My In-Experience

This Saturday, February 18, 2012, I will begin my interactions with a refugee family from the Congo. I am feeling a lot of emotions with this experience. I am feeling very nervous but I am also very excited to begin my work. I am scared that the family will not like me or that it will be very hard to communicate since they speak French. However, this exploration into a refugee family will be very enlightening. I will be able to view what a refugee family has to go through along with helping them get accustomed to the American culture and hopefully make lifelong friends. I feel that friends that are made through experiences like these are very close and stay lifelong. I hope that my family will not be afraid to contact me for anything they need from the sons to the parents.

I only have one experience with refugees and that is when I went with Dr. Amick to the Ukrainian village and visited the refugee museum. Going to the museum opened up my eyes and made me realize how much the refugees actually go through. The hardest part for me would have to be separation from your loved ones. I love my family and my fiancée to

Leopold 2

death. It would be so hard running from people and not getting split up and if you did get split up having no way to communicate with them or contacting them. It would be very frightening and scary. Reading about the lost boys only makes me sad for the people that had to flee, the boys while fleeing if didn’t get shot. They got eaten by the lions, it’s saddening that so few survived, but rejoice-full for the ones that did survive and made it to a safe haven.

I am very excited to work with my family and help them get accustomed to American culture, help them with their needs, and just to get to know them and hear their stories that are so inspiring. Just thinking about and even writing this paper gets me excited to help my family. I love helping people and an experience like this excites me. I hope to gain many qualities from this experience. I hope to gain respect for these families and the hardships that they have gone through, a passion for helping refugee families and helping them in the future, and a friendship that no one can understand unless they have gone and helped these families in their time of need.

I go meet my family this Saturday and I am very excited to not only meet them but hear their stories of struggle and relief in fleeing their country. The stories they tell can only be inspiring to have gone through so much hardship and still be strong and willing to fight for the little that they have. Only people who are tough, strong, and still have hope in

Leopold 3

their lives can make it through an experience like this and still have the will to go on. I look up to these families that fought their hardest to make it through and survive