She was five years old and she loved ballet. She was two years and she loved playing hide and seek. I visited them once a week and watched them grow and develop vocabulary. At first, they were timid, but then they ran to the door to greet me. We played in the park and made flower crowns.

Did you picture me playing with adorable children? Was it a good picture?

They were refugee children from Myanmar.

Does that change the picture for you?

I am not asking or expecting anyone to agree with my stance on refugees, but simply to acknowledge their humanity. Somewhere in all the mess of this world an entire population of people have lost their identities. We have been granted the unwarranted luxury to refer to other human beings as statistics. I am asking anyone reading this to take one moment and consider your family in this situation. Your life is threatened because of your skin color, your religion, and your political affiliation. You have been forced to live in filth and crumbling camps. Your children are not getting an education, they aren’t playing like other children because they are barely surviving. You are brought to a country with no personal belongings. You have left behind everything you know. You can’t speak the language here and people glance with suspicion at your presence, but at least here you are surviving. See their faces and hear their voices.

I acknowledge we live in a time when it is hard to trust, and we live a frightening reality of violence. I refuse to be ruled by fear, and I refuse to discredit many by the actions of few. I wrote about my nieces and nephews a few weeks ago, and just the thought of them being treated the way refugee children are treated chills me. They deserve to be treated with dignity. A woman with almost nothing to her name greeted me at the door and offered me food and drink every single time I stepped foot into her home. She never treated me with anything less than the utmost respect and kindness. It is hard to be vulnerable for the sake of another, but admitting the suffering of another person in no way lessens that of your own.

I can never explain the joy and humility I felt working with that family. My greatest hope is that those little girls grow up in a country that accepts them and values their lives.