The Event

At the Voices of Refugee event, two individual refugees and one family of refugees told their stories of their journeys to the US. The panel included one male from Burundi, one female from Burma, and a family from Bhutan. The stories all had a similar thread because all the refugees extensively expressed their value of education. The daughter of the Bhutanese family shared her hopes of attending community college and DU and the elders of the family expressed that their only hope from the US was that “all their children receive an education”. They all also had positive reactions to their lives in the US; many of them have found a sense of community and support through the work of the African Community Center.

The Voice of Refugee event provided many new insights about how to tell a refugee story. Many of the stories were told with humor; they highlighted lighthearted mishaps and small successes in the US. For example, the woman from Burma shared the story of her kids going hungry in the airport because “[they] did not speak enough English to talk to the vendor, so the kids were just lying on the floor hungry”. Another example is when the young daughter of the family jokingly explained that “she was born in a forest!” The stories were also more broad and general than the stories we have read in class, which was disorientating because I am used to hearing all the details of a refugee story instead of just the rough outline. My reaction to the level of detail incorporated in their stories illuminated another one of my inherent assumptions. After reading the astonishing events and pain that both Mawi and Valentino encountered, I developed the assumption that every refugee had witnessed crazy, horrific events during their journeys to asylum. However, at the VOR event, their stories seemed more ordinary to me. My definition of their stories as “ordinary” was jarring because I realized how immune to human suffering I have become. In an era that consistently displays stories of death and war in the media, suffering has become an everyday aspect of life, and so, without shocking details, the refugees’ accounts of fleeing their homes (an event that should be unimaginable) seemed mundane. This realization has helped me discover that I need to adjust my level of sensitivity to other people’s suffering. Therefore, I thought the VOR event was effective because it told real accounts without the amazing embellishments, which allowed me to analyze my own assumptions about refugee stories.