Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Refugees Welcome

The only time I’ve ever loved ice-breaker games

Introverts hate ice-breaker games. It’s a fact. Okay, I hate ice-breaker games. You know what I’m talking about, right? The games where you’re sitting in a group of near-strangers and a leader announces some game designed to help everyone get to know each other, and if you’re an introvert like me, you try to fade into the background because you’d rather just pair up with one person and ask them a billion questions about their life instead of trying to figure out what kind of inanimate object you are or state what kind of vegetable you like or–the worst–remember the names of everyone in the group.

Ice-breaker games. I thought I gave those up after college.

I showed up to the biweekly women’s group for refugees thinking we were going to make crafts, which I wasn’t excited about, but I’ll do just about anything for these women, including make crafts. As it turns out, the person who was supposed to lead us in arts and crafts had cancelled the day before and we were initiating a back-up plan. Ice-breaker games.

The announcement didn’t cause me as much anxiety as it used to, so I take that as a sign that I’m growing and changing. I sat down next to a Somali woman who was attending the group for the first time. I asked about her family and we cobbled together a conversation in simple and broken English. I explained to her what was going to happen, that we were going to play some games. And the first game was “Two Truths and a Lie.”

At least I was familiar with this ice breaker. It’s a youth group/church camp favorite. (Which I now find hilarious that we simultaneously teach our kids not to lie and then encourage it as part of a game. Side track. Sorry.)

I was so busy typing the statements of the first participants–who happened to be the staff and volunteers–into Google translate and trying to help my new friend decipher which one was a lie, that I didn’t realize my turn had come. I’m a writer, so I’m good at making things up. If it had been three lies, I think I would have felt good. It’s the truths part that is harder for me. So I spit out three things: 1. I have not lived in Pennsylvania my whole life. 2. I love coffee. 3. I have three children.

Most of the women guessed number 1, and in my head, I got confused about whether I had stated a truth or a lie, so I said, “yes, number 1. No, wait, I grew up in Illinois. I only have two children.” We all laughed and I was not embarrassed at my mistake.

When my Somali friend’s turn came, she said her three things. We encouraged all the women to speak their statements in English, which was more the intent of the game than the getting to know you part. The group leader said, “Okay, so which one is the lie?” We all tried to guess and my Somali friend said, “What is this ‘lie’?” She had told us all truths.

This pattern would repeat for the next several women who said they did not want to lie, and this was my first clue that I was about to experience something completely different where ice-breaker games were concerned. When Americans play this game, we exaggerate things. I have five brothers or six kids or I’ve flown around the world. These women told us things like I have 10 brothers and 8 sisters and my mother is dead and I had no idea if any of them were false.

Until one Cuban woman reminded us that sometimes an obvious lie is just what we all need to connect.

She spoke confidently but her English was still difficult to understand. We heard that she was someone’s wife but we asked her to repeat. “I am Donald Trump’s wife,” she said again, and all of us who understood doubled over with laughter. The Somali woman next to me wanted to know what was so funny, so I said, “She said she is the wife of the American president.” Her face broke into the widest smile I’ve ever seen and she cackled.

“Donald Trump! Oh no, no, he no good! Obama, yes. But Donald Trump, no!”

Her laughter spread to the rest of us and we spent several good minutes filling the gym with laughter. It was a holy moment for me because in any other setting, someone would have been offended by our laughter. But it was so free, and we all agreed that it was a ridiculous statement and sometimes laughter really is good medicine. None of us needed to speak the same language to understand the laughter.

Frank McKenna via Unsplash

When we had composed ourselves, the game continued and we all survived. Our next game was the one where we say our name and what kind of fruit or vegetable we like. We did not make everyone remember the previous statements, but apparently the “fruit or vegetable” part of the exercise was lost in translation because some women said they liked fish, chicken or chocolate. Whatever. We continued to play.

Then, we all stood and held hands and our leader told us to jump in and out of the circle, left and right. It was another exercise in chaos as left and right were sometimes mixed up. Then she threw a twist into it where we had to follow her directions but say the opposite. There was a lot more laughter, and the joining of hands is something powerful that I forget.

Tim Marshall via Unsplash

Our final game was charades, of sorts. We were divided into two groups and given a stack of animal pictures. We had to act out the animal for the other team to guess. Our first one was a sheep and no one was moving, so I got on my hands and knees and started saying “baa.” This is not normal behavior for me. Not the going first or the pretending to be a sheep. We acted like monkeys and elephants and roosters and cows and puppies and it was a ridiculous way to spend the afternoon.

Maybe there are no monumental takeaways from all of this except that I have literally never enjoyed ice-breaker games as much as I did that day. And that sometimes the only common denominator we need is laughter. And hand-holding.

How I became a friend to refugees {A Dangerous Territory link-up}

I recently read this challenging book called Dangerous Territory by Amy Peterson, and in celebration of the book’s release, the author is hosting a blog link-up for people to tell their stories of trying to save the world, or how a cross-cultural interaction widened perspective. The latter is the story I have to tell.

Last week, I wrote a guest post for my friend Carol about how I became a friend to refugees. I’m abridging that story here. So, if you’ve already read her post, this is a repeat. (But you can visit the blog link-up to read other stories like this!)

I was not always a friend to refugees.

Maybe I could have told you what—or who—an immigrant was, but I don’t know that I could have attached a name to a living, breathing person with this status.

This transformation was a gradual process, like water shaping rocks. Unnoticeable day-by-day but when compared years apart, the difference is obvious.

It might have started when my family visited Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. We grew up in the Midwest, so we were eager to visit these sites after moving to Pennsylvania. I remember standing in the massive room, empty except for a few tourists, imagining it packed wall-to-wall with immigrants. I read the words about their experiences, saw the pictures.

And then my husband and I decided to try to find his great-grandparents. You can search for people by name, and though we hadn’t been married long and the stories of their arrival are not ingrained in my history, I wanted to find this couple on a ship’s manifest. They were my kids’ ancestors, after all, and I know little about my side of the family’s origins.

Seeing their names awoke something in me as I imagined what it was like to arrive on these shores, tired, poor and uncertain.

If that’s where it started, it would be many years later for that seed to become noticeable fruit.

Christian Joudrey via Unsplash

HOW LOVE BROKE THROUGH

I didn’t become an advocate for refugees overnight. I learned late in life to use my voice for those who didn’t have one. I avoid conflict. I don’t like crowds. And I’m a recovering people-pleaser. These are the sorts of things that work against me whenever I want to lend my support—vocally, physically, monetarily—to a cause that can be controversial.

I used to be afraid that if I opened my heart to care about something—especially something heartbreaking—that I would suddenly need to care about everything and my heart would literally break and I would not be able to go on with life.

And I won’t lie. Sometimes it feels like that. But I wouldn’t trade a tender heart for a stone-cold one, even when it hurts.

Gaelle Marcel via Unsplash

So, I opened my heart a tiny little bit. I gave myself permission to cry over something that didn’t directly affect my life, for people I had never met, might never meet.

I let my heart break a little, and that’s where love broke through.

DO SOMETHING, NOT EVERYTHING

I can’t list all the steps in this transformation, but I can tell you a few stories. As my heart opened slightly, I started reading the news again, and when a picture circulated of a little Syrian boy, dead in the arms of his father on the shores of Greece, the crack in my heart widened. How could I do nothing?

But what do you do when you want to care but don’t know where to start?

That same summer my husband and I went to Kenya with a team from our church. I had never been to Africa and it had been 15 years since I had flown internationally. During the flight, we read the International New York Times, whose front page is drastically different than ours. We read about a Greek island overrun with refugees because it is the first landfall they make when they attempt to cross the Mediterranean, seeking safety.

Why hadn’t we heard about this before?

Maybe we had, but we weren’t paying attention.

During our stay in Kenya, we visited a refugee camp, one where Kenyans had been displaced from another part of the country. It had been a decade but most were still living in mud-walled homes, some perched on the edge of a dry riverbed that would flood during the rainy season. We entered these homes. We worshiped God with them. We prayed. We held their hands and looked in their eyes and it dawned on me: These are refugees.

When we left Kenya a few days later, we shared a plane with refugees leaving Rwanda. Congolese refugees, I imagine. They were large in number and somewhat disoriented by the journey. One woman tried to leave the plane as we flew from Brussels to New York. She was sedated and later questioned by port authority when we landed. I didn’t understand what was happening at the time, but when I think about it now, it makes perfect sense.

Would I not also be distressed and overwhelmed if I had lived all my life in one area of the world and was suddenly being whisked away to another part of the world, never to see my home again? Never mind being on a plane flying over the ocean. Never mind not knowing the language.

My re-entry to the American way of life was rough. I thought it would be no big deal to get on with my life after visiting Kenya, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the people. I’m not a person prone to violent outburst but I nearly shouted at someone in the Costco parking lot when they wouldn’t walk their cart to the corral because it was raining.

Do you know that there are people living in mud houses that could be swept away in the rainy season? Do you know that they walk miles to church? That they walk home from work uphill after a long day on their feet?

But they didn’t know because they hadn’t seen, just as I didn’t know because I hadn’t seen.

There was a part of me that wanted to go back to Kenya right away. I dreamt of booking a flight I couldn’t afford, of becoming a missionary or a teacher or whatever I needed to, to get back to Kenya. I dreamt of taking my kids on their first international trip, of showing them a world I had come to love.

But we are not wealthy and I will not go back to Kenya on the support of others. Nor could I realistically give up my life here. I am not actually “called” to be a missionary, not the kind that moves across the world permanently. I needed to do something right here, where I live.

Some friends connected me with a refugee resettlement organization in our city. I attended a volunteer training session one night. By myself. In the city. And I walked away energized but with little direction.

I continued to learn and to read and to pay attention. These are the foundations for change, I think.

Months later, I finally found my place in volunteering with this organization. I showed up one Tuesday and met a beautiful family from Congo. They re-awakened everything I had loved about our trip to Kenya. We became fast friends.

And I had found the work that made my heart come alive.

I always tell people I have no special skills when I volunteer. I show up and be a friend. Mostly, though, I’ve learned that if something disturbs, you don’t have to do nothing. You also don’t have to do everything.

You can let your heart open just a crack and see where it leads you.