Building Unlikely Bridges | Mustafa Nuur | TEDxLancaster
[Music] they say once you know somebody's story it is very hard to hit them I am a refugee from Somalia and I've been living here for the past four years like many refugees my life has been turned upside down and one day my family you are forcefully we spent many years between refugee camps and the cities of Kenya before we finally had the opportunity of coming into this community on January 23rd of 2017 the first travel ban was signed by the President of the United States banning refugees from eight countries including my own from being from entering the country at this very time Lancaster Pennsylvania and its title of being the refugee capital of the United States because our community Roselle's 20 times more refugees per capita than any other city but from what I have found out is many places do resettle refugees and welcome them but not many people interact with their refugees so I took up on a mission to highlight the refugees issue and the refugee stories so I can just bring it to the community to build understanding and under continue spreading the refugee issue so I started with writing op-eds in the local newspaper and some of the uppers got published when I swooned or sublet when those uppers got published that's when I started receiving so many uplifting and heartwarming messages from the online community one of them come from a guy called mark and Mark wrote to me and he said with all that you take away from the community Lancaster does not welcome refugees you are all here to harbor terrorism so go back to your country and stop blaming our government that was so hard but uh so how would you feel if you received a message like this and welcome resentful well I did at the beginning my natural reaction was to write back mark and be as mean as possible but i but I gathered my thoughts on a road team and I just what I said I said mark from your message I'm convinced that you are somebody who is concerned about the safety of our community I know you will be upset I would like to take the opportunity to sit down with you and understand our differences can we have coffee please so I just sent it so after some time mark eroded me back and he said okay so I was really dumb funny I was like okay I'm having coffee with mark so yeah here we are me and Mark are sitting down having coffee we spent two hours on that coffee meeting but we only spent 10 minutes only 10 minutes talking about politics and the issues we we discuss in the issues wouldn't I agree on the rest of the time mark and I had talked about all the similarities we had at our own farm fear of spiders and other things so I walked away from done meeting knowing with with a new friend mark and I are now friends we still disagree on many things we have different political views but we know that we know that our similarities felt where our differences so that's when it hit me the only way to overcome any differences right now in our country with a political or otherwise it's truly is it truly sit down with one another so I've met a group of local community members who shared this same view of welcoming people sitting down with the stranger and going all out this was a self-organized welcoming community that had were intentional about welcoming refugees they had invited us to their homes we had dinners had picnics land the YMCA dance and all the American things so I decided to recreate these same connections and the same experiences into the community because from from from interacting with disk with this group I was convinced that it's possible so I had a great idea what I thought was great idea at the time I was gonna open a restaurant and it was gonna serve cuisines from other cultures but from my experience with mark it's not just about the food it's about the sitting-down that counts at the same time coming from the refugee community I wanted to give an opportunity for the refugee community to a non income with whatever we I'm gonna come up with I'm not gonna make people broken so I had created a website called experience bridge it's a website where you can go online and book experiences on meals with refugees from around the world it started off with my family but right now there's over 11 families who are doing same thing so the we find a refugee family who wants to open up to the community the family the refugee family creates a profile on on our website and their list themself a host each host is supposed to provide you with an insight into their student into their story their culture the cuisine and guests who are trying to have these connections and how these experiences go on our website select from any of the any of the featured families and for a fee of $25 to $35 they book an experience then you go then the guests go home to go to their refugee families home complete strangers and sit down for two hours sharing a meal discussing the differences learning new cuisines and I'm really walking out of that experiences feeling like you have just really connected with somebody who's completely different than you over the last 11 months we the world has not significantly changed but from our community of Lancaster more and more of people are opting in to have this experience exactly 3000 people have opted in to having experiences with people who are totally different who speak other languages will probably have an accent and had interesting foods but but what I what what I get inspired by is the community I feel connected whether whether the national news is very saddening our communities really building those relationships with slack we've slowly started growing in to other cities right now we're gonna be in other cities in Pennsylvania and also going into national series I have turned a message I've received from social media into a successful business so I encourage you to open up and sit down with somebody that doesn't agree with you and be hospitable to people from other countries be open to hearing stories because once you hear somebody story it's gonna be hard to hate them thank you [Applause]