From afar, you couldn’t pick him out of the huge crowd that had come together except for the grin on his face that was so huge you could count the number of teeth in his mouth from across the room.
‘Life is wonderful,” he said.
Standing next to him, he was hard to ignore. From the canyon sized creases that carved permanent crevices into his taut, sun beaten skin framing his smiling brown eyes down to his shabby flannel shirt carefully tucked into his well-worn, but overly pressed jeans, Emilu Merkuria was the epitome of confliction and looked like one of those people who you wondered what it was like to walk a mile in his old, smudged up shoes.
“The one thing you’ll always find that people like him share is hope and pride,” said Rubis Castro, a regional director for Lutheran Services Florida.
In honor of Human Rights Day set forth by the United Nations on December 10, 1948, dozens packed the tiny room of Studio@620 in Downtown St.Pete on the eve of this internationally recognized day meant to observe the struggles of Merkuria, an Ethiopian refugee and the millions of others just like him that have been involuntarily displaced from their homes worldwide. The difference between him and them is that Merkuria is one of the lucky ones.
‘The people of America are very welcoming to us. They do not judge us based on color or looks or religion or anything like that.”
With the help of refugee service groups like the Tampa Refugee Task Force and Lutheran Services Florida helped organize the event, both Merkuria and his friend, Atkelet Getnet, were able to relocate to Tampa Bay three months ago. Both of them were were forced out of their home country leaving everyone and thing they knew behind because of political turmoil and spent the previous twenty years living in a refugee camp in Kenya.
“There are two hells, the one below us and the one here on earth,” Getnet said describing the horrors of living in a refugee camp.
For those who were unable to speak at the gathering, countless black and white photos braced the walls of the small studio telling the story of the voiceless victims as part of the “Invisible in the City: The Lives of Urban Refugees” photo exhibit.
“ The main goal of an event like this is to make the urban refugee population visible,” said Janet Blair, a community liaison with the Florida Department of Children and Families.
She defines urban refugees as those people who have been stripped of their human rights, and forced to move far away from their homes and families to live in the shadows of cities in unknown countries. Typically, when we think of refugees we think of row upon row of white tents in a sprawling emergency camp, but the reality is that one-third of the world’s 10.5 million refugees live in refugee camps and the rest have been steadily moving toward living in the cities.
“I try to imagine what it would be like if my family were uprooted and pushed to live in another country. It would be extremely hard to do. I couldn’t do it, yet people do it every day.”
Right now, Blair says that of the millions of refugees worldwide that have escaped to other countries or camps to seek protection from the unrest in their home countries, the United States is the leader in receiving and re-homing refugees, having taken in 80,000 in 2009 with an increased influx coming into Tampa Bay over the past few years.
Castro of Lutheran Services, one of the biggest refugee re- settling agencies in the area, said it’s the increase in refugees and the growing efforts made in Tampa Bay to receive them that has led to the growing population of refugees in both Pinellas and Hillsborough County over the past five years.
“To resettle a refugee the whole community has to pitch in,” she said and just as quickly Blair chimed in with, “ you’ve heard the expression ‘it takes a village’ well it really does.”
From finding the right size shoes and cooking up food from the refugees’ native countries to greeting new comers at the airport with former refugees who speak their language so they can communicate properly with them, the efforts made here to welcome these displaced victims and make them feel at home, Castro said, go above and beyond what other countries do.
“We try to give them dignity, respect, hope, help, and safety for their children, essentially, the American Dream.”
Based on the size of the crowd that came out to raise awareness, and the positive results of rehoming on refugees embodied by Getnet who said his goal is find work, a wife and have a family and Merkuria who says, “I like it here too much,” the efforts of all these small villages seem to be paying off and will continue to in the future.
“ Would I help out with other refugees in the future? Yes that’s an excellent idea,” said Getnet.
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2010.