Little time living among the refugees is required to discover that soccer is a sacred nightly ritual for the majority of the people living there--for the teenagers who play as well as for the adults who observe and the small children who congregate to jump rope and squirm beside the field until they too are old enough to partake in the evening’s competition. The younger boys play until about 8 o’clock when the older ones begin to show up and gradually phase out those smaller than themselves. A cement wall serves as a perch from which I may observe the game and record vocabulary words from about six different languages in my journal. Each child seems determined that I finish this summer proficient in their native tongue, whether that be Dinka, Arabic, Kurdish, Nepalese, Burmese, Tigrinya… Such fun! Checkers has also quickly become a competitive favorite in our home. I seem to now have a running tournament going with a boy from Eritrea and another from Sudan...
We have been so wholeheartedly welcomed into the refugees' hearts and homes that I feel as though I am a long-standing resident here and not someone who arrived a mere three weeks ago. This is a lesson I hope to carry with me when I leave this internship: how to welcome the stranger and give them a home regardless of the community I find myself in, who they are or where they are headed. In the meantime, I am looking forward to cheering on many soccer games and hopefully winning many checkers games that are to come :)
--Jenna
