Today started our first day of “walking in Abdul’s shoes” through working with Praksis. Abdul is an asylum seeker from Sudan living in Greece. We heard Abdul speak the other day about his personal and legal struggles of being a refugee. I think I can speak for the entire group when I say that Abdul’s story touched all of us. Our groups discussed how Abdul felt making his journey here and how we can relate that to our own journeys being away from home. We could relate by having withdrawals from our families and familiarities and adjustment of language, culture, and conveniences. Abdul also felt excitement for his new life, filled with safety and we felt excitement to experience this country. It made us evaluate our perspective on how we view immigrants/refugees and what we can do to help them. We all chose Global LEAD for a reason – because we would have the chance to impact our own lives through impacting others. Today was exciting because we didn’t really know what to expect. We learned all about the long process that an asylum seeker, immigrant, or minority has to go through in order to receive help from Praksis. Language barriers are one of the hardest things for the Praksis workers during the initial interviews. We saw many different kinds of people with issues that ranged from health problems to homelessness. I got to see the bags and bags of medicine that we will be helping the clinic sort and organize tomorrow. Everyone feels very optimistic that even with these little things we can help Praksis.
Lauren Shield
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