 So my overall artistic practice is really a way for me to kind of fill in the gaps of my particular story as a first-generation Egyptian living in the United States, often in the diaspora communities. Among the first generation there's not an easy narrative to kind of link us to where we come from and the feeling of home is like an open question really. The Chayamaya Monument is a monument to the her stories of Arab women immigrants and migrants and also Arab American women from my generation in combination with female US veterans who are critical of their time in combat. My friend co-worker she came to the Association and she has this project because she had working with our students like two years ago and she came to us and said like I did this project I wrote a lot of stories of our students and like I want as much as people to see it and then I came up with this idea to have open mic. Because the piece is so centered in women's voices and it's really intended to be a feminist art piece we really wanted to have the first open mic be a safe space and some of them just wouldn't be comfortable sharing their story in front of strangers or in front of male identified people so we decided to keep that as a women-only space and it was a really emotional event we saw that just kind of the floodgates were opened there were stories that just kind of came out of the depths of people and tonight's event is just a way to launch it to the wider public so we've invited some members from outside of the Arab American Association people that are just allies in Bay Ridge when people like to start telling their story throughout the event that we made this is really impact them to feel like very safe to tell their own stories. There's really small impacts that you feel along the way and then there's the bigger vision which is in this case you know creating a space for reflection around war and immigration and deeper feelings about why we're here in the US and what we've left behind so I really think that's the the key impact and you know we build relationships that way when we're able to just talk to each other on that level and then to the wider public it's also just giving us voice and space and visibility. I hope people learn from those stories and share those stories and like we want to build trust and we want to empower each other, support each other, heal each other when we hear each other.