We were angry and horrified when we read Senator Dick Durbin’s account of our president saying of African nations, “Those shitholes send us the people they don’t want.” Donald Trump preferred instead immigrants from countries like Norway.

The president’s racist implication was worse than his crude language. Our nation, since its founding, has accepted people who could not tolerate the conditions they faced in the countries of their birth.

Remember the words in Emma Lazurus’s poem on the base of our State of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

We listened this week to a refugee from Rwanda and are telling his life story on our front page. What he described sounded worse than the president’s “shithole” — more like Hell.

Francis Sengabo still suffers nightmares from what he endured. He lost most of his family as his country was torn asunder by civil war, with the Tutsis battling the Hutus. His mother was a Tutsi; his father, a Hutu. Both of them were murdered.

Sengabo values, though, what his father taught him. “My father said for him the important thing isn’t if you are Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa,” Sengabo said, naming the three Banyarwanda peoples of Rwanda. “The important thing is being a human being.”

We take that to mean we must see what we share as people on this Earth or in this country rather than focusing on the differences.

Sengabo also learned from his father a sense of responsibility for others. As an educated man in his village, his father was often sought after to help — and he did. Francis Sengabo, in his turn, in his own way, is helping others.

He did not know the English language — although he spoke four others — and he had never before been in such a cold place when he arrived in Albany in 2007. He did not wallow in self-pity. He did not begrudge the circumstances that killed most of his family and left him a refugee without a home for years.

He got on with his life. He married a woman displaced from the Congo and built a family with her. He not only learned English and about the American culture but is helping others to do the same and to find their way in an unfamiliar land. He co-founded the Refugee and Immigrant Support Services of Emmaus that now helps about 200 families a year get grounded in their new country.

Sengabo and another refugee — Muthama Alkhazraji who feared for his life in Iraq — spoke at a forum last Friday hosted by RISSE and The College of Saint Rose. Fred Boehrer, a Saint Rose teacher on the Community Advisory Board, spoke of his college not having gates or walls but being part of a larger community. The Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet, who founded the college, used the phrase “our dear neighbors” to describe the need to be engaged with others, he said. The sisters were dedicated to unity with all people.

“RISSE helps bring the world to us,” said Boehrer. How true.

And there is so much to learn from people who come from different parts of the world — people who have been courageous and resilient enough to journey to a foreign land and begin new lives here.

We hope our Albany County readers will also think of these newcomers as “our dear neighbors,” will value them and help them as they would any neighbor. RISSE needs donations of gently used household items, appliances, and furnitures to set up homes for people, many of whom have lived in refugee camps without amenities like running water or electric stoves that we take for granted.

Monetary donations to the not-for-profit RISSE are also welcome.

But more than things perhaps the best we can give is ourselves. Volunteers are needed for general office and maintenance work but also to help kids with homework after school and in the summer, and to help grown-ups, too, one on one, to learn the English language.

Sengabo shared figures showing that last year over 31 million people were displaced by conflict, violence, and disasters — meaning one person every second is forced to flee his or her home. There’s nothing we can do to prevent those conflicts and disasters or to help those millions and millions of people.

But, here in our midst, in Albany County, are several hundred new immigrants carefully vetted to be admitted to our country, and we can help them, our dear neighbors. All in good time, they may be helping us.