Dear friends,
This year, the UNHCR has decided not to celebrate World Refugee Day. This is for reasons we can understand. Quoting the UNHCR’s instagram announcement:
- Shelters are closing – which means more lives in danger
- Schools are shutting – forcing refugee children to leave education
- Fewer services – leaving refugees with limited access to documentation, healthcare, counseling, and legal support.
- Women and girls are at greater risk of violence – this means: Child marriage, Human trafficking, Rape.
We have deep respect for the UNHCR, and we believe the above statements are true, therefore we respect this decision.
The difference between us (well, one difference) is that the UNHCR is a global entity with a much-needed global perspective, and we are a local entity, with an equally-needed local perspective. This year, we are celebrating World Refugee Day along with our partners at the Coalition of Refugee Service Agencies, in Stone Mountain at the Eritrean-American Community Center. Allow me to draw a personal parallel to explain why…
My husband had a massive heart attack when he was just 38-years-old. At the time, we lived in a small town in Pennsylvania. After he was loaded onto the helicopter that took him to a bigger hospital in another city, I drove a few blocks home to get our four kids cared for before the much longer drive to meet him. A young friend who had been playing basketball with BIll when he collapsed showed up at our house looking bereft and asking what he could do to help. Our third son, Stephen, had just turned four, and for some reason I remembered that I’d promised him a trip to K-Mart that day to spend his birthday money, so I said, “You can take Stephen to K-Mart.”
Bill was in the CCU for ten days, while I stayed at the Ronald McDonald House nearby. The boys remember the gaming system there because it was far superior to ours at home. Sometime during those harrowing two weeks, my mom said something so wise that I never forgot it, especially since I needed that wisdom many times in the years to come. “Children need life to feel normal in a crisis, while adults need everything to stop.”
I am not saying refugees are children. This experience simply helps me reframe my mom’s statement like this:
People who have survived major crises need normalcy to thrive.
For every person I know, including me, who has experienced a major crisis or loss, stopping is a necessary part of their story. Maybe you can’t literally stop, but your heart and your brain shut down in order for you to survive. Always. And then one day you look up to see that life is going on around you, and you have to figure out how to join back in. Hopefully, you get to do that slowly, tentatively.
The beauty of Refuge Coffee is that we get to join that slow, tentative process with our refugee friends and neighbors. And part of the rejoining is celebrating. Refugees who are here now are not fully on the other side of hardship, but life is beginning to move on, and they are figuring out how to join in. It’s a hero’s journey, at least in our eyes, that’s how it seems to us, the ones who stand beside and bear witness.
That is precisely why we are going to celebrate World Refugee Day this year. And it’s exactly why we understand the UNHCR’s decision not to celebrate. In the post quoted above, they say:
Our commitment to refugees is unwavering. But in the face of brutal funding cuts, the future is uncertain.
Believe me, we will be doing both on World Refugee Day, lamenting the uncertainty and celebrating the people who navigate that uncertainty every single day. We are, like the UNHCR, unwavering in our commitment to continue the work of welcome in decidingly unwelcoming times.
With you for welcome,
Kitti
P.S. – Keep scrolling to check out photos from past World Refugee Day celebrations below.
