Tuesday, June 2, 2015

A Day in Their Clothes


A Day in Their Clothes

         A Sudanese daughter. A mother from Eritrea. A Burmese man. An Ethiopian woman. Each of us was assigned a new identity and nationality shortly after arriving in Nashville for job specific training. The first step was to make it through a mock interview to receive permission to come to America. After several failures, we were finally granted consent to come. However, that was not all. Each team member spent the night in the home of a refugee family. These families fed us ethnic foods and spoke their native language. The next day began with a language lesson taught completely in Swahili, and each member was given a bus pass and told to navigate through the Nashville while wearing various ethnic clothing.  Because the buses ran slow, we only rode it once and walked everywhere else. By the time we reached our final destination, we wanted nothing more than to sit and sleep.

To be completely honest, I wasn’t very excited at the beginning of the simulation. I thought it would be enough to simply “know” what the refugees go through. I couldn’t have been farther from the truth. It’s true when people say you must walk in their shoes to understand where they come from. While I will never truly be able to understand everything these precious people have experienced, my eyes were opened to just a small portion of their world. While I am already homesick, I will be home in two months. These refugees will most likely never be able to go home. 
The P52-Nashville team asks that you pray for God to use us in making America a place the nations can call a new home.