The coffee was too hot and the silence was enormous.
Marcus sat across a small table at the Hennepin County Library in south Minneapolis, holding a paper cup he couldn’t drink from yet, watching a man named Abdi stare at a laminated sheet of vocabulary words like it was written in a language from another planet. Which, in a way, it was. Abdi had been in Minneapolis for eleven days. He’d come from a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya, where he’d spent fourteen years after fleeing Mogadishu as a teenager. He spoke Somali and some Swahili. His English consisted of roughly forty words — enough to say hello, ask for water, and tell someone his name.
Marcus knew exactly one word of Somali: nabad, which means peace. He’d learned it the night before from a YouTube video, practicing the pronunciation in his bathroom mirror like a nervous teenager before a first date.
“Nabad,” Marcus said.
Abdi looked up. A slow grin broke across his face. “Nabad.”
And that was the beginning.
A Frozen Lake, a Warm Impulse
Marcus was thirty-four, a mechanical engineer at a manufacturing company in Plymouth. The kind of guy who could tell you the tensile strength of six different aluminum alloys but had never given much thought to what it meant to start over in a country where you can’t read the street signs. He’d grown up in Duluth — Iron Range stock, Lutheran church every Sunday, hot dish at every potluck. His world was small and comfortable and he knew it.
The idea to volunteer with refugees in Minneapolis, Minnesota came from his sister, Elena, who worked as a social worker in Hennepin County. She’d been telling him for months about the families she was seeing — Somali, Karen, Afghan, Congolese — cycling through a resettlement system that was both miraculous and completely maxed out. One night over dinner at their parents’ house, she said something that stuck with him.
“These people land at MSP Airport with a plastic bag of documents and maybe one suitcase. Within ninety days, they’re expected to have housing, a job, and their kids enrolled in school. In a city where it’s twenty below in January. And most of them have never seen snow.”
Marcus went home that night and started looking for refugee volunteer opportunities in Minneapolis. What he found surprised him — not because the need was hidden, but because this whole world of organizations and programs was right there and he’d somehow never noticed it.
A City Built by Newcomers
Minneapolis-St. Paul is one of the largest refugee resettlement hubs in the United States, and has been for decades. The Twin Cities is home to the largest Somali population in the country — over a hundred thousand people, many concentrated in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, a place locals sometimes call Little Mogadishu. Walk through Cedar-Riverside on any afternoon and you’ll pass halal grocery stores, East African restaurants fragrant with cardamom and cumin, women in bright hijabs pushing strollers, and old men drinking spiced tea outside the cafes on Cedar Avenue.
But Somalis are only part of the story. The Twin Cities also has the largest urban Hmong population in America — more than ninety-four thousand people, most in St. Paul, their roots tracing back to the fall of Laos in 1975. And since 2005, Minnesota has become home to the largest Karen community in the country — more than twenty thousand people who fled the Burmese military, many settling on St. Paul’s east side around Arlington Avenue.
Add Afghan, Congolese, Ukrainian, Eritrean, and Oromo families, and the picture gets clear fast: Minneapolis-St. Paul doesn’t just accept refugees. It’s shaped by them.
Finding the Right Fit
Marcus spent two weeks reading about how to help refugees in Minnesota before he committed. The options were bigger than he expected.
One organization — a long-established resettlement agency on Como Avenue in St. Paul — offered a refugee mentor program that paired volunteers with newly arrived individuals or families. Three-month minimum, meeting weekly for two to three hours. Mentors helped with everything from figuring out the bus system to decoding utility bills to just being a steady, familiar face. The training was a three-to-four-hour session. No second language required.
Another organization, faith-based and partnered with dozens of Twin Cities churches, ran what they called a cultural companionship program. Volunteers pledged a full year of walking alongside a refugee family. Not fixing. Not saving. Walking alongside. The model was built on one idea: what refugees needed most in their first year wasn’t just services but actual human connection. Volunteers might ride the bus with someone to their first doctor’s appointment, or explain why rent is due on the first of the month and not whenever you have the money.
A Karen-led organization on St. Paul’s east side — the first of its kind in the country, founded by Karen refugees themselves — offered mock interview sessions, after-school tutoring for Karen teenagers, and interpretation support during walk-in hours when families arrived with landlord notices they couldn’t read.
A major statewide social services organization ran Circle of Welcome teams — groups of community members who pooled financial and practical support for one refugee family over six months. One team had raised over eight thousand dollars. Another had furnished an entire apartment from donated goods.
And a statewide literacy organization offered twelve hours of ESL tutor training — covering how to lead conversation and literacy lessons — after which volunteers could work in classrooms across the metro as an ESL volunteer, supporting adult refugees learning to read, write, and speak English.
Marcus chose the refugee mentor program in Minneapolis. It felt right for who he was — an engineer, methodical, more comfortable with a single deep relationship than a room full of strangers. He filled out the application, did his background check, attended the training, and two weeks later got a call.
“We have a match for you. His name is Abdi. He’s twenty-nine. He’s from Somalia. He arrived last week.”
The First Weeks
The training had prepared Marcus for some things but not others. He knew to be patient. He knew not to make assumptions. What he didn’t know was how much of mentoring would happen in the gaps between words.
Their first meeting was at the library because it was neutral and warm and free. They started with a city map. Marcus pointed to where they were. Abdi pointed to where he lived — a small apartment in the Phillips neighborhood. They spent forty-five minutes figuring out the Metro Transit app on Abdi’s phone. Not glamorous work. But when Abdi successfully pulled up the Route 5 schedule and said, “This one — my bus,” the look on his face was something Marcus wouldn’t forget.
The second week, they went to a grocery store. Marcus had been told in training that grocery stores were one of the most overwhelming places for newly arrived refugees — the sheer volume of choice, the unfamiliar packaging, the fluorescent lights buzzing over aisles that seem to stretch on forever. He watched Abdi stand in the cereal aisle for a full minute, scanning boxes with an expression that wasn’t confusion exactly but something closer to calculation. Abdi picked up a box of oatmeal, turned it over, read the price sticker, and put it in the cart with a decisive nod. He wasn’t overwhelmed. He was strategic. He’d been managing scarcity his entire life. A grocery store with too many choices was a better problem than a camp with too few.
Week three, they sat in Marcus’s car outside a Social Security office and practiced what Abdi would say inside. Marcus played the clerk. Abdi rehearsed his full name, his date of birth, his address. They did it four times. On the fifth, Abdi delivered it without hesitation, then leaned back and laughed — a real, full laugh, the first Marcus had heard from him.
“Good?” Abdi asked.
“Perfect,” Marcus said.
What Cultural Mentoring Actually Is
People who haven’t done it imagine that volunteering with refugees is mostly about teaching English or donating furniture. Those things matter. But what Marcus discovered was that the real work of cultural mentoring is harder to name.
It’s presence. It’s consistency. It’s showing up on a Tuesday evening when it’s twelve below zero because you said you would and Abdi is expecting you. The one thing a person who has lost their country, their community, and their daily reality needs more than anything is someone who does what they say they will do.
Their meetings settled into a rhythm. Tuesdays, usually at the library or a coffee shop on Lake Street, sometimes at Abdi’s apartment when the weather was too brutal. Go over any mail he’d received. Practice conversational English. Work on whatever challenge was on deck — setting up a bank account one week, understanding a lease renewal the next.
He told Marcus about the camp. Not the worst parts — those came later, in fragments, months in, offered carefully, tested against Marcus’s reaction. But the daily texture of it. The sound of wind against the tarp walls. The boys he’d played football with in the dust between shelters. The teacher who’d given him a battered English dictionary when he was fifteen and told him it was the most valuable thing he’d ever own.
“That book,” Abdi said one evening, stirring sugar into his coffee at a Somali cafe on Cedar Avenue. “I read it for nine years. Every page.”
Marcus, who had taken four semesters of college French and couldn’t remember the word for “library,” said nothing for a long moment. Then: “That’s why your English is better than you think it is.”
Abdi shrugged. “Camp English. It is not the same.”
“It’s a start. The rest is just practice.”
The Invisible Work
One thing Marcus hadn’t expected was how much of mentoring involved navigating systems that confuse people who’ve lived here their whole lives. Health insurance. Employment paperwork. The tangled process of credential recognition for people with professional skills that don’t translate cleanly across borders. Abdi had worked as an electrician in the camp — real, skilled work, wiring shelters and community buildings — but his experience carried no certifiable weight in Minnesota.
Marcus started making calls. He talked to a workforce development coordinator at the resettlement agency. He researched electrician apprenticeship programs. He found out Abdi could enter a pre-apprenticeship program if he passed a basic math and reading assessment. They started working on math together on Tuesdays — fractions, unit conversions, the kind of arithmetic an engineer does without thinking and that Abdi, it turned out, also did without thinking, just in different units.
The mentoring coordinator had told Marcus during training that the hardest part for most volunteers wasn’t the language barrier or the cultural differences. It was the asymmetry. “You go home to your life. Your mentee goes home to a reality you can visit but never fully understand. Sometimes you’ll feel helpless. That’s okay. Being helpful and feeling helpless can happen at the same time.”
She was right. There were weeks when Marcus felt like nothing he did was enough. Abdi was applying for jobs and getting silence. His apartment had a leak the landlord was slow to fix. His mother was still in Kenya, and the phone calls home were expensive and always too short. Marcus couldn’t solve any of it. What he could do was show up on Tuesday, ask how the week went, and listen.
The Turn
The shift happened around month four. Marcus showed up at the library to find Abdi already there, reading a newspaper. Not a Somali newspaper. The Star Tribune. Sounding out headlines, his finger tracking under the words.
“What’s the news?” Marcus asked.
Abdi looked up. “There is a fire in St. Paul. And the Vikings are—” he checked the paper again — “‘looking to rebuild their offensive line.’”
Marcus laughed. “Welcome to Minnesota.”
Small moment. But it was the moment Marcus understood the work was working — not because of anything dramatic, but because a man who’d spent fourteen years in a refugee camp was reading the local sports section and cracking a joke about it.
Over the next two months, things picked up. Abdi got into a pre-apprenticeship program. He was riding the bus independently — not just Route 5, but transfers across the metro, to training sessions in Brooklyn Park and job fairs in downtown St. Paul. He’d made friends at the program — a Congolese guy named Jean-Pierre and a Karen man named Saw Htoo who had a laugh you could hear across the parking lot.
Marcus and Abdi still met on Tuesdays. But it had changed. They weren’t really mentor and mentee anymore. They were two guys in a coffee shop talking about work and weather and whether the Timberwolves would ever win a championship.
What You Should Know Before You Start
If you’re thinking about volunteering with refugees in Minneapolis, here’s what Marcus wishes someone had told him:
You don’t need to speak another language. Most refugee volunteer opportunities in Minneapolis are designed for English-speaking volunteers. Organizations provide interpreter support when needed. What you need is patience, consistency, and a willingness to communicate through gesture, repetition, and the occasional translation app.
The time commitment is real but manageable. Most programs ask for two to three hours per week, minimum three months. Some ask for more. Choose the level that honestly matches your life. Reliable two hours beats ambitious ten hours that burns out after six weeks.
Training is provided and it matters. Every major resettlement organization in Minneapolis offers volunteer training — from a three-hour orientation to twelve-hour ESL tutor certification. Don’t skip it. It covers cultural sensitivity, communication techniques, how to respond to disclosures of trauma, and the practical mechanics of your role.
The emotional weight is real. You’ll hear stories that are hard to hold. You might sit across from someone describing a family member still in a camp, or a career that evaporated at a border crossing. You’re not a therapist. You don’t need to fix what you hear. But you need to be able to sit with it.
The reward is quiet and cumulative. There’s no single dramatic moment. There’s a person who couldn’t read a bus schedule eight months ago navigating a job application. There’s a family who was terrified of their first Minnesota winter hosting you for tea and laughing about the snow. There’s a man reading the sports section of a newspaper in a language he learned from a dictionary in a refugee camp.
How to Get Started
Search for refugee volunteer opportunities in Minneapolis and you’ll find a whole constellation of organizations doing this work. Start by attending an info session — most run them monthly, and they’re the best way to figure out which role fits. Complete the application and background check. Show up for training. Then show up for your first meeting ready to be awkward, patient, and human.
Minneapolis needs volunteers who’ll commit — not for a week or a season, but for the slow, unglamorous, genuinely important work of helping someone build a life in a new place. The refugee families arriving in the Twin Cities have already survived things most of us can’t imagine. What they need now isn’t charity. It’s neighbors.
Marcus still meets Abdi on Tuesdays. Abdi is halfway through his apprenticeship program, talking about getting his electrician’s license, renting a bigger apartment, maybe bringing his mother over. The vocabulary sheet from their first meeting is still pinned to the corkboard in Abdi’s kitchen, edges curling, the words long since memorized.
Last week, Abdi taught Marcus a new Somali word: hodan. It means wealth, but not the money kind. The kind that comes from having people around you.
“Saaxiib hodan,” Abdi said, pointing at Marcus. “Friend wealth.”
Marcus, the engineer from Duluth who once knew nothing about any of this, poured more coffee and stayed.
