a wheelchair – Mustaffa suffers from cerebral palsy – but she told television news reporters that she had enjoyed the trip.
But she could not have guessed that her name was about to be spoken to millions more – by her favorite American soap opera characters, courtesy of US TV host John Oliver, in a clip that has spread further across online news sites and social media.
Mustaffa was interviewed by the BBC, as she sat by the side of a road in Germany where refugees were making their weary and nerve-racking way to safety. But she confounded the expectations of veteran correspondent Fergal Keane with a gleeful description of the perilous journey.
“I’ve tried many things for the first time, a train, a ship, so I enjoyed it!” she told the incredulous journalist – as images of the girl sitting in her wheelchair in the precarious rubber dinghy that brought her across the sea flash up on screen.
Keane asked her what her hopes are – and laughed with admiration when, grinning brightly, she replied: “I want to be an astronaut and go out and find an alien. And I want to meet the Queen.”
She then cut to the heart of the refugee crisis, saying: “Imagine you are 16 and you are always afraid to be dead at any minute.”
In a separate interview with ABC, she explained how she came to speak such good English – from watching television – specifically the daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives, which is syndicated to many countries around the world.
Now the irrepressible teenager has made it on to the hit US late-night talk and news satire show Last Week Tonight, presented by John Oliver.
Oliver’s latest show featured a long segment where he took fierce issue with politicians and conservative-leaning television news stations portraying the arrival into the European Union of war refugees and migrants, escaping poverty or economic stagnation, in derogatory terms, often with tones of racism or Islamophobia.
As part of the item, he showed the BBC’s evocative interview with Noujain Mustaffa and then ended the serious segment by saying he was going to make a small gesture towards her and had “made a few calls”.
There then followed a clip, on a set resembling that of the soap Days of Our Lives, where Mustaffa’s two favorite characters, a glamorous couple called Sami and EJ, are reunited in a romantic clinch.
In the actual series, the character EJ had died, so Oliver simulated a piece of drama with the actors that shows EJ has miraculously come back to life, and that twist of fate allows the characters to bring in the story of Mustaffa.

In the clip, Sami says that EJ’s fantastical journey back to life via “a German witch doctor” must have been horrible.
But EJ says coming back to life is not hard.
“You know what’s hard? Getting from Syria to Germany,” the character says, continuing: “There are some amazing people coming through that border. This amazing 16-year-old girl, Noujain Mustaffa, she’s our kind of people, we’ll get to meet her one day.”
He repeats her name slowly and deliberately in close-up to camera. The couple embraces and the clip fades.
It is not yet known when Mustaffa may get to see the clip. She had a tearful reunion with her brother Bland at a German train station after arriving from Syria and she has applied for asylum, the BBC reported.