Why Should We Care About Refugees?

Most of us don’t see or hear about refugees in our day to day lives, so why should we worry or care about helping them?

It’s a question we’ve asked ourselves for years after seeing news stories every now and then about refugees and the crisis they’re going through, and have been going through, for decades. We live in America, in a small, relatively safe town where not much crime happens and where people go to church every Sunday with their family. We are not exposed to the outside world in a way that even people who live in big cities are. The people who live in our town have lived here for generations and everyone pretty much knows everyone else. Why should we care about people we’ve never met (and probably never will) who live across the globe in countries we may never get the chance to travel to?

These thoughts ran through our heads until we got our first (and current) foster care placement of a sibling group of three kids, four years and younger. Having them in our lives has been life changing in so many ways, and even though they’re not our children, we love them like they are ours and would do anything to protect them and keep them safe. Somehow it all clicked when they came into our lives and we realized life is much bigger than what’s going on in our small little town in our small little world in the U.S. and there’s an entire world out there with people who need help to just survive.

From all of our research and readings, we’ve learned that, despite their unimaginable circumstances, refugees and internationally displaced persons are some of the most hopeful, hardworking, and strong-willed people you could ever meet. They are hopeful for a better future for themselves and their children, who (as young as 5 years old) are often forced to work in harsh conditions in order to help their family survive. Can you imagine? It’s 10 pm right now and the kiddos are asleep upstairs and the thought of any one of them having to work at all at their age, when all they should be concerned with is learning and growing and being a kid, is something we never want to become a reality.

It doesn’t make sense to us that, just because of where we were born, we get to live a free life (and we say this as two gay men living in a conservative town in the south) without fear of our city being overrun with war and violence and having to worry about where we’re going to live or IF we’re going to live. Refugees are trying to survive a crisis they had no part in creating, and after so many years of being displaced, a lot of them are born into it. Why should we get to complain about our new iPhones not arriving in the mail when they said they would when there are mothers who can’t guarantee their kids will have food and water for the next week? Or when people aren’t guaranteed the medical assistance they need for their missing limb because their hospital is underfunded? None of it makes sense to us and that’s another reason we feel the need to do something, anything, to help people in any way we can, whatever that looks like.

When we first started posting about wanting to help with the refugee crisis at the end of last year, we received several messages from people saying things like “we have our own troubles here in America, why not worry about them first?” And that’s such an important and real question that we almost had to ask it to ourselves. But at the very root of mankind and what it means to be a human and a citizen of any nation, is the fact that all human life is worthwhile and all humans should be cared for equally, no matter if they’re in your backyard or across the world. People everywhere are just trying to do the best they can with what they have, and with more than 65 million refugees around the world, we feel the need to turn our attention to them right now.

If you would like to help but don’t know where to begin, here is a good place to start. There’s always a good place to start, isn’t there?

(photo provided by USA for UNHCR)