She had searched relentlessly and eventually discovered in the ship’ s records that the vessel had been forced to stop in Poti. After nearly two decades, the family was reunited.
But the words that remained in my grandfather’ s memory were not about borders, or documents, or explanations. They were the first words spoken to a hungry child in a strange land:
“ Do you want bread?” That sentence became sacred in our family.
When war came to Georgia in 2008 and refugees arrived in our neighborhood school, my father remembered that story. Without hesitation, he bought sixty loaves of bread and brought them to the displaced families who had fled their homes.
He said it was a debt from his father.
When his father was a hungry refugee child, no one asked who he was or where he came from. They simply gave him bread.
For the first weeks of the crisis, my family continued bringing food, clothing, and blankets to the refugees sheltering in the school. There were many families and many children, including newborn babies who had arrived with nothing.
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