People used to ask me where refugees in Clarkston come from. My stock answer, until the last two years, was, “Look for the worst instances of oppression and war in the world, and in a year or so, that’s who comes to Clarkston.”
In the brief, 11-year history of Refuge Coffee, this has been true. Until now. As our country is becoming increasingly complicit in many of “the worst instances” that create refugees, since the Iran war began less than two months ago, it has already produced thousands of innocent “huddled masses yearning to be free.”* Because we have effectively closed every doorway to refugees, there are fewer places in the world that provide shelter. Since 2015 when Refuge first started this journey, the number of displaced people worldwide has grown by almost 60 million.
The world is suffering from a global failure to welcome of epic proportions. And, for global citizens like us who are not refugees, I suppose that we are also suffering from a global, epic failure of imagination–we cannot see ourselves in refugees’ shoes, and so we cannot open our hearts to be welcomers.
A small part of our job at Refuge is to aid your imagination when we can, but mainly it’s to “do the work” of welcome that is right in front of us every day, even as our national refusal to welcome pushes the refugee crisis farther away and, therefore, makes it easier to ignore.
Refuge Coffee is not a political advocacy group. We are not a resettlement agency. We are not a healthcare organization.
We are welcomers.
We welcome with coffee. And we welcome with jobs, with competitive wages, with training, with mentorship, and with as much safety, comfort, and community as we can. These days, this looks like planning for worst-case scenarios while creating best-case environments. We’ve crafted in-depth emergency preparedness plans for each immigrant and refugee on our team, know-your-rights training, and—this can’t be quantified—all the “we’ve got your back” internal communication we can muster.
Welcome looks like staying alive and alert to our refugee and immigrant neighbors, instead of becoming numb to a “problem” others may not see anywhere but on the news.
My Kurdish friend, Dr. Helen Sairany, brilliant researcher, expert in the field of trauma-informed leadership, and fellow Agnes Scott alum, wrote the following on LinkedIn last week. I find it a poignant reminder of why the mission of Welcome is more pertinent now than ever:
Some argue that refugees are simply the result of circumstance—like natural disasters, inevitable and impersonal. But history tells a different story. Most human suffering is not accidental; it is inflicted. Perhaps the opposite of good is not evil, but numbness—the quiet detachment that allows us to ignore the pain we cause one another.
Compassion isn’t possible when we are quietly detached. There are many types of compassion. There’s the compassion we feel for those living with their own self-inflicted suffering and for victims of circumstantial harm. And then there’s compassion for people suffering harm that has been inflicted. It’s this last kind of compassion that drives us at Refuge Coffee. Once you get close enough to see what refugee resettlement is and who it impacts, you can’t unsee it. Numbness is not an option.
We’re staying awake and alive with your help,
Kitti
*That’s approximately 3.2 million people who have fled their homes inside Iran and one million in Turkey, many because those homes no longer exist.
