Brooklyn Park, MN has a program to help welcome new people to the neighborhood. They give you a tote bag full of coupons, maps, a coffee mug, flyers about the city, etc. A welcome kit. To hand them out, they recruit volunteers in the neighborhoods to go visit the new neighbors. It's a great way to meet new people and feel like you're part of your community. My wife (Sarah) and I signed up as volunteers a couple weeks ago. They said it wouldn't take much time at all.
If they all go like our first one did, we're going to need to budget a lot more time than we expected.
We were given four bags to drop off to people who had moved in recently and we figured we could get at least three if not all four done Thursday night, just depending on how it went. We stopped at the first house and introduced ourselves and said why we were there. The woman that answered the door was little confused how we knew they had just moved in (we don't have our ID badges from the city yet) but after explaining how we knew she invited us in and went to get her husband so we could meet him. They both spoke English very well but with an accent. They had mentioned they had came to this country from somewhere else but didn't say where at first (or if they did, I didn't remember).
We had a wonderful conversation over Turkish coffee and quickly were starting to realize we may only get one more house visited tonight, which was fine. They were a wonderful couple with two young children and wanted to learn about the city and the neighborhood. While he had lived in Minnesota for 7 months, it was in New Hope. She has just joined with the children two weeks earlier from where they had been living.
After the coffee was done, there were many apologizes that the house wasn't more put together but they insisted we have drinks with them and he ran out to the store to pick up some beer. Then they quickly put together a dinner for us. Soup and sandwiches came together fast. For two people to stop whatever they were doing that evening to entertain two strangers who stopped by to welcome them was wonderful. It felt like they were welcoming us and much as we were them. It was such an fun night.
At one point he asked what we type of work we did. I said that I was a computer engineer working with power grid management software. He replied "Oh, like PLCs and SCADA software". That really caught me off guard. Those are two acronyms that you don't really hear thrown around unless you work in that industry.
Then the real kicker came when he said "Yeah, I use to work on the Iraqi National Grid, before April 2003". Both Sarah and I must have had the most stunned looked on our faces. We've both had friends that served in the US Armed Forces in Iraq but we've never sat and talked with somebody who was in the country, in Baghdad, as the Marine Corps was moving in on the city.
The stories they had were wonderful to hear. Working with our forces to help rebuild their country, getting to come to America, living and working in the Mid Atlantic region, and then moving to Minnesota. You can always learn from somebody who has a different background than you but what we learned that night makes me appreciate even more what we have here. Hearing stories of being afraid or the gut reactions to loud bangs and shaking were so eye opening.
We ended up staying over three and a half hours. We didn't make it to any other houses that night but that's ok. We've made plans to get together with them again and have them over to our place.
I know the point of the Neighbor Connect program is to help new residents feel welcome in their community and to help the people who have lived here reach out to the new folks moving in. I have no doubt that it will help our city grow and be a better place. But if the other people in this program have even half the experience that Sarah and I did Brooklyn Park is going to be greatest city in Minnesota.
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