We are a small blog on a rather arcane subject that gets a moderate number of readers from day to to day (until the Tsarnaev ‘refugee’ brothers bombed Boston and since then our number of readers has steadily increased). Yesterday we had a record-breaking number of 3,708 readers.
Granted over 2000 went to one post—Laura Ingraham calls for halt to Muslim immigration—demonstrating the power of social media (facebook in this case). The next two top posts following far behind were the Diversity is Strength alert from Wisconsin and the Minneapolis intimidation and harassment post.
If you are a new reader here, we started writing this blog (a charitable enterprise) in 2007 when Mesketian Turks/Russian Muslims were brought to our rural county in Maryland by the Virginia Council of Churches (subcontractor of major federal contractor Church World Service). We, blog partner Judy and other women friends, just wanted to figure out how that could be done with no approval process by local elected officials or consultation with the citizens who were told we must be “welcoming.” It is a very long story (chronicled in our category entitled ‘September Forum’), but the bottomline is that here we are, going on to our 6th anniversary in July, still trying to understand the refugee and asylum process in America (and the world!) and trying to educate you.
You can see from the categories on the left hand column how busy we have been—there are 1,500 posts on Muslim refugees alone! We are approaching the 1.5 million visitor mark and have written 4,626 posts in all. We have readers from all over the world.
If you don’t find a topic among our categories that interests you, we have a great search function. Type in a couple of search words and presto you will likely find something that you want to learn more about.
And be sure to check the TOP POSTS in the right hand sidebar every day to see what posts most readers are finding of interest. Sometimes it’s a post that is several years old because the topic has suddenly become relevant.
I apologize that our fact sheet (on the header) is out of date, but those mundane chores—updating a fact sheet (yuk!)—are hard to do when every day there are so many news stories begging to be reported. Also, I’m not very good at responding to comments (I’ll try harder). And, I stink at keeping up our facebook page, but have recently started tweeting, so follow me—Ann C @Refugee Watcher.
And, thanks for visiting RRW!