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october 14, 2017 - Starbucks

Upstanders: From War to Montana

Editor’s note:  This is one of the episodes in the second season of Upstanders, a collection of short stories that asks what it means to have courage in today’s America. Produced by #howardschultz and #rajivchandrasekaran, #upstanders help inspire us to be better citizens. 

Mary Poole was scrolling through news stories on her smartphone while breastfeeding her infant son when her eyes locked onto a photograph that would transform her life — and the lives of many others.

She stared at the image of Alan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian boy, clad in a red shirt and blue shorts, lying on a Turkish beach. At first, it appeared to her as if he was on vacation with his family. Then she noticed he was face down, with his head toward the water. He was wearing shoes. And she grasped what she was seeing. He had drowned in the Mediterranean Sea while fleeing the civil war engulfing his homeland.

Poole was overwhelmed by sadness. She thought of Alan’s parents, and she tried to imagine how painful it would be if she had to flee her home, her community in Missoula, #montana, and her country.

“It was gut-wrenching,” she recalled.

The next day, at a monthly gathering of her girlfriends, Poole described the profound effect the photo had on her. She and her friends agreed to contribute what they could to charities that help refugees, and when she got home, she donated $20 to the United Nations’ refugee agency.

As soon as she sent the money, it felt insufficient. She wished she could do more, and she voiced that sentiment to one of her friends, who suggested that they welcome refugee families to live in Missoula.

Poole, who had worked as an arborist before her pregnancy made it difficult to climb trees with a chainsaw, had no idea how to extend the invitation. She wasn’t familiar with the U.S. government’s refugee resettlement process or the controversy surrounding the issue. She didn’t even know what qualified someone as a refugee.

That didn’t daunt her.

“Let’s give it a try,” she told her friends. “Let’s start to educate ourselves and figure out what it would take, and what the whole system is — and see if we can help.”

During her son’s naps, she opened her laptop to do research. She learned that refugees are not voluntary migrants, but #people who have been forced to flee their home countries because of war, persecution, or natural disasters. She sought out experts and called them on the phone. She was determined to get Missoula to the top of a list of refugee host cities that she assumed was being compiled by the U.S. government.

“I was sure that there were these 10 boxes we’d have to check and we could make this happen,” she recalls. “I was absolutely sure that everyone who had seen that photo was scrambling to get refugees in their community, and scrambling to get to the top of the list.”

Eventually, she learned there was no list, and that #montana was one of just two states — Wyoming is the other — that had no cities participating in the State Department’s resettlement program. If refugees were to be brought to Missoula, the city would have to petition one of the nine resettlement agencies that work with the federal government to open an office in #montana, and that decision would have to be approved by bureaucrats in Washington.

Those discoveries would have led most #people to abandon the quest. But Poole thought of the desperation of her fellow mothers in war-ravaged parts of Syria. “Part of me couldn’t move on,” she says.

The challenge of building support for refugees in #montana — Missoula, a small city of around 72,000, is surrounded by conservative, tradition-bound communities that dislike interference in their lives by the federal government — also did not dissuade her.

“Somebody needed to stand up” for #people fleeing the Syrian civil war, Poole says.

xxx

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