My Volunteer Program Gets Canned
For almost exactly a year, I've volunteered with a refugee and immigrant services program. It's part of what having a 4-day work week allowed me to do. Today I learned the program is shutting down, in part because of federal funding issues, but in part because we have an adminstration that's actively hostile to, you know, refugees and immigrants.
I feel like I didn't do much. I was tech support for undocumented teens, mostly, and a few adults. They were from everywhere, anywhere, sometimes with families, sometimes not. I helped them set up and understand the online accounts where their applications for asylum lived. Sometimes I got to send the kids home with laptops that the program provided and they got to keep. My work freed up the staffers to do things that require legal smarts, which I don't have. I was there on the regular, working though a translator, often, and helping move a human a little closer to having a safe home.
I'm gutted, truly heartbroken to see this program shutter. I enjoyed the work, I have great respect for the team I supported, and I feel this cause deeply.
Some years back while traveling, I got into it with a German man. He started trash talking immigrants. So I told him what it was like for me to live in Austria. How there were zero language programs nearby, how I couldn't find a job -- and I had it easy. I was married into a local family, and came from the West. I know he listened to me because I'm American, and white, but he at one point he said, "I never considered what it would be like." No kidding.
I don't know what I'll do with this time handed back to me, where I will put this energy going forward, but it's a great loss. For me, it's nothing, a few hours back in my week. But for the kids I worked with, who knows.
Last week I was talking with the lead lawyer, they said, "We have to keep doing the work. We have to move forward so when things change, there will be something left."
Go do something. Doesn't matter if it's small and quiet, it matters to the world we are creating. We are all immigrants. We are all here for a minute from somewhere else. Make it count.
//Pam