Tag: hope

Story Feature: A Tale of Two Sisters

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“I had a dream to be in school. Then school was bombed—that dream is now gone.”

Meet 19-year-old Malak (left) and 23-year-old Hana (right), two sisters from Yemen who have lived as refugees for nearly half their lives. Malak was only 12 when the sisters lost both of their parents in Yemen… and they have been traveling on their own ever since. From Yemen the two girls went to Syria where they stayed under the care of UNICEF for 5 years as minors. But when the war in Syria forced them to leave, they decided to search for their future in Europe.

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Sleepless in Seattle: Caring for Seattle’s Most Vulnerable

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A little over a year ago I was walking along “the Ave” (a street known for homelessness in Seattle’s University District) with a friend as we looked for her acquaintance, Eddie Wang. We were meeting up with Eddie that night to talk with the homeless who called those streets “home.” As we passed a local grocery store my friend and I kept our eyes fixed ahead of us, not wanting to engage the homeless men sitting at our feet, mostly because we were two girls and it was getting dark, but also because we were waiting to interact with the homeless until we had a more “official” reason (like walking with the founder of the group, Sleepless in Seattle).

Five minutes passed with no sign of Eddie—and then it hit us. We turned around and, sure enough, he had been sitting with those homeless men outside of the grocery store the entire time… the men we hadn’t even acknowledged. The shame was instantaneous. I can assure you, nothing is more convicting than totally failing to be a good person in your pursuit of being a good person.

But that experience served as a much-needed wakeup call for me to understand homelessness in Seattle, as well as the people working to address it.

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Urban Hands: Giving Meals and Second Chances

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Around the corner from a bus stop in North Seattle and down a wide alley is a nondescript white door many walk past without wondering what’s inside. I would have done the same, except on this day I had an appointment with Urban Hands, a nonprofit built around caring for the marginalized in Seattle, primarily by providing meals for the homeless and job opportunities for those in need of a second chance.

I had heard about Urban Hands through my friend Eddie Wang (organizer of the Sleepless in Seattle campaign) and was intrigued to learn the “who, what, and how” behind their use of for-profit businesses to impact the lives of Seattle’s most marginalized. So with my curiosity piqued, they became my first social impact feature for the “Seek the Good” project.

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Project: Seek the Good

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In the past few weeks I have been asking myself a lot of big questions…

“What does it mean to be a ‘successful’ 20-something just out of university?”

“What is up with all of my friends suddenly getting engaged and married?”

“Does Ryan Seacrest even age?” (Okay, not totally relevant, but just as perplexing.)

But most importantly, I’ve been asking two central questions: If I was doing what I feel I was made for (no limitations), what would that be? And how do I best use my skills and passions in this season of life to give back? Truth be told, I think we often answer questions like these rashly or we give some “canned” answer that sounds great without intending to follow through. I’ve done both, but I wanted to dig deeper. For some reason I felt like these answers should be so easy to find, yet I quickly learned that finding definitive answers to these questions was more like walking through wet cement than a walk in the park.

However, as I’ve slowly waded through these questions one idea has consistently popped up–an idea for telling stories–specifically stories of people working to impact communities on the margins of society.

Considering how much of the media focuses on the darkness and danger in the world, I started asking myself what it would look like to spread the opposite–hope. So much of my life has been built upon the desire to see the good in others and to find hope in a hopeless situation. From the slums in Kenya to the streets of Seattle, I believe there are stories of joy and hope all over the place. The question is not, “do they exist?,” but, “how do we find them?”

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