NEWSBYSUSANNAH CUNNINGHAM

"African" jewelry on sale in the Khan Al-Khalili market in Cairo

"But what are you trying to get her? An ID? Assistance? what?"

"The right to exist! The right to survive. That's it. All I do is try to get the UN to recognize my clients as refugees so that they can stay in Egypt and live, not get sent back and killed. Just live...and, mind you, not with rights, not with opportunity, or…happiness--not even the promise at a pursuit of happiness. Just the right to exist."

Silence from my dad on the other line. I think he's still there though. I always get worked up when people don't understand how little I actually fight for. Sometimes I notice that my anger doesn't equal the questioning at the moment and I recognize that it must be a release from a well-up of the last week or so. Probably yelling at myself mostly, for being so useless.

As a legal adviser for asylum seekers in Cairo, Egypt I can do…so little. I meet Eritrean, Sudanese, and Somali clients and the first thing I tell them is that I can't get them a job, I can't find them housing, and no, I can't meet you at your house—even if you're begging for transportation money to come to our offices. I explain to them that as someone who has applied for asylum with the UN High Commission for Refugees, the branch of the UN mandated to identify and protect those persons in need of refuge from their state of origin, they have a limited amount of time before they have to go forward to the UN for their interview.  I will listen to their story, ask many questions, and if I think I can help them prepare for their interview and write their testimony, then we will have to meet at least four more times, where I will ask many, many questions. Some of them might be difficult. I may ask them to recall how their husband was killed. I may need them to describe the governmental official who raped them. If they can possibly remember, what did the officers ask them in the interrogation room? How long were they tied up? How frequently?

I am completely and utterly invasive. There is no such thing as privacy in my sessions with clients. The best they get is a few seconds to recover between questioning as the interpreter translates their answers.

During my first few months at our office, I took up smoking, again, after two years of sticking with my "only with a drink" rule. A smoke break was one of the only legitimate excuses I could make to step away from testimony taking and be by myself. Or chit-chat about something other then my case with fellow squeezed in smokers on the tiny balcony. Or stop the screaming in my head because all I could do was write a testimony and give advice. I couldn't give her back her brother, or her mother, or her father. I couldn't give her back the life she had.

All I could do was give her was an 11-page written testimony, advice, and some instructions on how to wait for the UN's results.

Knowing what I know, that so little is promised to these asylum-seekers. That parceling out rights with such reluctance is soul-crushing and wrong—morally wrong, divinely wrong, the kind of wrong that screams from your gut—that refugee status alone grants them only the ironically exclusive right to stay legally in a country with astronomical unemployment, closed doors for education for them and their children, and if that weren't enough, rampant racism and xenophobia. Welcome to your refuge, a place where no one wants you.

So when I met with Jeff for the first time after exchanging a few e-mails about his idea—to keep the famous Dr. Harrell-Bond's Iraqi legal clinic open after she returned back to Oxford, I was looking for something that offered a little hope. Something to help me quit smoking.

Dr. Harrell-Bond had been helping write testimony for newly arrived Iraqis who'd managed to get out of Iraq and stow their families in one-bedroom houses in sprawling Cairo. The American government had promised to expedite resettlement to the US for those Iraqis who'd served as translators, construction contractors, drivers for the US forces. I knew what I thought about the invasion of Iraq, I marched my freshmen year in New York in February of 2003 even as my ex-boyfriend and my best friend were shipped off. But I also knew what fate promised refugees in Cairo and if there was any hope that these Iraqi families could get out of Egypt, go to the US, where they could at least try to get jobs, put their kids in schools, see accredited doctors, that seemed in its most basic sense, right. It was the pet project that was supposed to have wings; something to remind me that things can get better for a few refugees..

Six months later, it's still that. Except now, it's no longer a pet project. It's gonna be my job. Help make a resettlement office for Iraqis and select candidates in the Somali, Sudanese, Eritrea, Ethiopian, and You-Name-It refugee community , create a project that has wings for legal advisors and refugees alike. Something to offer hope to both of us.

But change it's goddamn name. The Iraqi Information Office? Sounds like a cultural tour company.

Susannah Cunningham is one of four "Entrepreneurs on the Verge" who will spend the next six months blogging about live inside a social startup. She is a co-founder of the Iraqi Information Office in Cairo, Egypt, which works to provide specialized legal assistance to Iraqi refugees. She has worked with African & Mid East Refugee Assistance (AMERA), STAND, and the Genocide Intervention Network.