This week Marinda and I receive an email from Alejandro, the coordinator for Refugee 
mentoring through Catholic Community Services: The Kasongo family is scheduled to arrive at 11:08 PM , Tuesday, December 20th via JetBlue flight 071. It’s exciting to have the name of a family, who were formerly refugees and will now be legal immigrants that we’ll get to meet and help.
We don’t know where the Kasongo family is from. Really we don’t know anything specific about them beyond their name, arrival time, and that they are refugees resettled through the US refugee program. Likely they have had many difficult and trying years with turmoil in their lives. It’s possible that their family has been torn apart, perhaps losing a parent or children in the process of fleeing from wherever they are from. They may be from a war torn nation; almost certainly they fled due to violence and traveled far and long by foot, boat, train, etc. There’s a good chance they spent years living in a camp – a tent city with some measure of order and plenty of disorder. As they arrive in Salt Lake City, they will likely be quite tired after a long and trying journey. We do not know to what extent they know of us – the Wessman Family, and from the email a bit of internet hunting a 20 something girl named Kassidy and a successful businessman (family?) named Ed Richardson who together are assigned to mentor and help this family in a new culture, new language, new food, new peaceful, new everything different from their prior experiences world and lives. I’m looking forward to meeting them. We hope it is a good experience for them and also for our family.