Update

I shared this last week on facebook, but realized that I should write it here too for completeness sake: The Afghan refugee family my group of friends is sponsoring made it to the US! While the executive order still has put the fate of tens of thousands of refugee families in limbo, "our" family was able to come because they have a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) granted to Afghan nationals who worked for the U.S. Government in Afghanistan and subsequently became targets.

The second piece of good news is that we ended up having every large piece of furniture donated, which left us with more money than we needed from our fundraiser. We were planning on donating the excess funds directly to the IRC, but as our family was about to arrive, the IRC let us know of a second Afghan family arriving last week under the SIV program, who would be living in the same apartment building as our family, and didn't yet have a sponsor. One individual donor stepped up to cover the second family's rent subsidy, and then we were able to use the remaining fundraiser money, and extra furniture donations, to fully furnish an entire second apartment. In the end, not one but TWO families arrived in the Bay to find a new home and welcoming community waiting for them.

I'm trying to focus on maintaining the positive momentum and motivation from these developments, which is hard because at the same time that I am elated about these two families, there are thousands more refugee families who had been vetted and promised a home in the US and now seem unlikely to actually be admitted. But, not being able to fix everything doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix as much as we can. Onward.