My wife and I have a dear friend, a Muslim refugee who fled civil war much like the Syrians causing the GOP-o-sphere to engage in massive freak outs. Today I was helping my next door neighbor move. Three of us — a friend of his (a strapping guy in his early 40’s), my neighbor, and I - were chatting. The subject of “Muslim refugees” came up and my neighbor’s friend said something to the effect: “Obama’s a Muslim who wants to let terrorists in!”, to which I replied “Really? After years of attending a Christian church after he moved back to Chicago?” “Oh, that’s just a cover story,” he replied. And so on ....
I replied, “terrorists aren’t going to spend years in refugee camps and then undergo 18 months to 2 years of rigorous scrutiny. They’ll enter with tourist visas like the 9/11 Saudis, or sneak across our Southern border where they can then buy all the assault weapons they want to anywhere in the Southern U.S.” And did he know that people on terrorist watch lists have bought thousands of guns because it’s perfectly legal?
He paused for a moment and said, “I was driving past a mosque next to the State Fair Grounds, and they even have a terrorist training camp there.” Hm.
It’s actually a playground for kids with plastic tunnels kids can crawl through, you know, like you see on playgrounds across America. I mentioned the majority of the Muslim refugees in our city are Kurds, that I know many of them - all really good hard working people with good families and good hearts.
“The black ones. They wear robes and those things on their heads!” exclaimed my neighbor’s friend. “And the women cover their faces” Ah. He was talking about refugees’ from Sudan who’ve also been relocated here. Ya, I calmly explained, they’re Sudanese who fled a brutal civil war. Most as orphaned children. They’re going to services in their Sunday church clothes, so to speak.
I also heard the usual right wing nonsense: “Obama doesn’t wear a flag pin … he stands in front of Islamic flags!” I knew I was talking to someone who gets his ‘news’ from right wing propaganda sites. He’d eaten every spoon-fed morsel of hyperbole, so I continued to calmly offer facts in a friendly way that countered each rhetorical claim he made. We weren’t getting anywhere.
Then a thought about how to handle this conversation struck me like a light bulb going off: Put a human face on it. And since I had my laptop just next door, I had the opportunity to deliver some reality about the refugees he feared in a polite, anecdotal, matter of fact way.
My Muslim refugee friend, Hamza, was 9 years old when rebels came barreling into his village in Sudan in the middle of the night. His father and mother yelled “RUN INTO THE JUNGLE!!!!!” They knew what was coming next. As he and his siblings ran it into the jungle and up the mountain to hide, they heard the gunfire as his parents and every adult and child who didn’t make it to the relative safety of the jungle were killed. He and his siblings were separated in the chaos. For months these children and countless others like them hid from rebels who killed every boy over 13, offering younger boys the choice of taking up arms with them or being shot on the spot. Hamza was captured by rebels at one point and given that choice, but he managed to escape after a time.
He reunited with a band of Lost Boys 5-12 years old, with whom he eventually made his escape out of Sudan following a long and harrowing journey fraught with dangers ranging from ruthless rebels to crocs and lions. Everyone took care of someone else younger than themselves, and they held school with the handful of books some of them had when their schools were attacked and they fled for their lives.
Hamza was 19 when my wife and I met him at our local Walgreens, where he had started working to support himself and his full load university studies in biochemistry - his dream to one day be a research physician and help others. He’d recently been settled in my city after years in refugee camps in Kenya and Egypt. Knowing the story of The Lost Boys of Sudan, I was struck by his gentle, happy, shining countenance despite the unimaginable horrors he experienced as a child, an innocent victim of a bloody civil war, living through hell-on-earth experiences no child should ever have to face. Yet, he has Christian friends who were on the opposite side of Sudan’s bloody civil war. Kindness and compassion and forgiveness are not limited to Christianity.
“The Lost Boys of Sudan” is an excellent documentary, by the way. Here’s Part One of a 60 Minutes report with a couple of their stories, and more video stories which continue when Part One ends:
Back to my neighbor’s friend, whose only ‘experience’ with Sudanese refugees was seeing them driving cabs and playing soccer at middle and high school fields on the weekends - the limit of his ‘knowledge’, as it turns out. Stereotypes. People he’d never ever spoken to.
I went home and grabbed my laptop and went back next door. Rather than preaching to this guy, I simply opened my laptop with a large, smiling picture of Hamza I’d pulled up on the screen and said “this is my friend Hamza. My wife and I met him when he was 19. He’s not only a Muslim and refugee, but he’s of the best people you’d ever want to meet. Gentle, quiet, unassuming, forgiving of the people who slaughtered his parents and extended family. We befriended him as a freshman working towards a degree in biochemistry and count him among our most treasured friends and admired people. He graduated university, and now, after a break to save up money, he’s entering a post-grad program in biochemistry, with dreams of attending medical school and becoming a research physician so he can help people. I just wanted to share that with you. I haven’t met a refugee who isn’t a kind, polite, hard working, honest person who’s grateful beyond words for having the chance to be a citizen of the United States.”
His reaction? “Well, I never knew that. Glad you shared that. It helps take away some of the fear ....” Big strapping guy in his early 40’s afraid of people he knows nothing about beyond stereotypes because he’s been spoon fed right wing idiocy. ‘Contempt prior to investigation.’
Sometimes, like today, bigotry and misconceptions can be countered with a story behind the human face of a refugee who happens to be Muslim, making America better for his having arrived.
Hamza mentioned over dinner a couple weeks ago that someday he’d like to write a book about his harrowing experiences in the aftermath of the attack on his village (details I didn’t include here), but he’s not an author-type. I hope someone with those skills hears his story someday and becomes interested co-authoring it with him. I’ve never heard a more profound story …
Thank you very much for reading and recommending this diary about him and the effect he had on changing a mind today. It can be done one face and story at a time :)
UPDATE: Hamza asked me to mention that since the arrival of Christianity in Sudan, Christians and Muslims lived side by side peacefully until the civil war broke out.
Below, Hamza and his lovely fiancee, a fellow Sudanese orphan/refugee. She just got her RN degree. We’ll be attending their wedding next spring … beaming like proud parents would:
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Oh, and he found his brothers and sister …
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door
- Emma Lazarus’ inscription on the Statue of Liberty