I am the mother of children close to the age my brother and I were when my family fled Bosnia. That realization has changed how I remember everything.
When I was 13, war split my childhood into before and after. My family fled first to Croatia, and then to Germany. I did not speak German. I did not understand the system or what would happen next. I only knew that the life we had known was gone.
People often speak about refugees as if displacement is one painful chapter, but for my parents, survival required more than one act of courage. They had to rebuild our lives twice, carrying their own grief while trying to convince their children that a future was still possible.
The first time was in Germany, where refugee housing and daily life demanded adaptation, patience, and humility. Then, years later, just as life had become stable, we started again in the United States.
At 19, I arrived in Albany, New York, and within a week, still jetlagged, began working for the International Center of the Capital Region. I was helping resettle families like my own before I fully understood that I, too, had just arrived. The fear in people’s eyes and the exhaustion was familiar. I knew what it meant to need help, but did not know how to ask.
Now, more than 27 years later, I think less about what I endured and more about what my parents survived.
They carried two frightened children through upheaval not once, but twice. They maneuvered financial stress, dislocation, grief, and the pressure to appear strong when everything around them collapsed. They worked to make a future for us while mourning the life they had lost.
My parents believed in education with a kind of sacred urgency. For them, education was not simply about earning degrees. It was safety, dignity, and the bridge between survival and possibility.
Education became that anchor for me. It gave me language when I felt voiceless. It gave me purpose when I felt out of place. It turned gratitude into service.
That belief is why my work at SUNY feels so deeply personal. Through the Educational Opportunity Program, I serve students who are often first-generation, low-income, underserved, and underestimated. I see in them the same promise my parents saw in me: that education can transform not only one life, but an entire family’s future.
But education is not the only bridge I believe in.
I also believe in the bridge built when people of different faiths, histories, and wounds choose to see one another’s humanity. Through the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, I have found an extended family of Muslim and Jewish sisters committed to solidarity, friendship, and action. These women are bridge-builders, peacemakers, and yes, girl-power agents of change who refuse to let mistrust have the final word.
In a world too often divided by fear, our sisterhood proves that humanity is not just an ideal, it is something we choose, build, and protect together, one honest and sometimes difficult conversation at a time.
June is World Refugee Awareness Month. It is a time to honor the strength and courage of people forced to flee, but also a time to ask what kind of neighbors we choose to be.
Refugees are not asking to be admired for their suffering. They are asking for the chance to rebuild with safety, dignity, education, work, friendship, and the opportunity to give back.
My family rebuilt our lives because exceptional Germans and Americans helped us along the way. Someone opened a door, offered work, patience, encouragement, and trust.
That is the call before us now.
Support and welcome refugees. Defend affordability and access to education. Invest in students whose promise is greater than their circumstances. Choose humanity before politics hardens your heart.
Behind every policy debate is a mother trying to make her child feel safe. Behind every refugee story is not only loss, but courage, talent, love, and the possibility of a future still being written.
My parents taught me that survival is not simply the ability to endure hardship. It is love in its most demanding form. It is choosing to hope.
I think of that every time I look at my precious children.
And I think of my parents, and all parents who carry more than the world will ever know. Not once, but twice.
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