Refugee, noun: a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution.
Today is World Refugee Day, and given the news in the last days and weeks it is easy to become inundated, numb, desensitized to the plight of those fleeing their homes to come to the United States. The words can begin to blur together. When it’s one image of a young toddler crying for his mother, a shard of ice can break through the noise and bloom in your heart. When it’s hundreds of images of canvas tents and chain link fences and cages and silver blankets and mattresses on the floor and tear-streaked cheeks and reaching hands and closed doors and people at podiums trying to justify atrocity and thousands of children crying for their parents, it becomes a silent wall of vague and impenetrable ice. It muffles things.
Immigrant. Refugee. Asylum. Resettlement. Caravan. Migrant. Undocumented.
There are people behind all of these words. Not just a refugee, but also a person with eyes and hands and intelligence and thoughts and dreams and families and stories and love to share. That seems simplistic doesn’t it? But it seems that so many have forgotten this truth.
Recently some volunteers from COWC were fortunate to sit down with a man named Blaise, a man who lives and works in Central Ohio and who also happens to be a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo. We met with him because we wanted to learn more about the work our friends at Community Refugee & Immigration Services (CRIS) were doing and to hear firsthand what it is like to be a refugee who has resettled in Columbus.
His life has been an incredible journey. The violence he fled from with his brother and the long road to the United States is important to understand and learn from. Blaise has a TEDx talk that you can watch here if you’d like to hear more of his past story.
Now that Blaise is living here in Columbus his dream is to attend Columbus State Community College to study IT and computers. He wants to work, pay bills, and maybe get married one day. He’s learned that some people in the US don’t like refugees or people who have any kind of accent. He says the best way to deal with people like that is to just be quiet and keep his distance. He doesn’t want any trouble.
When he first arrived, CRIS helped him get a job at a Chipotle near his house and now that he has a car he’s commuting to a manufacturing job. But what he really wants is a job that pays well enough for him to have the time and resources to take GED classes and then college classes. He wants to have Saturdays off so he can play pickup soccer games again with his friends.
When he came to the US in the fall of 2016 CRIS helped him understand his new home, from how to setup utility service to how to ride a bus. Jewish Family Services helped him furnish his home. He tells us the refugee community is tight knit and since he knows several languages he’s often helping a friend translate some mail, advising JFS on who could use the bunk bed that was just donated, or trying to help the other people in his neighborhood as much as he can. He says “I don’t have much, but when I see someone I know how they feel and I want to help them.” Blaise is an asset to his friends, his community, and Columbus. We need more people like him, not less.
We asked him what surprised him when he first moved from the refugee camp in Uganda to Columbus. Some were humorous like his first encounter with automatic doors at the supermarket. Others were sobering like being amazed that there were homeless people here, too. Here in what we call the greatest country on earth there were still people who were hungry or didn’t have a roof over their head.
When he first tried to get a job it was a challenge because he didn’t have a car and while his English is very good, he has a noticeable accent. Interviewers would ask if he had reliable transportation and when he said no, since he didn’t have a car, he would not get that job. So while he saved up for a car, he got a job he could walk to.
Many people of color in the USA have known that “Do you have reliable transportation?” is a trick question. It’s a way to disqualify someone from a position without explicitly discriminating. Low wage workers in the USA have struggled to find enough financial foothold to go to college or have weekends off or work reasonable hours. Immigrants, regardless of status, have faced snide comments, dehumanization, microaggresions, racism, and blatant hatred. Blaise’s story is one of a resilient man hoping for the future, a refugee willing to cross continents for a better life, and it’s also a very American story.
So this World Refugee Day let’s recommit to remember the people behind the words. Let’s remember the Blaise’s behind the word “refugee.” Let’s remember that there is a whole child with a name and a favorite color and loved ones behind each “unaccompanied minor.” Let’s remember that for every person fleeing violence at home, there is a story of how home turned into the mouth of a shark.
Without repeating some of the vile rhetoric from recent history, immigration reform isn’t about secure borders, documentation, or vetting. It’s about people. Our policies as a nation should reflect that.
If you believe that Ohio should welcome refugees, please give generously of your money and time to CRIS and Jewish Family Services. These two organizations are pillars of the community and helped Blaise, personally, during his resettlement.
CRIS: http://www.crisohio.org/
Jewish Family Services: https://jfscolumbus.org/