Hospitality is a corner store with dirty boxes of mango juice blocking one door, African dresses that may or may not be bought, and stacks of sticky Injera that look like the inside of an anthill. Hospitality is also tears and laughs around a plastic table in the upstairs room of an apartment complex for refugees.

Let me tell you about my friends:

Two female shop owners from Ethiopia are propped against their arms, talking in a language I don't know yet addressing us in broken but wonderful English, as if we're their long lost sisters. They give us pastel-colored hijabs with tiny silver circles that make them sound like wind chimes when we put them on. They don't make us pay.

Two baristas, one from Syria and the other from DR Congo, epitomize "service with a smile." They talk to us as if they could talk for hours, if they had the time. We buy coffee from them every day of our trip, partly because we like the coffee, but mainly because their attitudes are infectious. We never leave without full-faced smiles.

Children from all across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa do their homework together. We help them do math, learn history, and write sentences. Crayons and eraser shavings flying, we commit to their education for those few hours at the end of our days. We see their drive, and we close our eyes, praying, to keep their childhood untainted from hate and prejudice.

And the Syrian man: he looks at us with solemn, kind eyes. We're gathered around a table, waiting for the pieces of his story that fall like poker chips in front of us. We write, we listen, we cry. He tells us about his life, about how he and his family applied for refugee status after a bomb landed not too far from his children's school.

He explains their stay in a refugee camp in Jordan, about how they came to the U.S. after that. He talks for a while about his son's search for higher education. He tells their collective story passionately. He is a father, a husband, an honest man. He smiles at us, says he's thankful, says he's grateful, blessed. I don't know whether to cry or yell, hug him or get angry at the world. Instead, I take his words to heart.

His story is unique, yet overarching. He is one of many, and he is also the one catalyst for change. What I learned from a Syrian refugee is that hospitality doesn't always have to be Southern, doesn't have to be black or white, doesn't need to be based on class or status. Kindness can be the simplest, smallest gesture that holds worlds of peace. Feeling blessed doesn't mean you have everything, doesn't mean your life isn't filled with struggle.

I think, above everything else, this peaceful Syrian man, taught me what it looks like to love others: destroying comfort zones, breaking racial/ethnic/cultural boundaries, talking human to human, and that has made all the difference.