ANDREA EISEN

Family Support Specialist

In the last 20 years, I’ve become friends with many many many many people who, due to how society is structured in the United States, I would not otherwise have met. The friendships are part of what I tell people about when they ask me about what I do. What’s my work? My work is to be friends with people.

I find it difficult to elaborate because the people with whom I am intentionally creating friendships  arrived in the area with refugee status. I used to say, “I work with refugees.” Then people would ask, “How are your refugees?” That does not sound good. It also contributes to the incessant patronizing language that infiltrates the hours I spend with my friends. Some people ask, “How are your People?”

Add to this the fact that all the work I do is unpaid--I am a volunteer. I have a Master’s in Social Work, but no career ambition or financial necessity has ever enticed me away from the privilege and luxury of not working for pay. Until recently, I was only barely aware that there is an entire academic framework built around the benefits of friendship and community-building in social work.

I sometimes refine my answer to the question about what I do: I am friends with people who arrive in the area with refugee status. I do this practically full time. I have  discovered there is some academic lingo that can define this work. People get trained to do what I do. They get essays and diagrams and vocabulary that explain and prove the value of friendship, community, and mutual learning in social work (as opposed to service-oriented, one-way models of “helping”). In my experience, such friendships differ greatly from those that come along outside of my volunteer work. I do not escape or avoid the extreme inequities built into our society by calling someone a friend. I get to just work it all out somehow and benefit from the friend part in an eternally valuable way that somehow feels different from the “normal.”

In addition to friendship and community, RCP is necessary simply because of the difficulty in navigating the extremely complicated, often demoralizing and dehumanizing systems created to make poor people prove again and again how poor they are. Access to sufficient basic needs that are not met by low paying jobs requires filling out mountains of forms. It involves rejection and confusion. You have to plow through that part of the friendship because these particular friends just need a shit ton of help.

I learned the value of extreme cross cultural friendship and mutual aid while in the Peace Corps, and I sure as heck recognized the value of help. Friendships don’t exclude help. People who move to the United States with very little other than a few changes of clothes and a gigantic bag of paperwork need a lot of help. That paperwork gets them a few months rent and access to one or two jobs that pay eight to ten dollars an hour. I had a lot more than that when I was in the Peace Corps.

Here again, I’ve launched into the effort of defining what happens within the world of Refugee Community Partnership. When I met Maddie Hayes and Asif Khan while they were starting RCP,  I said that I wanted to be with people who wanted to volunteer with communities who have been forced to flee their homes, in the same way I wanted to be with them. Maddie and Asif understood that language at its foundation. They connected all the dots and colored in all the spaces to build an incredible network of an organization, a community that has grown and grown based on a foundation not of service, but of friendship.