This story is syndicated from The Black and White, the newspaper of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, MD. The original version ran here.
The vivid smells of black tea and cigarettes fill the air as I walk through the front yard of the refugee center, picking up on the loud, passionate conversations around me — siblings bickering aimlessly, mothers scolding their children, friends making jokes. Taking in the warm, soothing sound of their Arabic words, I’m instantly transported back to Lebanon, the country I called home for 11 years.
When I was just 10 years old, enjoying my weekly Sunday lunch at my grandmother’s house in Beirut, my cousins told my parents and me about a program called the Children’s International Summer Village, an organization that focuses on building connections between children across the world to foster global peace. When I first heard about CISV, I was excited at the prospect of being able to understand more about the way people of distinct cultures interact with each other.
Since 2018, I’ve attended CISV programs in Scandinavia, the Middle East and the American West Coast, each of which taught me unique lessons about communication and global citizenship. This past summer’s program took place in the Netherlands, a country I had previously believed to be blissfully peaceful; of the numerous countries I’ve traveled to throughout my life, I never would have pinned the Netherlands as the one that would leave the strongest lasting impact on my understanding of the Middle Eastern refugee crisis.
A few days into our trip, our group began a volunteer project at a refugee center in Amsterdam for asylum seekers. When we arrived, I was surprised to see people in the recreation area smoking hookah and drinking Turkish coffee in classic Middle Eastern “fenjan” cups. Everything around me felt like home, except that I wasn’t anywhere close to Lebanon — I was over 2,000 miles away.
After just a few minutes at the center, my fellow volunteers and I noticed a pattern: almost all of the refugees at the center were Middle Eastern, mainly Syrian. Suddenly, 30 pairs of eyes fell on my friend and me — we were the only two Lebanese people in the room and the only ones in our group who spoke fluent Arabic. When the staff members at the center tasked us with helping to break the language barrier between the refugees and the volunteers, I felt the pressure start to build. The entire group was relying on us to be able to connect with and learn from the refugees.
I consider myself an outgoing person, and I never imagined I would be the type of person who would struggle to approach someone. Yet, when met with the challenge of starting conversations with refugee families who had been through more than I could imagine, it was difficult to avoid feeling invasive or rude.
A few hours into our volunteer work at the center, I met a 60-year-old Syrian man during a group painting activity. I approached him, introduced myself in English and told him I spoke Arabic. He let out a sigh of relief. Excited to speak in his native tongue, he began to tell me his story.
He and his family had lived in Damascus, Syria, where he had his own engineering business. Between his loving family and fulfilling career, he considered his life practically perfect. That all changed in 2011, he said, when the ongoing Syrian civil war broke out. He lost everything: his house, job and practically perfect life. He fled his home country, leaving everything behind to give his children a new home in the Netherlands.
His story, though fairly common among the refugees I met, was the one that forever altered my preconceived notions about the circumstances of refugees. During my childhood in Lebanon, the war in Syria had a significant impact on my country — as the streets of my home city of Beirut flooded with hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, I remember listening to adults in my life constantly talk about how burdensome the refugees were to the country.
As I listened to the experiences of the refugees I met, the narrative I previously held about them — of refugees being problematic, inconvenient and burdensome — quickly began to change. I also sensed their collective lack of hope of ever returning to their previous lives, and an overwhelming feeling that the legal asylum system had failed them. After all of the paperwork and waiting rooms, the system could never give them the lives they sought on their journeys to freedom.
Listening to people share their stories gave me a feeling of indebtedness towards the asylum seekers, as well as a sense of anxiety and guilt: how could I even begin to do their stories justice?
I felt discomfort knowing I had a comfortable house and a healthy family waiting for me in the U.S. I understood how easy it had been for my family to flee the 2021 political uprising in Lebanon. I recognized how privileged I was to have the opportunity to learn from the refugees I met.
Now, I look back on this discomfort and appreciate it; it reminds me of how lucky I am to be safe and have access to the opportunities I do, and of the importance of understanding others’ stories at the cost of my comfort. Seeking out more stories and helping people share them is something I plan to keep doing by visiting refugee centers in Lebanon and advocating for refugees whenever I can.
I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to look back on my time volunteering in the Netherlands, where something as simple as sharing a language allowed me to discover unforgettably powerful stories.
