Today, after church, we stopped by a food truck park.

That’s how it started. Casually, the way Sundays are supposed to go. But what we walked into was something else entirely.

The Fuego’s family was there, boxing up donations to send to Venezuela. Sweaty and present. Welcoming everyone who arrived with something to give. Still serving their customers. Still running their business. All of it at once, under the Austin heat.

At night, they told me, they can’t pull themselves away from the phone and the TV. Every update. Every story. Did they find someone else? Are they alive? They call other Venezuelans. They share what they know. They share what they don’t know but fear.

More Venezuelans arrived. Some came with donations. All came with the earthquake on their minds, the coverage, the stories, the need to compare notes and fill in the gaps that the news couldn’t fill. And somewhere between the boxes and the phone calls, something else happened. They reminisced. They talked about Venezuela. The Venezuela they knew. The one they miss. They felt the strange, specific ache of loving a place you’ve had to leave, while standing in a place that has given you so much.

I was so moved by what I saw that I offered to make a video for them, so that more people in the community would know they could bring their donations there too.

Today is Sunday.

Tomorrow, the people I watched at that food truck park will go back to work. Some of them work in technology. Engineering. Finance. Healthcare. All kinds of industries, all kinds of teams.

And many of them will walk into those offices or those Zoom calls as the only Venezuelan in the room.

Maybe a coworker will ask, Did you have family there? Is everyone okay? And that will be a grace. A small, important act of noticing.

But maybe no one will ask. Maybe the meeting will start at 9 and the agenda will move and the earthquake will stay right where it was left: in the car, in the chest, in the quiet space between what happened at the food truck park on Sunday and what has to happen at the desk on Monday.

This is something that doesn’t often get named: the commute between worlds that people living intercultural lives make every single day. Sunday, you are fully yourself. Your language, your people, your grief, your belonging. Monday, you step back into the professional identity that the workplace knows.

The earthquake didn’t pause for the workweek.

That commute is what InterCulturaling™ is about. It is the lived experience of people who carry entire worlds inside them while navigating spaces that may only see one version of who they are.

And it is also an invitation for the rest of us.

P.A.U.S.E.™ Before the meeting starts tomorrow, before the agenda takes over, take a breath and look around the room. Is someone carrying something today that you haven’t acknowledged? You don’t need the perfect words. You just need the willingness to see them fully. Not just as a colleague, but as a person who might be somebody’s whole world away from home, holding their phone under the desk, waiting for news.

We can do better than letting people commute between worlds alone.

That is the work. That is always the work.

Want to donate?

Take your donations to Fuego’s Fast Food. 9817 Anderson Mill Road, Austin