World Refugee Day - June 20, 2007

Yesterday was World Refugee Day. The theme this year is New Home, New Life. I went to National Geographic to listen to Paula Dobriansky, Ishmael Beah, John Dau, and Tony Bennett. The event had an air of stiffness, formality. Aside from the refugee authors speaking, and a handful of others in the crowd, I could not tell if there were any other refugees or former refugees in the auditorium. Tony Bennett cried while accepting his Humanitarian Achievement Award and was teary-eyed while singing, "If I Ruled the World."

The theme was meant to be hopeful, and the event meant as a pep talk for service providers, but I could not help thinking of my thousands of brothers and sisters in Dadaab, waiting for a chance to return home, waiting for a chance to be resettled, waiting every year, for more than 15 years, for a new home, new life. I was thinking of all the refugees in the U.S., and even in the local area and wondering if they had even been invited to these World Refugee Day events.

Later I listened to the refugee panelists and felt sorry for the North Korean woman who had arrived less than 3 months ago and had somehow been enlisted for this World Refugee Day panel for our benefit. She smiled and laughed, the way Asian people do when they are uncomfortable, or feel awkward and want to make light of a difficult situation, when she realised there was no translator. Finally someone volunteered to translate and she was able to tell us piecemeal about her journey from North Korea to China to Thailand and eventually to the United States.