My first thought about working with refugees was bittersweet. I really like helping out people and I already have some experience in helping people. I used to volunteer at my local hospital and part of the experience was to meet with patients of all different races. Yes, most of them knew how to speak English and knew what was going on but there were some who had trouble to speaking English. Patients who didn’t know much English were Hispanic and there kids would help them translate for them. So working with refugees, I can relate to the situation at the hospital. I am excited to work with refugees because I feel like my experience will benefit me. When we started talking about helping refugees in class, I started to become a little nervous. When the peer mentors were talking about how some families might take awhile to open and build a relationship, I was worrying that what if my family doesn’t open up to us? Or they try not to contact us? Which did happen, the family we were supposed to be with didn’t make a contact so we were assigned a different family. As our professor has mentioned in class that this particular family has already been given help and they are greatly accepting for more volunteers. This was a sign of relief; I’m already going there and knowing that the family wants our help. My prior knowledge of refugees is that I knew that refugees weren’t treated as well as they should be. I know that they have a difficult time getting situated in the United States and some experience culture shock. I know that they don’t get much help from the agency and they are left to do things on their own. When we learned more about this in class, I feel like refugees shouldn’t be allowed in the United States if we can’t afford to help them out all the way because most of these families have kids and most of the parents are struggling to find jobs or getting settled in. Especially when watching the movie clips in class, most of the refugees said that the agency don’t do much to help them out after certain number of months and they don’t help them find jobs. Most refugees feel very lonely here because no one knows them and back in their country everyone knows them, so a lot of refugees become depressed. Not everyone views refugees as needing help. When I first told my family about this class and how we are helping out refugee families, they were concerned about my safety and were wondering why are we helping refugees instead of poor people. It hard for my family to understand this because they haven’t done any research to know about the refugee situation here in the U.S., if they did know I think their opinions might change. I told my family that I’m not going alone; I’m doing this with a partner and an experienced peer mentor. I am really excited about the project we are doing with Guz Amer camp in Chad. Especially because Chad is one of the poorest countries in the world, I like that we are helping one of the camps out. I feel like I’m making a difference by helping out refugees and becoming aware of this problem that is currently going on around the world. So I am looking forward working with my refugee family and learning more about refugees around the world and their struggle in other countries.