An Uplifiting and Emotional Dinner

Tonight, I had dinner with refugees who are a part of the African Community Center in Denver. Upon walking into the church where these dinners are hosted, I anticipated what to expect, but was not ready for the flood of emotions that engulfed me as I watched in silence the beauty of 'integration' at work. The purpose of these dinners are for refugees and Denver community members to meet and get to know one another. The refugees make the meals and bring them to share with everyone. Refugees from Burundi, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Bhutan, and Burma among other places interacted with each other, some of them barely able to speak English having been in the United States for only a few months, but happy, smiling and talking to one another as if they were old friends. I saw the friendship between an Iraqi woman and Sudanese woman as they hugged one another, I saw the young children from all different backgrounds cheering for each other (there was an award ceremony for the completion of their summer program), and I saw strangers holding other people's babies. Truly, a beautiful scene. Normally I am a gregarious person, loving to meet people, but the experience truly made me silent. Having studied the backgrounds of the people that were there tonight, understanding in depth the difficulty of the process of asylum, and the academics that surrounds it, seeing successes really brought tears to my eyes.