The Power of Radical Hospitality: Dr. Diya Abdo Visits the Quad Cities
"Refugees are forced to seek safety elsewhere because home, forever soul-filled and memory-rich, is no longer safe. For refugees, exile is the solution to the problem of death."
With those words, Dr. Diya Abdo opened her keynote address on a Thursday night in February at St. Ambrose University. Dr. Abdo, an English professor at Guilford College in North Carolina and the daughter and granddaughter of Palestinian refugees from Jordan, is the founder of Every Campus A Refuge. Her organization, also known as ECAR, is a higher-education initiative founded in 2015 with a mission to partner every U.S. higher education institution with local refugee resettlement agencies as co-sponsors to host refugees on campus. ECAR now has 16 chapters across the country, with St. Ambrose University being the first of its kind in Iowa. Dr. Abdo came to visit the people who formed the chapter on campus and welcomed the first refugee family in December. We at Tapestry Farms were honored to be a part of that team.
Our staff and supporters were present at various opportunities throughout her visit. By this, we weren’t surprised. One of our key values at Tapestry Farms is humility and we recognize that we have a lot to learn about the culture and experiences of refugees. Dr. Abdo’s address and the time she spent in our community was a great opportunity to be dazzled by new knowledge.
While she was here, Dr. Abdo also met with students, visited the home of the family that our local chapter of ECAR hosts, and led a day-long training about forcibly displaced people and how to respond. She also had dinner with Tapestry Farms staff and board member Wafa Alhajri, as well as a woman and two teenage girls who journeyed to the Quad Cities as refugees in the past year. It was at this dinner at an Indian restaurant in downtown Davenport that two young women—both new to the US, both teenagers, both from Syria—met for the first time. They go to different high schools in the Quad Cities, but have traveled through conflict and crossed borders to end up where they are. Needless to say, they made fast friends.
During Dr. Abdo’s keynote, she shared her family’s experience, dismantled myths that too often surround the refugee community, and talked about the hopeful welcome and significant challenges newcomers face in our country. She told the stories of refugees who are a part of her book, American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience.
"These stories begin in their home countries, the places and people they never wanted to leave, and travel with them through the conflicts that caused them to gather their disparate selves and cross borders, first to countries next door and then to countries unknown, much farther away, like dust in the wind, droplets of water, scattered far from home."
St. Ambrose is the first college in the state of Iowa to host a chapter of Every Campus A Refuge. The next closest is in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
