The recent Atlanta spa shootings that left eight dead this past Tuesday come amid a surge of hate crimes and xenophobia directed against Asian-americans—stitching together stigmas of race, gender, and immigration.
Dr. Diya Abdo
At UMUCO Love, we are dedicated to navigating these stigmas and finding the HUMAN within all of us (#IAmYou). As an online community, it is our belief that we must preach unity and acceptance, a theme that we had the honor of continuing to explore during this week’s podcast with Dr. Diya Abdo, a first-generation Palestinian refugee originally born in Jordan and now an English Professor at Guilford College in North Carolina.
As a person who was once a new American, Diya has taken on the responsibility of helping to make a new, welcoming home for others, and in particular, for the 12 million Syrians who have fled or been forced out of their home. Diya reflected, “The Syrian refugee crisis is not new. What was new about it was the incredible higher numbers— the highest we've seen in decades—and also the brutality of it that we saw visualized on the screen. We saw people…drowning in boats, I mean hundreds of people on a dinghy, on rafts, that cannot handle that many people. People who are trying to cross deserts, and also perishing along the way. But we saw it. We saw it visually. We saw that devastating footage."
Desperate to take action, Diya founded the Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR) in 2015, which advocates for housing refugee families on college and university campus grounds and assisting them in resettlement. Under this program, each refugee family is temporarily housed in available campus housing free of rent and with access to college facilities and resources. To date, Guilford College has hosted 60 refugees so far – 29 of them children – from Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, the DRC, Venezuela, and Colombia.
Diya put forward the questions: "Why don't we tell a different story about who can be in our community—that we can be a place that supports families as human beings. Find community. Find integration. Find belonging. We do that for students all the time. Why don't we do it for refugees? Why don't we do it for other folks coming into our community?"
We so much appreciated Diya’s sentiment of focusing on the humanity within all of us and fostering a more welcoming society. We encourage you to join in on conversations of unity, like the one we had with Diya here.