Refugees
On Tuesday we had a really lovely visit from USA in our class. I got the chance to talk to a wonderful young girl Hannah who had prepared a very interesting topic for us: refugees. And that's what I'm going to write about today.
Hannah is studying to become a social worker and at school they asked them to choose an internship. As Hannah said, they didn't have many options to choose from, but she had to pick one so she leaned towards helping refugees. What exactly was her work? Well, when a refugee comes to the USA after being checked through and through by the American government, they need help. They are in a foreign country with a completely different culture than their own is and they have no idea what to do. People like Hannah are here to help them get used to the whole new life, find a job or a school for them or their children and many other things. What I found really interesting and totally fair is that once the refugee has a job they have to pay everything back to the US government. So it's not like America gave them plane ticket, home, food and all this for free. I really like this whole idea. I think that if we had something like this in the Czech Republic, we wouldn't have to see people demonstrating either for or against refugees and radicalizing in either way.
Hannah also talked about the difference between refugees and immigrants. A refugee is a person that needs to leave their home country and it is not their voluntary decision. They must leave because their home is being bombed or because they are supposed to be executed due to political reasons in some dictatorship. Immigrant is different. Immigrants can be both legal and illegal and they left their home country because they wanted to, maybe because of economic reasons or just to live a better and more comfortable life somewhere else. I think that knowing the difference is very important and I am happy that now I know it.
The talk about refugees and Hannah's work was so much fun and I think that it is very
important to talk about these topics and to have the information about them considering what's
going on in the world right now.