Traveling long distances today is commonplace. Whether for work or for leisure, most of us have had the very routine experience of boarding a plane, taking your seat, enjoying your bag of peanuts or complimentary frozen meal, perhaps even a complimentary beverage (if you’re lucky), and landing at your destination- maybe half way across the country, maybe half way across the world. Either way, it really doesn’t hit you until you step out onto the sidewalk with your luggage and hail a cab that you’ve gone any where at all. But it very quickly gets interesting if for example you don’t know the language, or you can’t find a currency exchange, or your luggage never left Chicago. We’ve all been there, or worse. But even in the worst of circumstances eventually, the luggage arrives; eventually, you find your hotel, and eventually you get back on a plane returning from whence you came, and you arrive back home, safe and sound.
We have a sense of basic security and stability in our everyday lives. Home will always be home, we’ll always be welcome in our own neighborhood, we’ll be understood, and we’ll be accepted. And so even when we travel far away, no matter how far that is, we carry with us that deep, comforting sense of knowing that eventually we’ll get back home. To have a place to call home, to have the sense of identity that comes with being part of a community, to know the ground under you feet is yours- this is perhaps as essential to being a whole and integrated person as anything else. And if you’ve ever found yourself in a bad situation with no kind face to turn to, if you’ve ever been a stranger in a strange land, you know how scary and empty a feeling that can be.
Katie Nagus, Lindsey Weber, and I went down to the International Institute of Saint Louis this week. We came bearing gifts; Welcome Baskets. The recipients of the baskets were participants in a job skills and placement program offered by the institute and were among the program’s most active and successful participants. None of them have been here longer than four months. These were people from all over the world who have, no doubt, faced loss of home and security on a scale that most of us could not imagine.
What would it take for you to pack it all in to a few suit cases and leave everything else behind, everything you know, everyone you love and care about and travel across the world and start from nothing- knowing that chances are, you’ll never be going home again?
The circumstances that lead most immigrants and refugees to do just that are dire. Generally, it’s either extreme poverty, or war, or both. And you can see what they’ve gone through in their faces. But, they are also amazingly resilient and hopeful and after just a few minutes of getting to know them, it hits you that these people have a good chance of making it through and surviving what many would find crushing.
So what’s a welcome basket? A laundry basket filled with allot of stuff you would find really nice to have if you were trying to move into a house or apartment with little money or resources. They have cleaning supplies, personal hygiene items, safety items like flashlights and batteries, and smoke detectors. All told they cost close to a hundred dollars fully stocked.
And where does that money come from? Our volunteers.
Who goes out and buys all the items? Our volunteers.
And who assembles them? Our volunteers.
These particular baskets were made by Deane Adam’s Youth Corp volunteers. They were covered until we got there and so I hadn’t had really had a chance to look at them closely. But when I pulled the covering back, it really struck me how much care and attention went in to putting these things together. They even had a welcome note from the Red Cross. Elena Sabin from CDE also contributed brochures on safety in the home as well other valuable program literature.
The contents of the baskets will be used up for the most part, though the alarm clocks and flashlights and such might become keepsakes. Who knows. But, however modest a gift these Welcome Baskets are, it is the spirit behind them that carries on. Most of these people had had some interaction with the Red Cross along the way (living in refugee camps managed by the International Red Cross, treated in Red Cross hospitals, etc.) So, I think we can take pride in knowing that the American Red Cross continues to be a ‘kind face’ to strangers as they struggle to make our community their new home.
Michael Braeuninger is the director of international services for the St. Louis Area Chapter.