Beyond Food and Shelter: Migrants Need Dignity and Community
While the number of refugees migrating to Europe has died down since 2015, the tension regarding how to handle the migrant crisis in the E.U. has not. From electing far-right, anti-immigration leaders to criminalizing migrant assistance, the situation can feel insurmountable. However, after speaking with Kathleen*, I’ve learned there are pockets of hope around the world, and that there are ways people can help.
After Disaster Relief: What Happens?
Have you ever helped out with some kind of disaster relief? Whether it’s migrants or hurricane victims, your first response might be to bring by bottled water and food. While this is essential for responding to an emergency, Kathleen says this is an issue because, for migrants, people don’t think of what comes after.
“Even if a refugee is given legal documents and they have a place to live and shelter over their heads, they still need people to welcome and receive them and help them in their transition so that they can really recover from the deep trauma that is involved in forced displacement,” says Kathleen.
Kathleen works for the International Association For Refugees (IAFR), an organization she says is focused on the “then what” that comes after immediate needs are taken care of. She helps individuals, churches and organizations reframe their thinking and “understand a little bit deeper what the people’s needs really are.” While she currently lives in the U.S., Kathleen volunteered abroad for years helping refugees, first with a different organization then the IAFR.
Her extensive experience with refugees gives Kathy specific knowledge of what they need. In particular, she spent several years in Italy with her husband exploring the needs of migrants and how they could help them. While there was food and shelter available to migrants in Italy, Kathleen recognized the biggest issues were permanent housing and employment.
So, she thought, what else can we do? Kathleen spoke with migrants and observed the conditions, and after migrants frequently told her they felt like they were being treated like animals, Kathleen realized the most important thing she could do was to help provide a welcoming place for migrants that offered dignity and privacy.
“There are no toilets that they’re allowed to use with any sort of dignity or privacy. [The migrants] said actually that’s way worse — the lack of dignity is way worse than any sort of lack of food or shelter. They’re like,’ We would rather have a shower and be treated like a human being than have a shelter.’
Kathleen and her husband decided to start a shelter to provide migrants a place to be during the day (even those who are in night shelters often get kicked out during daylight hours) where they “…were welcome, there was no pressure, there was no agenda, it was literally just come sit and be treated like human beings, and given a place to use the bathroom in peace.”
The center, though small, provided a safe space, among other functions, including a place for them to charge their mobile phones for free — which is important, as it is often their lifeline. They could drink hot tea, play a card game or chat. Italian and international volunteers were there to welcome them and listen and answer questions. Some volunteers would even help migrants with employment, explaining ‘wanted’ ads and answering other cultural questions. Most importantly, the atmosphere was welcoming and the volunteers were there to lend an ear to whatever the refugees needed.
The Five Things Migrants Need to Recover
This center is just one way the IAFR helps refugees, in that it provides relationships and a sense of humanity and dignity. Kathleen and others in her organization have “…spent a lot of years listening to the voices of refugees themselves. Not what the ‘white foreigner who wants to save the day’ thinks. But actually asking them, ‘What is it that you really need? What is it that you really want?’”
Kathleen says she consistently hears five themes of what refugees need to recover, thrive and flourish. These five themes, which the IAFR uses to guide its recovery work (IAFR, 2017), are community, faith, emotional well-being, personal capacity and contribution.
“The number one thing they say is ‘We need a community. We need a group of people who know us, where we can belong, who believe in us, who look at us as humans.’ That’s where that dignity and safe space comes out. This list is true whether they’re in Africa in a tent camp in the desert or on the streets of Rome or in a city of the U.S. They want to be received into a community of people. Without relationships, people die. People need relationships and a community that will welcome them.”
For Kathleen, this community is a natural fit with the church, but I believe a sense of community can be found in any nonprofit organization that works with migrants and refugees. After all, it makes sense that being connected to a community provides you with greater resources and support in troubled times, so having a sense of community and relationships would be critical for recovery.
This sense of community cascades into the rest of the factors, including “faith” or “worldview,” as Kathleen phrased it in our interview. She said:
“We really believe that for most refugees, their departure from home represents a crisis of worldview, where all of their foundational questions — ‘Who am I? Why am I here? What’s the world about?’ — they have to answer those questions again because of the trauma that they’ve faced. Often, they have been chased out by their own people or people of their own faith background, and then they’re like ‘Oh, what do I do with that? Do I still believe that? How do I make sense of my world? What’s the purpose of life?’ Being able to answer those questions is really important for long-term growth and flourishing, to really recover, and we think those questions are best answered in a community.”
Similarly, Kathleen attributes refugees’ ability to recover their emotional well-being after suffering trauma to relationships because refugees need someone to listen to them and treat them like they matter. Recovery “…comes from having people who take the time to listen; to where they’re safe and slowly unpack their story over time and be heard.”
The next two factors, personal capacity and contribution, are also intertwined. The term “personal capacity” is used to show that refugees are not without skills — some of them are incredibly resourceful and resilient — but they might not have the right skills and qualifications for their new environment. These skills can include technical or employment skills needed for a job, but also language and navigation skills.
“We always give the example of a cow farmer from Sudan who shows up in America in a big city and is like ‘What does that have to do with anything here?’ It’s not at all because that person lacks skills or anything to offer, it’s just because it doesn’t fit in the new place… So we use personal capacities instead of skills because we want to capture that broader context, that broader concept of growing personal capacities and growing new abilities for a new environment.”
This leads into contribution, which is the last but definitely not least of the components.
According to Kathleen, refugees often will say, “What I really want is somebody to realize that I have something to give.” When given the opportunity to be the solvers and innovators of their own problems, they unlock the key to thriving in so many ways. One of her mantras is that “Refugees are not just people in need.” While they may be in a place of tremendous need, they also have gifts and skills and things to offer.
“When we run right over their voices and don’t take the time to ask them what they think the problem is and the solution is, we miss the boat again and again.”
One example she gave me of a migrant who not only recovered, but also is thriving, is a man in Italy who successfully learned Italian and assimilated to the culture. He put himself through junior high and high school, and then he was able to go to college. Now, he is married, has a baby and co-owns a business with one of the most unique stories in the Eternal City: He is an Afghan who co-owns a sushi restaurant in Rome! While Kathleen has many inspiring stories like this, she also says she has seen people who in that same time, are still stuck in the streets due to a multitude of factors — unwillingness to integrate in Italian culture and mental health issues caused by trauma being the most common. But, with the IAFR’s five pillars of recovery being addressed by aid organizations, refugees have a better shot at success.
Think Beyond the Statistics
After speaking with Kathleen, I realized that while so many statistics are thrown around about the migrant crisis on a daily basis, it’s often the unquantifiable things that count the most regarding relief efforts. This was especially obvious upon hearing her passionately tell me about what she calls her “exploratory phase” while living in Italy and listening to refugees’ stories to try to understand how to best help them.
Kathleen and her husband used to go down to the train station and speak with the migrants living there, and they’d invite a few over for dinner five nights per week. One night, due to the language barrier, way more guests than anticipated showed up — over ten people — and there were more people than chairs. Kathleen recounts what happened when it came time for dinner to be served:
“I brought all this food to the table and I just looked around and I felt so sad, like we’ve missed the boat, we’ve failed, I can’t believe that I don’t have enough chairs for these people and I’m so glad they’re here. I was putting food down and I saw one young boy, who was probably 16, and he had tears in his eyes. I said, ‘I’m so sorry, this is probably stressful, is there anything I can do to help?’ He said, ‘No, you don’t understand. I’ve been invited into a chaotic family where there are not enough chairs at the table and where I come from, everybody’s got twenty brothers and sisters and cousins and there’s never enough room. And we never sit at tables anyway; we sit on the floor. But this just feels like home. And it’s the first time since I’ve left that I’ve felt that way.’
And I realized like, could we count that? We served ten people dinner — that’s how most people would like to report about that experience. But I would say we gave ten people an opportunity to have respite from their chaotic difficult lives and to have the opportunity to be received into a family and treated as equals and answer random cultural questions and I think that’s worth a lot. So a lot of it, I think, comes down to reframing what we think is valuable.”
For Kathleen, encouraging organizations to focus on the long-term path to recovery can be difficult because it’s tough to quantify helping others in a more emotional way:
“We try to encourage people to think broader and a big part of why that’s hard is because people want something that’s countable. Tangible, countable things are important in this world, and that’s really tough. But we’re dealing with people, we’re not talking about cogs in a machine, we’re talking about people, and at the end of the day, all of us are human beings and all of us need human connection to live, and so we have to learn to value what we offer and even value the little wins.”
What Can You Do
Throughout discussing the statistics of displaced persons to experiences in training organizations, Kathleen impressed one point upon me throughout: that everyone can do something about this issue. First of all, donations always help to those helping others. But secondly, having not just an open pocketbook, but an open mind and heart is what is important.
“All of us can give money, because let me tell you, in the nonprofit world, we all need it! So please give money, and food and water are essential! But don’t stop there. Go past it, and realize the power of making space in your own heart and mind, making space in the hearts and minds of people you know, for people like this. That’s powerful work and it’s important. I think it’s really crucial.”
You can donate to IAFR here.
*Name has been changed for confidentiality. All photos provided by interviewee.
Source
International Association For Refugees. (2017). Retrieved from https://iafr.org/downloads/IAFRs%20Unique%20Role%20on%20the%20Refugee%20Highway%20-US%20Letter.pdf
