Not Really Strangers

In this special episode, host Suzanne Ehlers revisits one of Not Really Strangers' most enduring questions: what does the word stranger mean to you? Drawing from each conversation across the past two seasons, you will hear a collage-style episode featuring artists, advocates, business leaders, and more — each of them a refugee, the child of a refugee, or someone who has felt called to work alongside refugees. Together, their voices explore how the idea of a stranger shapes the way we move through the world, and what becomes possible when we choose to close that distance.

If this episode sparked something for you, we invite you to go back and listen to the full conversations from both seasons. Then, if you want to be part of building a world where we aren't really strangers, please consider making a donation to USA for UNHCR at www.unrefugees.org. Finally, if you enjoyed this episode, taking a few minutes to leave a review helps these conversations reach more listeners — and that matters more than you might think.

Resources:

• Podcast show notes
• Donate now
• Follow USA for UNHCR on Instagram
• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn

Recorded on location at Emma's Torch — a restaurant and culinary training center for refugees in Brooklyn, NY with locations in the Washington, DC metropolitan area — Suzanne sits down with staff members Kira O'Brien and Alexander Harris and alumnus Giorgi Tabukashvili to explore what home, belonging, and hospitality mean when displacement is part of the story. Now in its tenth year, Emma's Torch runs an 11-week, fully paid culinary training program for refugees, asylees, and other newcomers. Giorgi shares how the program helped him find community when he was new to the U.S after fleeing his home country of Georgia, and how it propelled him in his career as a restaurant manager. Kira, a lifelong New Yorker, shares how living in New York City on 9/11 inspired her to advocate for refugee communities, and “Chef Alex,” a self-described “Jersey Boy” who leads the Emma’s Torch culinary training program in New York, offers a window into how the organization prepares its students to thrive in the restaurant business. At the end of the episode, Kira gives all of us the same “extra credit assignment” she gives her graduate students: to dine at a local restaurant owned by a family whose ethnic background is different from our own. Because, as this entire conversation illustrates, sharing a meal is how strangers become friends.

Topics Discussed: 

• What home means when it is no longer a place — across languages and experiences of displacement
• Emma's Torch's mission: refugee empowerment through culinary education
• The 11-week program model: classroom training, the EEE framework, and live cafe operations
• Culinary skills as a pathway to long-term employment including recipe literacy, language acquisition, and consistency under pressure
• Job retention and wage growth as program success metrics, not just placement
• Giorgi's journey: leaving Georgia, crossing through Mexico, arriving with no English or network
• How Emma's Torch graduates become mentors and trainers for the next cohort
• The hospitality industry as a vehicle for welcoming new Americans
• "We are strangers even to ourselves" — on self-discovery and belonging

Episode Resources:

• Emma’s Torch website
• Cobble Hill | Daily Provisions
• Artha Rini Indonesian Restaurant in Kensington, MD 

Resources:

• Podcast show notes
• Donate now
• Follow USA for UNHCR on Instagram
• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn

In this episode of Not Really Strangers, host Suzanne Ehlers sits down with global leader and major sci-fi fan Ada Williams Prince to discuss how her career spanning multiple continents has shaped the way she thinks about the best way to fund social change. Ada shares how she first came to feel a personal connection to the issue of forced displacement and why it’s not just a humanitarian crisis – it is also a political crisis, a gender crisis, and a climate crisis. Ada also makes a compelling case for what she calls a “liberation practice”: designing investment strategies not in boardrooms but by and with the communities most affected on the frontlines of a crisis. Threaded throughout this episode is a meditation on power, and how people having power over systems is what creates lasting change. 

Topics Discussed:

• Ada’s time working as an emergency program manager in Aceh, Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami and the reminder that compassion crosses oceans, and the visceral connection between forced migration stories.
• Understanding that forced displacement is never just a humanitarian crisis but a political crisis, a gender crisis, a climate crisis, and a failure of systems.
• The centering of women and children in displacement narratives: chronic underfunding, the dangers of defaulting to male-centered imagery, and the specific vulnerabilities that women and girls face inside protracted displacement.
• Reframing philanthropy as a liberation practice where we have to shape the investment strategy itself; not just funding change, but changing who gets to define what change is.
• Meaningful examples of progress within the humanitarian aid system (water placement in South Sudan camps, lights on paths to latrines in Guinea) and the question of what the transformational next move looks like.
• Who gets portrayed as a worthy recipient of aid, whose suffering is made legible, and who gets to construct those stories.
• How strangeness/otherness is being weaponized and entire populations are made to feel like strangers in countries they built

Episode Resources

• Refugees International
• Women’s Refugee Commission
• Women and Girls of Color Design Council
• Resilio Fund

Resources:

• Podcast show notes
• Donate now
• Follow USA for UNHCR on Instagram
• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn

In this episode of Not Really Strangers, Suzanne Ehlers sits down with two UNHCR DAFI scholarship recipients and leaders of the Tertiary Refugee Student Network (TRSN) — Monicah Malith, a law graduate from South Sudan now completing her Advocates Training Program in Nairobi, and Krista Rivas, a Nicaraguan architecture and international relations student finishing her final semester in Mexico City. Together, they explore what home means when you've been displaced, the unexpected ways education equalizes and amplifies, and what they want people who've never met a refugee to understand about our shared humanity. The episode also shines a light on the practical advocacy both are doing: Monicah coaching new DAFI applicants on how to connect their story to their scholarship application, and Krista and TRSN building a centralized website and English-language YouTube channel for refugees in Mexico navigating higher education without a scholarship. Both guests reflect honestly on self-doubt alongside pride — Monicah on walking into her first law orientation in a suit and feeling out of place; Krista on managing social anxiety before a high-stakes internship interview. And both return to the same conviction: that education gave them a voice they intend to use for others still on the path behind them.

Topics:

• What "home" means after displacement for Monicah and Krista
• The DAFI (the Albert Einstein German Academic Refugee Initiative) scholarship experience and current educational journeys
• Monicah's election as first international student president at the University of Nairobi
• Krista's hospital design thesis and internship news
• The funding gap: no new DAFI scholarships for Mexico in 2025, and Building Better Futures
• What refugees and non-refugees share — empathy, migration, and adapting to new places
• Pride, self-doubt, and being the first in your family to graduate
• What it means to be a "stranger" to both women and how you stop being one

Episode Resources:

• Building Better Futures — Watch the campaign video featuring Monicah and Krista
• DAFI Scholarship Program
• Tertiary Refugee Student Network (TRSN) 

Resources:

• Podcast show notes
• Donate now
• Follow USA for UNHCR on Instagram
• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn

In this episode of Not Really Strangers, host Suzanne Ehlers sits down with Maryam Banikarim, an Emmy Award-winning storyteller, community builder, and host of The Messy Parts podcast, for a conversation that moves from the streets of Chelsea to the streets of Tehran, and back again. Maryam, who fled Iran as a child and arrived in the United States in the middle of the hostage crisis, reflects on what it means to build a sense of home when home is not a fixed place. She shares how New York City became the city where she found her voice, raised her family, and  began setting the longest table in the neighborhood. She also opens up about the experience of cultural estrangement and offers hard-won wisdom for young people who have had to flee — joining, doing, and refusing to wait to be invited. Throughout, she returns again and again to the idea that belonging is not something that happens to you, but rather something you build, one long table at a time.

Topics Discussed:

• The concept of home as a visceral feeling, not a fixed geography
• What it means to be a stranger and conversely, to be welcomed
• Growing up displaced: Maryam's experience fleeing Iran as a child
• "Cultural estrangement" and the longing that comes with forced departure
• Building community in New York City: NYCNext and The Longest Table
• The role of the private sector in supporting displaced communities
• Advice for young people who have had to flee their home countries
• How displacement can be a driver of innovation and resilience
• Returning to Iran in 1993 — and finding her childhood bedroom frozen in time
• What it means to pull up the piano bench and make room for one more

Episode Resources:

• The Longest Table 
• Maryam’s Columbia Commencement Address
• Prep for Prep

Resources:

• Podcast show notes
• Donate now
• Follow USA for UNHCR on Instagram
• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn

Susanna Pollack, President of Games for Change and a cross-sector leader with over 25 years of experience in traditional and interactive media, joins host Suzanne Ehlers for a conversation that bridges virtual worlds and lived realities. From Clouds Over Sidra — the UN's landmark VR film set inside a Syrian refugee camp — to the immersive theater of The Jungle, the award-winning text-based game Bury Me, My Love, and Minecraft Education's use in displaced communities, Susanna illustrates how games and immersive media can build empathy, teach skills, and restore agency in ways few other mediums can match. She also reflects on Games for Change's growing partnership with the UN through the Games and SDG Summit, and on her experience with USA for UNHCR's innovation hub, The Hive, before closing with one of the episode's most resonant ideas: that a stranger is simply someone whose story you haven't heard yet, and that the shift from assumption to curiosity is where belonging begins.

Topics:

• Home as community, belonging, and shared purpose beyond a physical address
• Games as education and skills-building tools within refugee camps and integration classrooms
• Minecraft Education's use in displaced communities for digital literacy and future-building
• Games for Change: 20+ years at the intersection of the gaming industry and social impact
• USA for UNHCR's Hive innovation hub: where creativity meets humanitarian context
• Gaming's global scale: 3+ billion players; the industry is larger than film, TV, and radio combined
• Cross-sector partnerships as the engine of meaningful social change
• The stranger as potential: moving from assumption to curiosity

Episode Resources:

• Games for Change
• Clouds Over Sidra
• The Jungle (Play)
• Bury Me My Love
• UNESCO MGEIP
• We the Refugees: Ticket to Europe
• The Hive

Resources:

• Podcast show notes
• Donate now
• Follow USA for UNHCR on Instagram
• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn

In this episode of Not Really Strangers, host Suzanne Ehlers sits down with internationally acclaimed ballet dancer, choreographer, author, and humanitarian Ahmad Joudeh. Born stateless in 1990 in Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, Ahmad carries a story that is both extraordinary and deeply representative of the millions of people around the world who exist without nationality, without a passport, and without a country that claims them as its own. When Syria's civil war broke out, Ahmad faced death threats from extremists simply for dancing; he responded by performing in the ruins of Palmyra's Roman amphitheater and having "Dance or Die" tattooed on the back of his neck.

The conversation moves from the body as a home that carries East and West, grief and resistance, within a single dance to what it felt like to finally hold a Dutch passport and "see life in colors." Ahmad also reflects on his upcoming role as Young Gilgamesh in a new opera as a meditation on power, love, and the kind of legacy that outlasts any government. Lastly, when asked what he wants on the dinner table, his answer is immediate: "I don't care what is on there. I care who is in there." This is an episode about the distance — real and invented — between those we call strangers.

Topics Discussed:

• What statelessness actually means, how it differs from being a refugee, and navigating borders without a passport
• The generational cycle of Palestinian statelessness in Syria, from the Arab-Israeli war to the present day,
• The role documentary filmmaker Roozbeh Kaboly played in bringing Ahmad's story to the world and how the Dutch National Ballet changed the course of his life
• How Ahmad merges classical ballet with Sufi dervish tradition in his dance, and what it means to carry culture, ancestry, and resistance in physical movement
• What the Dutch passport represented: belonging as a privilege, not just a right,  and what it feels like to "see life in colors"
• Why Ahmad continues to post on social media: reaching young people in the Middle East who deserve to see that freedom is possible
• The myth Ahmad most wants to bust about displacement, identity, and what it actually means to be a stranger

Resources:

• Podcast show notes
• Donate now
• Follow USA for UNHCR on Instagram
• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn

In this episode of Not Really Strangers, host Suzanne Ehlers welcomes her "name twin" — Dr. Suzanne Barakat, physician, humanitarian, and a leading voice on refugee health, asylum medicine, and countering Islamophobia. 

Dr. Barakat, who is from North Carolina, traces her connection to the refugee experience back to her own roots: from summers in Syria and then two years of high school there, to watching as an adult as the Syrian crisis forced her her extended family— who once all lived on the same street — to relocate  across the globe. She describes her journey as a doctor caring for those in crisis, including returning again and again to the Syrian-Turkish border, and shares her most recent trip topost-regime Syria to bear witness and help forge the country’s forensic response .

Dr. Barakat also shares the gripping story she shared in her popular TED Talk: when she was still a medical student, a white supremacist broke into her family members’ home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and murdered them while they were eating dinner. She asks the question: What if rather than “otherize” her relatives, the perpetrator of this hate crime had sat down and gotten to know them? And what can we learn from this unspeakable tragedy about the power of asking, as leaders, “Who is not at this table, and needs to be?”

This conversation raises important questions about our shared humanity and gets to the heart of what the Not Really Strangers podcast is all about.  

Topics Discussed:

• Growing up between North Carolina and Syria; two formative years of high school in Idlib
• The slow, devastating displacement of Dr. Barakat's extended Syrian family
• Volunteering on the Syria-Turkey border: clinical work under impossible conditions, language barriers, and dignity of care
• Otherization as the root cause of violence and genocide
• The 2015 Chapel Hill murders of Dr. Bakarat’s family and her fight to have them recognized as a hate crime
• Visiting Syria six weeks after the fall of the Assad regime; bearing witness to the destroyed town of Wulta
• Shaping Syria's national forensic response: missing persons, mass graves, and the imperative of local leadership
• Why justice, including narrative acknowledgment, is inseparable from peace
• Confronting implicit bias and the moral courage required to act
• Finding purpose after personal trauma: the SF Muslim Fellowship
• The dinner table as a question of inclusion: who is not here and needs to be?

Episode Resources:

• 36 Seconds Documentary
• Dr. Suzanne Barakat’s TED Talk

Resources:

• Podcast show notes
• Donate now
• Follow USA for UNHCR on Instagram
• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn

In the inaugural episode of season two of Not Really Strangers, host Suzanne Ehlers speaks with Kristin Davis, internationally acclaimed actress and UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, fresh off a visit to South Sudan to see the organization’s response to the deepening emergency caused by the war in Sudan. Kristin shares how an encounter at a Hollywood party first connected her to UNHCR, and what she witnessed at the Joda border crossing and Renk transit center: families arriving with nothing, safe spaces shuttered due to funding cuts and the gut-wrenching reality of women and children receiving only a high-calorie biscuit as their first meal after harrowing journeys through a war zone. But alongside the devastation, she also found extraordinary resilience in a group of teenage girls reclaiming their voices at a program called Girl Shine, and in a woman named Jacqueline who, after being displaced three times, opened a tea shop and hired her first employee. Kristin and Suzanne reflect on the difference between humanitarianism and politics, what it means to truly see another person and why — no matter where in the world Kristin has traveled — she has never once felt like a stranger.

Topics Discussed:

• How a chance encounter at a Hollywood party connected Kristin to UNHCR and set the course of her advocacy work
• What Kristin witnessed at the Joda border crossing and Renk Transit Center — and what was devastatingly missing
• The human impact of funding cuts: safe spaces closed and hot meals gone for families arriving with almost nothing after violent and dangerous journeys
• Girl Shine: the safe space near Juba where displaced teenage girls are learning to use their voices, understand their rights and imagine different futures
• Jacqueline's tea shop: the story of a woman displaced three times who built a small business from scratch and hired her first employee
• Why Kristin believes humanitarianism must be separated from politics and why it's everyone's responsibility
• What "stranger" means to someone who has never felt like one and the shared humanity that makes that possible

Episode Resources: 

• Kristin + UNHCR
• On South Sudan visit, UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Kristin Davis calls for urgent support for families fleeing Sudan

Resources:

• Podcast show notes
• Donate now
• Follow USA for UNHCR on Instagram
• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn

Today Nabin Dhimal joins Suzanne for the final episode of season one of Not Really Strangers Suzanne originally met Nabin in Geneva at the Global Refugee Forum, where he helped her feel at home and confident in her then-new position as the executive director and CEO of USA for UNHCR. Nabin was born in a refugee camp in Nepal after his family was displaced from Bhutan, and he later resettled in Portland, Oregon. Today, he’s a master’s student at Georgetown University, an advocate for refugees, and a community builder. In this conversation, he and Suzanne explore what it means to call a place “home,” how food and education shape identity and why being a “stranger” is so often just a matter of being misunderstood. Nabin’s story invites us to see how deeply intertwined our lives really are and how, by listening more closely, we start to realize we’re not really strangers after all.

Topics Discussed:

• Nabin’s journey from Bhutan to a refugee camp in Nepal, and eventually to Portland, Oregon
• The emotional toll and hope embedded in the refugee resettlement process
• The meaning of home, belonging and identity as a Bhutanese-Nepali refugee
• How education, vulnerability and storytelling helped Nabin build community in the U.S.
• The role of food and tradition in maintaining cultural roots across continents

Episode Resources:

• Read: Inspired by a love of education, a former refugee is making a difference in Portland, Oregon

Resources:

• Podcast show notes
• Donate now
• Follow USA for UNHCR on Instagram
• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn