Dear friends,
Several years ago, our small Refuge team took a field trip to The Center for Civil and Human Rights. If you’ve never been, it’s worth a full day of your time! After visiting the Civil Rights floor, we made our way upstairs to the Human Rights exhibit. I remember Leon calling us over to “meet his friend,” Dr. Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist who had won the Nobel Peace Prize that year. We didn’t need to read the description placed next to the life-sized photograph, because Leon, ever the history teacher, told us all about him. I will never forget learning about, and “meeting” this doctor, a hero who continues to fight for the rights of women in his country.
Introduce people to your heroes. It might just change their lives.
Over 16 years ago, a friend noticed that Martin Luther King Jr. was one of my husband’s heroes. She asked him to suggest where she should begin reading about MLK. Growing up, she’d been told that he was a terrorist and, essentially, a bad man, yet heard Bill quote him often, and with great respect. Bill suggested she start with Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and that was all it took for Martin Luther King Jr. to become my friend’s hero as well.
Again, introduce people to your heroes. It might just change their lives.
Last week, thanks to the generosity of The Alliance Theater, I was able to take five of our barista trainees to see The Mountaintop, a play set in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the night before Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. At dinner, I asked if anyone had heard of MLK. At first, I was shocked to find that none of the young women had. And then I realized that, even though MLK is a historical icon on a global scale, like Nelson Mandela in South Africa or William Wilberforce in England, our truest heroes are those closest to home. The heroes who changed the world in our own backyards are the ones we remember. These women all fled their home countries in traumatic circumstances and, while they are learning to thrive here, they are still very much in survival mode with very little time for heroes.
I spent most of dinner trying to be like Leon, telling them as much of the overarching story of the civil rights movement that took place before they were born and the impact MLK made as one of the primary architects of that movement. I told them about MLK’s “I Am a Man” speech, about the sanitation worker’s strike, and the reasons for it. As I tried to convey how his non-violent protests cost him his life, they translated for each other in Tigrinya, Amharic, and Farsi. The play is complex and gritty, and I’m not sure anyone in our little group who sat together on the second row got the connection between the story I shared over dinner and the events so imaginatively displayed on stage.
I’m convinced that knowing the stories of heroes is critical in the world today, especially in light of how many people are experiencing the crush of power being wielded with lethal force to create powerlessness in its victims. We do not need heroes to worship, but we desperately need people, real, flawed human beings, to look up to. People who use what little power they have in the service of others.
Nafisa, Sediqa, Sesyat, Hiyab, and Betty use their robust ability to welcome every day, despite the barriers they face. I count these women among my heroes. I hope I conveyed that to them as well. I’m so grateful for the courage and resilience they exhibit daily and the example it is to me and others. And I am grateful, too, for your support of Refuge and the millions of opportunities for heroic welcome you create.
It’s moments like these—when I get to introduce people to my heroes (including you)—that change my life.
Thankfully,
Kitti
