What gives you hope?

Monday at the refugee center was hopping. When I first began volunteering in January 2017, it had been a residential center. There were residents who have been living there for years, waiting to hear if they would be able to stay in Belgium. Over the past nearly three years of volunteering, I have seen the center shift into a transit center. It is now the first place people visit in Brussels in order to apply for asylum in Belgium.

I am only there on Monday afternoons so I don’t know if it is this active every day, but these afternoons are definitely busy. In the two hours Sarah and I invited people to participate in poetry and songwriting, we witnessed the passing of many tours led by Fedasil staff, each with at least 5-10 people. The people looked dazed as they passed by us. We said “hello” and “welcome to Belgium.”

We hadn’t seen each other in two weeks. Sarah had been vacationing in the south of France with her family. We were thrilled to be together and also exchanged some gifts. Sarah brought the smell of the South of France by way of a sachet of lavender (yum!) and a beautiful pair of earrings that reminded me of the sea. I was excited because I had found a set of dishes with pigeons on them at a brocante the weekend before. They were dishes a man from Mexico had brought with him to Belgium. His family had bought them from an artisan several decades before, but they were just sitting in a box in his basement. I decided it would be fun to split the set so Sarah would have half and I would have half. Wherever we found ourselves in the world, our pigeon plates would continue to remind us of each other.

On our afternoons together, we often will sing an already written song as a way to invite people to participate in the creation of something new. We have found that music acts as a kind of magnet. On quiet afternoons, people seem to appear from out of nowhere the moment we begin to sing. Music is a universal language. It brings people together, lifts spirits, and helps to create a safe space, a sanctuary for sharing our voices.

On this particular afternoon, the center was already pulsing with energy. There were residents seated on all of the benches that lined the wall of the covered outdoor corridor that faces out onto the open courtyard. There were young residents with a little digital speaker, playing music, and I suggested that perhaps we should commence working on a song instead of playing music so as not to interrupt them.

Sarah showed me a photo of a quote from the place she had stayed. It was attributed to the Dalai Lama from the 14^th century and had been translated into French.

La chaleur humaine permet l’ouverture. Vous découvrez que tous les êtres humains sont comme vous, tout simplement.

The English translation is far less poetic than the original French, but it gives you an idea:

Human warmth allows an opening. You discover that all human beings are like you, simple as that.

We hung up the paper from our previous session, which offered the beginnings of a poem about hope. The first person we worked with several weeks earlier had shared these words:

Every day I wake up smiling

Smile every day

It can turn the stranger into someone else

Like me

[someone] I could share this moment with

We are not alone

We couldn’t remember but thought these had been the words from a man from Albania and that his words (I looked at my notes and can now tell you the resident was from Turkey) had prompted us to write the question: What is the recipe for hope? We had asked him to share more, and he had kept repeating his recipe: smile.

Another woman had arrived that same afternoon and written her own recipe for hope:

Every day I pray

I am thankful

I am never without hope

I pray to Allah every day

This gives me strength

We reflected on these words and added the words a resident had written in response to the question: What gives you hope? Which Sarah had written on several piece of paper on our poetry wall, each piece of paper with the question posed in a different language.