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.
