At the beginning of this summer I remember being so nervous that I wasn’t fully prepared to take on an internship yet. And as much as I tried to be prepared, that start date approached much more quickly than I could have anticipated. I quickly learned that even when you aren’t ready, life keeps moving. And that’s what I did this summer, I learned. Working at Exodus has taught me more than I could have ever imagined.
It started with the simpler things. I learned how to enter data, refine my kitschy marketing language, and I even discovered some organizational skills I thought were nowhere in my genetics. About a month in another intern and I were asked to start mentoring a new refugee family twice a week. At first I was thinking “I just learned how to use a copier, do you guys really think I’m ready?” But as life does, our first day approached before I thought I was ready.
It’s funny how when you first meet people there are those awkward lulls of silence, and then that awkwardness starts to slip away as you get to know each other. That awkwardness has a little more of a presence when you and the person you meet have no common language. Our first few weeks with our family were fun, interesting, and mostly a lot of hand signals and laughing. We developed this ritual where the other intern sits with the parents and practices English, and I run around with and watch their three amazingly sweet children. At the end we sit down for tea and we almost always end up leaving a few hours later than we are supposed too. We are friends now.
These days, the kids always run up and hug us when we arrive and pout when we leave. We’ve come up with some weird mix of hand motions and various languages and we can now understand each other most of the time. But I think the hardest part of getting to know this family is knowing that our time together is coming to an end. The father has begun calling us his sisters and has explained that since their family is so far away, that Exodus is their family. I can never put into words how much this experience with them means to me.
Today is my last day with the family and I hope we will cross paths again someday. We have tried to help them as much as we can, but I think in the end, they are the ones who have helped us. They have shown me how truly resilient one can be, how close you can become with someone when you take the time to know them, and how important family truly is. I will never forget this experience with Exodus and I am so thankful to have been led in this direction by the CAPS program. I plan to spend the rest of my life working with refugees and getting to know such strong and beautiful humans.