How many of us have liked a Facebook post, signed a Change.org petition, or sent a pre-generated letter to our elected officials advocating for refugees coming to America, especially Syrian refugees? As an Arab and Muslim American, I certainly was doing all of the above, especially in this post-Trump world. However, it was not until I started to tutor three refugee families in English that I started learning about the human faces of those likes, petitions, and signatures. What is it about this eight-letter word “refugees” that can evoke empathy and pity to many, yet fear, disgust, and anger to so many others?

According to Amnesty International, twelve million Syrians have fled their homes, and half of them are children. Five million of them have left Syria and become refugees, with 99 percent living in only five countries: Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt.

I have not only come to know Syrian refugee families but also families from Afghanistan and Eritrea. They all have stories of suffering, yet whenever I come to their homes to tutor them, they are always welcoming, embodying strong resilience. The Syrian family I tutor is made up of a mother and father with four children—two boys and two girls; I tutor a seventeen-year-old Syrian young woman. Her mother is happy that I speak Arabic when I come to tutor her daughter in English. Despite the housing conditions of the family, the mother is always hospitable to me, offering me Turkish coffee and Arab sweets when I come.

The Eritrean young woman I tutor is not Muslim but an Orthodox Christian. Her mother and siblings are still in Eritrea, but she is in America with her father who works night shifts and so only sees his daughter on the weekends. The Eritrean student,who takes care of her home while her father is at work, is a successful student despite her struggle with English. She makes me tea when I visit.

I tutor four Afghan siblings, all of them sixteen or seventeen years old, who go to public high school. They get teased at school. The Afghan students I tutor tell me that they are mocked by some of the Arab and Muslim students at their public school because of their struggles learning English. Nevertheless, they all work hard, and we laugh together during tutoring sessions.

I asked one of the girls I tutor, Zahra, to tell me more about herself. You can read about Zahra in the letter, which is the image provided with this article. She is a beautiful, sweet, yet sassy young woman who learns English and math very quickly. (Note that her name has been changed for privacy.)

I chose to share this all because this is a different perspective that we do not often hear in mainstream news. This is the other side of the story, the side not told: refugees are not coming here as secret ISIS terrorists, but rather are forced to leave their countries because of war and famine, which are partly caused by U.S. foreign policy. Nevertheless, they are doing their best to live and be happy. I admire them and am learning a lot about the Afghans, Syrians, and Eritreans I have met.