“Grab an end of the boat and boost it above knee level,” hollered the event coordinator in his brown khakis and overly tight t-shirt donning the logo of some monotonous sporting brand.

I put a weary hand on the massive object and pulled along with the other fifteen teenagers. It took us a while, but we managed to thrust the depleted article into the depths of the dumpster. Upward Bound, Arizona State University’s TRIO program, took us members to regain humanity by helping to cleanse a downtown Phoenix neighborhood of the filth and debris that overtook it several years back.

When I had arrived there, I inhaled the cold air of the bitter winter along with the dirt that the alleyways oozed. I regarded the dilapidated houses behind the nostalgic pavements that screeched words of the occupants’ pasts. I could not believe that coming from a country that was once in those conditions that I would be fortunate enough to end up in a well sterile place.

The houses were enervated and some were even decapitated. We fixed broken cracks in walls, and we splashed irking grey paint over the once artistically sentimental wording of the past along with picking up litter. And I did not object. I knew that the tenants living in this neighborhood needed help because they did not have the strength or will power to commit to such difficult tasks due to the fact that most families relied on hard working parents who barely had time to eat yet alone clean up their community.

While I was cleaning out the alley, I thought about Bosnia – my home. I thought about how the tragic war ruined the once vivacious country that was Yugoslavia. I thought about the memories made and the laughter that spilled like city lights over our home. And I grew woeful. I missed the now foreign country, and I came to the realization that these people were immigrants too. Sure, they might not have been refugees in the sense that they left a home country looking for salvation. But they were immigrants nonetheless. They were immigrants that those nostalgic sidewalks seeped of.

I clenched my now sweaty palm into a hard rock fist thinking that although we had cleaned up the neighborhood and restored their lives somehow that these people would never be truly content because they are not in their state of home. It might have been clean at that moment, but two weeks later the debris and the stench were sure to reappear like moths to a flame. And we are all aware of the danger flames convey.

As I descended into my car, I could not help but foreshadow the lives of the sidewalk people. I could not help but imagine what their children will end up becoming, or how they will find happiness in the darkest times like my family tried to during the war. But I sighed and exhaled to myself a fatigued “okay, I am ready to go home.”

The broad spectrum that my mind opened up to that one breezy day in December will never be ignored. We are all the same, and we all have homes inside of us that we would kill to run back to.