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.

I studied abroad once and I took pictures and I told tales and I felt like a world traveler for some time. It’s funny how once you visit a place, you feel like you carry part of its culture as your own afterwards. Traveling seems so glorious, so surreal. And it is. It’s a beautiful way to step outside of your comfort zone and learn about things you can’t quite grasp behind a computer screen or even between the covers of the most marvelous novels. But the traveling I did in Europe was nothing compared to the traveling I do within the walls of a small office in Indianapolis.

I am going on my sixth week as an intern at Exodus Refugee Immigration through Valpo’s amazing CAPS Fellows Program. Exodus is a refugee resettlement non-profit that has been in operation since 1981. They began by resettling Cuban refugees, and have since helped refugees from all over the world. This past year alone they assisted nearly 900 individuals. My official department is in development and communications, which coincides rather well with my pursuit in international business. I’ve done a little event planning, social media posting, emailing, donation requesting, and so on. But outside of these normal communication roles, I have been introduced to a whole new side of the city I thought I had known my whole life.

My first day at Exodus I was able to help with an apartment set-up. We met at an apartment near my childhood home and walked into a space that would soon be home to a family of 8 just arriving from overseas. We set up a bed for the parents and then 6 more beds for the children. It was overwhelming imagining this family getting off their flight and walking into a completely foreign land, and then hopping in a car to head towards their new weird home in the part of the world that had always been the most normal to me. Since then I have been able to help teach English, smile and laugh with the most resilient and beautiful people I have ever met, and am even able to help mentor a new family one-on-one.

A lot of the work Exodus does is just kind of mind-blowing to me. It’s this small office space with almost 40 employees and a lot of interns, and everyone is always speeding off to their next location, doing whatever it is they are tasked with that day. It’s so beautiful there. I’ve found I work alongside a lot of everyday superheroes. These people do everything from teaching english, finding jobs for people, raising money, moving furniture, setting up appointments, and so much more. I always just say, “It’s a full-service kinda place.” You can walk into one room and there’s an official suit and tie meeting going on, and walk into the next and find kids playing with toys and coloring pictures of flowers and baby bears. It’s this kind of diversity that makes Exodus so special.

I feel lucky to be able to work with and for Exodus. It might be a small office that has no windows and a leaky ceiling, but it creates a home for people who really need one. In an interview with a local Indy paper one client stated, “When we came here, we had no friends and no family. We only knew Exodus.”

They always say an internship is where you do the real learning. I can’t wait to keep learning this summer.