Humility, and her city
Community activist Debbie Almontaser, founder and CEO of Bridging Cultures Group, reflects on fragility, humility, and her city.This pandemic has showed us how fragile we are as human beings; it’s cast a fear in our hearts, globally, because we don’t understand what this is, where it’s come from. This humility is something very significant and has helped me connect more deeply with people who feel this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 12 months a year, year after year – people who face famine, war, destruction. This is just a small taste of it for us, those of us who are privileged.It has truly been humbling; it’s challenged many of the things that I’ve taken for granted. It’s made me step back and think about my priorities, especially the importance of family.Ramadan came at the best time that we could possibly imagine; this is the month of Rahmah (mercy). And we all pulled up our bootstraps and said we have to do something, we have to help those less fortunate. The level of engagement and volunteerism that has taken place has been just incredible. It is such an honor to be among so many people who are putting aside their own fears and helping their fellow brothers and sisters; the solidarity that we are seeing emerge has really been incredible and humbled all of us. I pray inshAllah that we will continue to take to heart the lessons we are learning from this pandemic and continue to support our brothers and sisters in humanity.I always innately worry and care about other people, like we all do. The scene in NYC is surreal; the level of food insecurity, the number of people affected is surreal. So many families have lost family members; some families have lost two to three members.I’m part of the Yemeni American community and when I started to see the pandemic affect this community, I was like we have to do something. We started the NYC Mask Mission campaign and we raised some funds. Then with Ramadan coming, I was like there isn’t enough halal food available for people. So we pressured the NYC government and the Mayor announced they’re providing halal food. Through the Yemeni American Merchants Association we’ve been doing food giveaways; we had close to 1000 people this past Friday standing in line, circling the entire block; we couldn’t even feed them all.There’s always this feeling I have that I have to fix things, I have to fix things. One thing I learned about myself is that even though we’re living through a pandemic, I can’t take the work out of me. I’m finding other ways to continue doing my advocacy work. My sister said it best, we’ve been facetiming each other and she said, “even now we have to schedule a time to facetime with you? Even Coronavirus can’t shut you down, what is it with you?!”Please support the Yemeni American Merchants Association NYC Mask Mission campaign to provide PPE for essential workers.
To read all '30 reflections for our times', please follow the Facebook page '30 days 30 deeds', Instagram @salmahasanali, or subscribe to the newsletter at www.salmahasanali.com.
PC: Saanya Ali