The CROP Hunger Walk’s corn maze began with the first step in a refugee crisis — people being forced to leave their homes.
This decorated the white fabric used to create the corn-maze style walls in the atrium at City Hall on Saturday, along with photographs of people evacuating their homes for a variety of reasons, including natural disaster and war.
This year’s annual maze was designed to trace the “Journey of the Refugee” to enlighten attendees of the Farmers’ Market about the refugee crisis and Bloomington’s role in that crisis.
[Bloomington approved to begin Syrian refugee resettlement in 2017 | IDS]
Lisa Miller Maidi, coordinator for the CROP Hunger Walk, said the maze was designed to coincide with the addition of Exodus Refugee Immigration, an organization looking to resettle refugees throughout Indiana that will work with the Bloomington Refugee Support Network, an existing volunteer support group.
“I decided it would be good if we made it a kind of spatial metaphor for what refugees go through,” Maidi said. “It’s really sort of stage-by-stage, starting with people having to leave their homes and the definition of a refugee and the different problems they encounter, then information about Exodus near the end.”
The maze included information on how refugees travel and, at one of the dead end areas, a sign that read “Closed Border,” highlighting one issue that refugees could potentially face on their journey to safety.
Another section of the maze included other threats to refugees along their journey and was followed by questions refugees are required to answer at immigration interviews, some of which dealt with why they cannot go back to their home country.
Maidi said she hopes anyone walking through the maze can develop a better sense of empathy in considering what this journey entails for the refugees who must endure the process of resettlement, especially locally.
“I hope that they learn about and gain more sympathy for what refugees go through,” Maidi said. “We need this because we have protesters who are against refugees coming to town, so it’s a national issue but a Bloomington issue as well. We really need people to understand what we’re doing to try to help out.”
Diane Legomsky, chair of the Bloomington Refugee Support Network said CROP’s involvement will be appreciated and the cause is one well worth supporting.
Though the situation the refugees enter the country in may be tragic, the people coming over are people just like us in a human sense, Legomsky said.
“What we also want to remember is these refugees coming in, their circumstances are pathetic, but they as people are not pathetic,” Legomsy said. “Sometimes I think we bore that over. These are intelligent, gifted people just like us. They’re in pathetic circumstances, but the people themselves have full dignity and they’re wonderful.”
The end of the maze included a statement by the United States Department of State, which labels Bloomington as a good location for resettling refugees. About a dozen families, or 60 refugees, are projected to arrive in Bloomington starting in March 2017.
“This is something we have to keep stressing,” Legomsky said. “These refugees are not people to be feared. They’re people to be embraced.”
