On Thursday, October 26, I went to work not knowing the names of the people murdered during a mass shooting in my hometown of Lewiston/Auburn, Maine, locally referred to as “The Twin Cities.” Before leaving, I told my husband I was unsure if I could effectively do my job. As executive director of Stellar Story Company, I was scheduled to be at St. John’s Prep in Danvers, MA, leading several hours of Suitcase Stories®, a program that explores global migration through storytelling.
I felt terrible even sharing my anxiety out loud. I was not in lockdown like my father, close friends, and former neighbors. Also, my primary role at the school was to introduce refugee storytellers who experienced violence directly and still have loved ones at risk abroad.
But my fear was justified. The night before, I knew from frantic texts that my relatives and closest friends were safe. Still, growing up and working in Maine for nearly thirty years, it was entirely conceivable I would know one of the victims or someone who did, and I couldn’t possibly account for everyone.
Within hours of the shooting, I knew nurses treating the injured in the emergency room and officers searching for the perpetrator. I thought about them and the other first responders working despite real fear and acute grief as I packed my bag, and I told myself to do my job. Heading to the school, I hoped I could focus on the stories we had prepared, not the ones unfolding in real-time in my hometown.
But when I arrived at the private Catholic school and learned the campus had said a prayer for Lewiston, it became clear that it would be impossible not to think about Maine. Some students had siblings at Bates College, where my friends work as professors. And so I leaned in and revealed an important truth at the start of the assemblies, honoring my community the best way I knew how. I told the students we were only at their school delivering Suitcase Stories because of Lewiston, Maine.
Back in 2002, I worked for the City of Lewiston during the unprecedented Somali migration that drew national attention. My job was to help foster relationships between long-term residents and our new neighbors. It was a challenging time and changed my life forever. Later, I started to tell stories about Lewiston/Auburn to make meaning of our experiences and discovered the conversations I had been trying to have about building community became easier and more authentic. In 2016, I created Suitcase Stories to invite more dialogue and feature more voices.
Standing on stage at St. John’s Prep, I emphasized how stories reveal what we have in common as people and how, through storytelling, we can contribute to important social change, whether supporting refugees or ending gun violence.
Brothers Biar and Gak Kon from Sudan shared their experiences growing up in refugee camps, while Zalaikha Wahid told of fleeing Afghanistan after the Taliban took power in 2021. Part of Zalaikha’s story involves surviving a shooting at her university, where she was studying to become a doctor. As I listened to her describe having to climb over a wall to avoid being shot, I thought about the people fleeing the bowling alley and bar back home.
At one point in the day, we visited a social studies classroom where we discovered a painting of an assault rifle on a wall with other politically oriented art and social justice statements. One end of the gun dripped in blood, while an American flag wrapped around the other. By then, the first ten victims’ names had been released. I didn’t know anyone personally, although my friends did. Staring at the painting, I was angry for people in Maine and for our refugee storytellers who came to the U.S. in search of safety, only to discover that America has a different war—mass shootings. This year there has been five hundred and eighty so far, including another in Chicago three days after Lewiston.
In the evening, we hosted one more Suitcase Stories event for parents, joined by our partners at the International Institute of New England (IINE) and another storyteller, Rodrigue Kalabayi, a former IINE client from the Democratic Republic of Congo. During the Q&A, Rodrigue described storytelling as therapy for him when asked why he tells his story.
Around nine that night, I pulled up outside Zalaikha’s driveway to drop her off. Suddenly, I found myself sheepishly apologizing for spending so much of our day together distracted by my phone and talking about my hometown when I knew her mother was still in Afghanistan and how the Taliban has killed exponentially more people.
Zalaikha immediately cut me off
“Cheryl, I’ve had to get used to living with violence all the time,” she said. “You are new to this. Of course, you will be upset. It’s awful.”
We had something new in common, and for the first time, I wished we didn’t.
I was apprehensive to go to work on that Thursday, but it turns out it was the right place to be if I couldn’t be in Maine supporting family and friends. Over lunch, a student told Biar, Gak, and Zalaikha how impressed he was with their resilience. He wasn’t sure he would be so strong and full of such optimism after all they had experienced. The storytellers acknowledged it’s hard but said they want to give people hope.
They certainly did for me on Thursday, and I suspect refugees in Maine will do the same for many of their neighbors for whom violence of this magnitude is new.
Beyond banning assault rifles and funding more mental health services, my hope now is people in Maine find some comfort in sharing stories of the loved ones they lost and the beautiful acts of courage and community already circulating out of Lewiston.
I certainly don’t know how to end violence throughout the world, from Afghanistan to Israel/Palestine to Lewiston, Maine. But I do know that sharing, listening to, and understanding each other’s stories helps us begin to heal.
