I gave an orientation session to nursing students last week, and it was blah. Nine arms-crossed students, who according to themselves, are "ready to be done" with school, were subjected to my 1.5-hour orientation spiel.
Allow me to back up for a second and give you some context. Orientating people is a major part of my job as Community Resource Assistant/Volunteer Coordinator here at the Refugee and Immigration Center, and usually I give a thought-provoking presentation full of essential information, such as the services our office provides to clients, the process of becoming a refugee, the 12 countries sending us refugees in 2009*, and statistics such as the following:
There are about 12-14 million refugees (people who have left their country because of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, or membership of a particular social/political group) currently in the world today.
Refugee camp life is usually not temporary: 75% of the people in refugee camps have been there for five years or more.
For the vast majority of orientation sessions I give, audiences give me affirming nods throughout, with some kind-hearted souls even getting teary-eyed as they imagine the hardships our clients have been forced to endure.
But last week, not so much. The only nods I was receiving were signaling sleep was on its way and the only tears were from oversized jaw-splitting yawns. It wasn’t the students’ faults, really. They’re in their last year of school and are filled past capacity with the theoretical that is classroom learning.
So it was beautiful in the afternoon to bring three of the students to a refugee client’s home, Simon**, for them to begin a mentoring relationship with him. Perhaps because they’re nurses, so they’re into hands-on human interaction and all, but as we chatted with Simon, it was like giving the nursing students a shot of one of those four-ounce caffeine-taurine-intenseine drinks. Energy, curiosity, and compassion started breaking through on their faces where boredom had just been setting up camp that morning.
The meeting started with the usual intro questions: what’s your name? (Simon); where are you from? (Burundi); how long have you been here in the U.S.? (three weeks). But then the conversation turned to questions like how did you get here? (through Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia), and what have you endured? . . .
My father was killed by Hutus [the majority tribe in Burundi and Rwanda] in 1995. My mother, in 2007. I am an only child. I left the country the week after my mother was murdered because they wanted me too. Here are the burn scars on my arm and side, let me list the medical problems I still suffer from today because of the time they beat me . . .
Listen to me; look at my face. I am a human, not a statistic. I know English. I am smiling and friendly like you, about your age even. I do not hate the Hutus. Not all Hutus are bad. I am a pastor, a Christian, so I forgive even the bad Hutus.
For fun, I like swimming and Tae Kwon Do, and if I get lessons here in the U.S., I will have a black belt after two years.
And a direct quote from Simon I wrote down during a later conversation: "I don’t feel like a refugee, I feel like you, like other people here, like Americans. America is a nice country, there is peace here; there are no tribes here. I have hope that life is changing for me."
As we walked back to the car with Simon, the nursing students asked about bowling.
"No, I’ve never gone bowling."
"We’ll take you sometime, Simon. I’m no good at it, but it’s fun to do together as a group."
So this—the process of making the theoretical practical, of translating statistics into human faces, of witnessing the formation of hope and bowling get-togethers—this is why I love my job.
*Bhutan, Burma, Burundi, Congo, Cuba, Eritrea, Ethipia, Iraq, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, and Vietnam.
**Fake name, but I have permission from him to put the rest of this info on this blog, which is accurate.
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