After my filling and scanning hundreds of papers, with no one in sight in the office, I was ready to go home. With 5 minutes until closing, I put my coat on to turn and see one more man who had just walked through the door. Where I would normally tell him it was closing, I sat at my desk and told him to come over. Unsurprisingly he too, much like hundreds of others who stopped by our office that day, was an asylum seeker. To me, it felt routine. Print the form, fill in his information, and wait for him to sign. As he signed each document and I entered each line into our database. I looked up from my computer to see the man in tears, grateful that finally, someone had offered to help him. Every other government agency had turned him away and me staying an extra 5 minutes meant the world. Over the next 20 minutes, he had shared his family’s story of refuge from the Yemeni Civil War. I had been so desensitized to seeing people in refuge come in, that it never occurred to me the frontline danger that millions face daily. People aren’t just numbers in a system or overgeneralized statistics on a page but should be valued individually. Every person who walked into our Congressional office had a story that shaped them and the people around them for generations. Human Rights abuses that occur in distant far-off places like Yemen or Syria are now at our doorstep and are urgently calling for our advocacy. His story impacted me in a much deeper way than he had intended. Both of my parents immigrated to the US to explore their dreams. They taught me my greatest tool--my morality. Their stories remind me to always remember those who helped pave my path. It is my morality that is often called upon when facing these issues and is what drives me to solve them. We push these issues aside simply because they aren’t “pretty” or fit the standard where people think they can’t make a difference. Moreover, both our country and the citizens in our local communities have a moral obligation, to further advocate for change. Higher education would give me the resources needed to further pursue these concerns and in actual change.