I decided to work with refugees because I wanted to work with people who were underserved.

I came from an immigrant background myself.

I was not a refugee, but I was traumatized for a number of years and so much that I tried to shy away from that immigrant culture.

I tried to blend in, even changed my name.

So I'm using an abbreviation.

Everything about me...

Felt a lot of racism for my color, for plenty of things about me, but eventually came full circle to it and realized that I wanted to help others avoid it.

And I knew that I had to work with immigrants, but the most oppressed ones are refugees and they've been oppressed even before they came to the country.

They were oppressed for some aspect of their ethnicity and who they were.

And I wanted to be that buffer between them and society, any aspect of it.

I wanted to help them.

The man, the woman, whoever it is, avoid being oppressed in the same fashion that I was.

- I appreciate his vision.

I never could have seen what he created across the street at the old Mango house.

And that was nothing compared to this.

When he said he was gonna, he was thinking about buying this building and he talked about what he was doing, I just went, that is, that's an amazing vision.

I personally don't think I could fill this place.

I could do all of that, but I believe he could.

Music playing - Mango House is a shared space of services that are either for refugees or mostly by refugees, where - Any culture can be adopted very easily and anyone can be comfortable here.

That's because it is owned by all immigrants and refugees.

- These are people that needed help and these are people that have a lot of potential in this country to do a lot of good and be a, yeah, a good contributor to this country.

- It's very liberating to be in a place like this where everybody is truly welcome.

- Then it's also a place where Americans can come and hang out with refugees.

Kind of a, a place where the cultures can combine, but mostly a place now where refugees can open their own businesses and experience that part of the American dream.

- And plus Dr. P.J.

And he is very simple person.

He will talk with you if you don't speak English, he will either call what language you speak, he will call someone or he will try to get the interpretation.

- Hello, hello.

- It's very liberating to be in a place like this where everybody is truly welcome.

Nobody can, can can tell you shouldn't be here.

Nobody can tell you you're more or less than somebody else in the same building.

- Mango House started with my own medical clinic.

Now we have a dental clinic also, and those are actually the economic hub of Mango House that's financially underwriting and supporting the rest of it.

But we have at this point, dozens of other businesses, restaurants, shops, churches and office spaces.

I decided to call it Mango House because there are other entities that help you name the population an underserved population.

I didn't want it to be like the institute for whatever, whatever.

And I didn't want it to be just someone's name, PJ's, whatever.

I wanted it to be bright and as fun as your local eatery because the clients going there deserve a fun, bright, tasty place.

And you know what?

Mangoes come from everywhere in the world where our patients come from, but they don't come from the U.S.

So it's just like the refugees I deal with.

The community I started in is one of the poorest, if not poorest parts of Denver.

It's a stretch of land, which was the original part of Aurora, the main suburb of of Denver.

But it's fallen into urban decay.

Street noise Somber music In my training in med school and residency, I'd been in a number of settings where I saw underserved medicine being done in a way that I didn't wanna do it, that wasn't serving the clients, the patients in the best manner possible, that was creating more barriers to care than it was solving.

And I realized that I'm gotta do it my way and if I don't make any money doing it, that's not going to matter.

So I set out on a experiment of sorts.

I said, well, let me start looking up on the internet, how to put together a business.

And it was literally you just do a search after search, how to run a medical practice, how to do medical billing, how to do medical coding, which software to use, which phone system, which fax systems started piecing this together one by one.

And I thought, well, hey, I'm gonna have a lot of fun doing this.

If I fail, I guess I'll go get a job working at one of the big institutions in town.

But I'm gonna give this a couple years.

Hopeful music I started this medical practice right after I finished residency and which was unfortunately right after my mom had died, she was a doctor herself.

She worked in the poorest parts of Chicago.

And after she died I had the, the privilege of going to her office and cleaning out her books on her shelves.

And there was a scrap piece of paper where she had written Ardas, which is a, a Punjabi Sikh prayer from, from my faith.

It's basically staying away from evil.

And the thing she ended, it was not what is in it for me, what I can do for others.

And I pulled that outta that book and have kept that with me.

And that was, that was really formative for me to see that, that that was a core part of her business.

And it was only about a year after she died that I opened a practice and I knew that's where I wanted to use the word Ardas.

So I did.

I said, I'm gonna get a building, I'm gonna call it Mango House.

And I found that building, I found some of those other tenants.

They were awesome.

We started creating that community structure.

After five years of that, I had been watching a building across the street go through different gyrations of failure.

And I thought we could be doing a lot more of what we're doing over there across the street.

- This is great coming in here, this patient population, the just the things you get to learn about people and cultures and also some of the absolutely horrific things that you, that you get exposed to with what patients have been through.

It just has a lot more meaning to me.

I think it's important that people really see for themselves, knowing these people have come from atrocities and just horrors that you can't imagine watching, watching the interactions, watching sometimes the joy that they, that they have watching the, the relief that they have when they get, when they get treatment, when they get help.

I think that goes a long way.

- What's going on?

Any problems she's having?

Any problems?

Yeah.

- So - She said, I'm so weak.

She feels like she did a lot.

Like when you out, you're really like fatigued.

- Well, you know what I wanna do is Corona test when you're saying that stuff, because that's exactly how it's for some people right now.

That's the first thing we gotta think for everybody.

I gonna do the test.

We do it outside.

Actually - A blood test.

- Can we do outside?

- Good, good.

- In the summer now we're doing up to a hundred visits a day.

We're doing 50, 70 Corona tests a day and all the follow up in care for those patients.

- Is it okay?

Don't jump.

Good, thank you.

So I send message tomorrow night.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

Alright.

- Going back and forth to the car.

It, it takes some effort.

Sometimes there's a lot of cars out there in the parking lot and you're looking for the correct one.

Sometimes you're walking out with seven tests at a time because a whole family of seven wants to be swabbed at one time.

Sometimes to cut down you're walking out with twice that many swabs.

You're going out there and changing gloves, washing your hands and going on to the next car.

- White Prius.

- Yeah, it was parking lot medicine is what I quickly concluded.

It was, it was in any weather we had every season of the year.

You definitely have to be efficient with time because as always we were doing things with no appointments and the patients keep coming and at some points they came a lot.

Office noise - So we had up to 60% positive at one point in the refugee community.

It never much dropped below 20%.

She said - She's sick.

She's like gets tired.

- You might have the Corona - What?

- Coronavirus, you know.

Okay, we're gonna do some tests and I'll send you a message after a couple days.

Okay?

Okay.

So we're gonna take blood over here.

- Okay.

- We've done about 4,000 coronavirus tests here and have had about a thousand of those positive total.

And that's during the whole Coronavirus so far.

- And that high rate, it has an effect on the community.

They, on one hand they're scared of it.

On the other hand they get used to it.

- Try, don't move.

Alright, I'll try to.

Kids are okay?

- Around these communities.

They know multiple people in their own family who've had it.

And usually they know one or more people who've died from it, either in this state or in one of the other states.

They, they're all hit pretty hard by it and they, they have no control over what they can do for it.

Like the idea of social distancing just doesn't work at all when they're packed 10 to a car and share one car when they're sleeping four or five people to a bedroom.

And when they're all working together on assembly line, which they can't necessarily go home and use Zoom from a lot of folks on the other end of the spectrum will have, you know, couple houses where someone can go isolate at their other house.

And that's definitely not the case in this community.

It's kind of the opposite.

At our peak, we were seeing a hundred tests a day up to 50% positive and a handful of people in the hospital at any time.

There were a few weeks where we were delivering flowers, you know, for condolences to different patients one week and then the next week part of it is that we didn't find out about every death because we're the primary care and they would go and die in the hospital and this information doesn't always come back to us.

Somber music - Yeah, I would go ahead and keep him in quarantine and just kind of, everybody stay isolated for about two weeks.

Okay.

If he gets any symptoms though, you need to bring him in.

You need to call us.

Okay.

Starts having cough, starts having problems breathing.

Everybody just calls.

Okay.

Alright.

You take care.

Thanks.

Bye.

We got your Covid test back and it is positive.

Have Coronavirus.

- Oh - He's positive.

He is positive, yes.

- Wow.

- He is positive for Coronavirus.

They are both positive.

Positive.

He has Coronavirus positive.

You just assume that everybody's positive and keep him away from everybody.

Positive for Coronavirus positive he has Coronavirus.

Okay, I'm gonna send you a picture of some medicines.

You should not go pick them up.

Somebody else who does not have coronavirus should go pick them up from the store and you can take them to help you feel a little bit better.

Okay.

That's it, right?

Yeah, she's, if she's having a hard time breathing, that's when we're talking about hospital, that's when we're worried.

Okay.

Oh, okay.

But otherwise she's just gonna be sick and we're gonna, we're gonna, hopefully she'll be sick and she'll be comfortable with the medicines.

Are you giving her the over-the-counter cough and cold?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

As long as that keeps helping, we're doing okay.

Alright.

- Okay.

Yeah, - We had no guidance as far as how often we should be testing ourselves.

So we made up a rule of at least once a month and then we made it once every two weeks.

Some of my staff like to test themselves every week or more a period of time.

I was testing myself twice a week.

Do you wanna swab me?

- Sure.

Really?

Yeah.

- Alright.

I won't do a self swab.

Johnny's probably been waiting for this moment.

Yeah.

He wants to like get my brains on a stick.

- So I'm pretty sure you've already picked up how to do this.

- Seeing how you learned how to draw blood.

- Ready, don't jump.

- No funny faces.

- Sorry.

Good job.

Oh my goodness.

Alright.

You want payback time?

- It's gonna mess up your nice do.

Oh, it's like too loose.

Is it fine enough?

So the strategy is you stand a little bit this way or that way.

'cause if I cough then you're a little bit outta the way and you just stick it up my nose.

- Alright.

- You kind of like stick it down.

That's the way your nose goes a - Little more.

- Yeah.

Leave it in and twirl the count to about - Five more in.

- And that's how it's done.

Hopeful music I think we're all really excited and really proud to be a part of giving the vaccine out, especially in the community.

And especially some of my staff have enjoyed that.

We're giving it out to the local community that we traditionally have not been working with.

Hopeful music There's plenty that have had the shorter end of the stick.

And that's basically what I've done with my whole career is try to help those folks who've gotten the short end of the stick.

And here we are trying to, you know, give them a hand up, make, give them a taller ladder to reach that apple in the tree.

Whereas the privileged folks, they were born with that, that taller ladder.

Here we are trying to make it equitable, which means we're not given the same size ladder to each of them.

We're giving a taller ladder to the folks that were born with a shorter one.

Street noise Parts of Mangle House slowed down during the pandemic, but they're coming back now.

We're seeing more people in the restaurants, in the shops, in the religious gatherings, more kids coming on our camp-outs.

And we're even having weddings.

Celebration music Mango House is, feels like a home to a lot of folks.

They have their doctor here, their dentist here, their restaurants here, their places of worship here, and it's because they feel welcome.

So our medical assistants, our dental assistants, our front desk folks, our cleaners, these are all refugees or folks from those backgrounds who can speak those languages.

Of course, those are the ones I target.

I want to not only give them a job, but also they can help bridge that gap.

For example, Raz, she was a refugee from Kurdish area of Iraq.

She actually came at a later age in her teens, but she had picked up English wonderfully overseas by watching reruns of Friends.

And she was ready to hit the ground running as soon as she got here.

When - I first met PJ, I thought I was gonna be meeting this very scary Indian man, but it, he was, he just walked in wearing a Columbia jacket.

Very relaxed and walked into the clinic and said, hi, I'm PJ.

And I said, hi, I'm Raz.

Not knowing that he was the doctor, he just shook my hand.

And then my friend, my coworker came out and she said, that was Dr. P.J.

I said, oh, I, I, I should probably reintroduce myself.

- We always have a home for you.

- Aww.

That's like the sweetest thing anybody's ever said.

- Perfect.

Okay, now you're gonna be my little helper with this hand.

- Pick this up.

To think that there is a place for refugees with so many different stories where all of those people get to be together.

Where there is an establishment, a a, a common ground, a place, a building that makes everybody think they are welcome here.

1, 2, 3, - All done.

- Wow.

- Great job.

Hi five!

- Refugees or people who are extremely vulnerable, who want nothing but safety.

You don't know how those people have gotten here.

You don't know what their background or their childhood or the life of everybody here.

Scary wind noise One night, one of our neighbors attacked us with a bat.

We got two threat notes and we called for help and they did not call the police.

We just didn't, didn't feel safe.

That's, that's why we had to leave.

And we got on a plane, went from Kurdistan to Turkey and from Turkey to Chicago, from Chicago to North Carolina.

We had some people here in Denver, some family friends and such.

And we just came here to, to be with them.

Reflective music - We like to think that once we've resettled refugees to the United States, we've done some sort of savior role where we've taken them out of a traumatic situation.

But as we all know, as soon as they land in the United States, they're a minority here.

And that's where the trauma begins in the next phase.

The - Trauma didn't really kick in until, until we got here.

I had lots of panic attacks, lots of rage build up.

- So any part of that that I can help alleviate that trauma, that's my job.

That's what I'm here to do.

- And that's, that's what I, I recognize him for somebody who uses his privilege and uses his energy and strength to help.

- Sounds good.

- Cool.

Good deal.

Good deal.

- The one-handed Namaste.

When I opened up practice, I wasn't sure if I was gonna make money at all.

I didn't make that much money in the first year, but I sure did after that.

It was making what I consider embarrassing amounts of money double or more.

What if I had gone a gotten a job elsewhere and I said, that's what I called stupid money.

I said, I have no use for that.

I didn't even have use for the money and average family doctor makes.

So this money is not mine.

This money I move around.

It's just, it's a, it's playing the game for society to, to benefit underserved immigrants is what it's benefiting.

I like to live simply.

I actually don't own that many clothes.

I by principle own two pairs of pants and it gets more than that.

I, I get rid of one.

It's too, it's too confusing to me.

- It's just khakis and a Columbia shirt.

Yeah.

All over again, every day.

- It's not easy finding the right size pants, right?

So anyway, you find one pair of pants that works, you just go buy the same brand until that brand stops being made.

Office noise - Filmmaker asks: Why do you not wear a white coat?

- No reason to.

That said, in a lot of the world, white coat is definitely something people wanna see, but I don't, my patients don't seem to care.

I have one.

In fact, I think it's right there in the corner.

I used to wear ties, then I got rid of all of them.

I think I saved one just in case.

I don't even know why I saved one.

When I was in residency, I was rotating at one of the local orthopedic groups and I was in between patients.

A couple of the doctors crossed in the hall and they were talking about their fancy new car, which, which I had come to expect in the medical culture.

And that was fine.

But later I asked one of the doctors there, I said, why doesn't this practice take any Medicaid patients?

And his only answer was, it doesn't fit with our business model.

They won't take that 5% or even 10% Medicaid just flat zero.

And they're proud.

They're, they're happy to talk about their, their cars in between patients.

And these are the same guys who wrote on their med school application essays that they wanted to help those less fortunate.

And if they're in medical school and buying that car and living in that part of town, the debt starts piling up and they start to rationalize, I have this big debt, I have to have a bigger paycheck.

And then they buy a bigger house.

It, it just goes down there in this hedonic treadmill as it's called, of where you have to keep getting more and more, but their happiness returns back to the same level just like the rest of us.

Reflective music If you have Medicaid, I can't readily get you an appointment.

There's certain places in town where if I call them and say, the patient has Medicaid, the next appointment is six months out.

If I say they have Blue Cross, they'll put you on the schedule tomorrow.

And this is legal.

This is absolutely legal.

So that's economic discrimination, which unfortunately in this society goes hand in hand with racial discrimination.

Some of the hardest specialties we have trouble getting refugees into in this town are dermatology, urology, orthopedics, forget about it, hand, forget about it.

We gotta play games with that.

I've had patients come out of the university emergency room with a cut tendon in their hand and the university emergency room tells them that they then have to get an appointment with their university orthopedist as if they don't know that the university orthopedist refuses to see Medicaid.

So they can't get that appointment.

Of course we know this, this happens in the rest of the world, but we'd like to pat ourselves on the back and think that we don't do this in this country, but we absolutely do it to the most vulnerable among us.

When I was about two or three years old, I changed my name from Paramjit, which is too long for many Americans to understand or pronounce.

I wanted to fit in in school.

I changed it to Joey actually.

And that stuck for a year and or two.

And then I changed it to PJ.

A few years later in school, a teacher told me I'm supposed to have dots in there, so I put a P and a dot and a J and a dot.

And I thought, that's not quite right.

It doesn't stand for Paul James.

It's one word.

So I started writing it with an exclamation point.

I thought, if I'm gonna put punctuation, why not it be an exclamation point?

- Well, an American teacher was trying to tell me how to spell my fake name, which I had made just so that teacher could, could talk to me.

And I just thought that my name isn't gonna end in a period, it's gonna end in an exclamation point.

I don't at this point expect anybody to write me or call me with an exclamation point.

Although it sure is nice if they like have some spirit and say, Hey, P.J!

Oh, my parents got divorced when I was 1-year-old.

And that was looking back, very traumatic experience growing up without either of them present because they were both working a lot also as good immigrants do, probably much more than they even needed to.

And so I didn't have the parenting around, had to self-parent a lot, learn in the schools.

And at some point my dad decided I was going to be put into a military boarding school when I was 8, 9, 10 years old, 11 years old.

And that was not the sort of parenting that one needs at that age.

My dad thought it was a good idea to go there because his father was the principal of a British-style boarding school in India.

And it was a prestigious thing to go to a boarding school.

That's what you did with your kids.

But it was quite the opposite.

It was a military school.

I'm not sure that he even realized that it was where some of the worst kids of the city went.

And there was corporal punishment, there was gang violence, there was sexual violence.

And this is an all-male school of, of young kids.

It was a vulgar place for an eight-year-old.

There were a number of names that were called, it's really hard to say them.

Now looking back on it, there's Cameljockey, there's sandn-.

And it didn't stop.

It didn't stop.

When I ended up in military school, it was in every direction.

Brown on black, black on white, white on brown racism.

And coming out of there in high school was more of the same, getting beaten down because you look different even growing up.

It doesn't change once you get older, once you leave childhood, it just becomes institutionalized.

Be it in the court system, be it in the legal system.

Anywhere from traffic stops and profiling to the airports, to literally the legal system where you're given less benefit of a doubt in this society because you're a minority.

It's, it's a part of me where I've learned that I can't trust that system.

I can trust more readily people of other colors in this society.

Kitchen sounds During my teenage years, I was part of the Boy Scouts of America and I actually found it quite a safe space from all the racism that I was facing.

For some reason, my troop was very inclusive and I, I have been in boy Scouts pretty much ever since.

So once I had Mango House and I had the kids and I had the funding and the space in a beautiful state, I knew that I had to take them camping.

- Yeah, that's fine.

Camp sounds.

There you go.

Is this like, this - What's I think so unique about Mango House as a whole, not just the clinic.

It plugs kids in through boy Scouts.

So it gives them a sense of community in this country early on.

They have the follow-up of always getting medical care here or having the opportunity to get medical care here.

Being, just being plugged in in multiple different ways, I think is really important for, for anybody coming to this country.

- So we started the boy Scout Troops here.

I grabbed a bunch of my friends and enemies and needed those adults to help volunteer.

We put together boys and girl Scouts Reflective music For the Scout Troops, I know that now that it's can often be a quite conservative organization and definitely, you know, there's uniforming and ranks and merit badges and so forth.

And we don't use all those methods.

In fact, we don't use the uniforms at all because, well, where these kids come from, uniforms often are the people who were oppressing them.

So we don't go there.

We, we don't do some of the advancement because we can't, some of my kids are illiterate.

They can't read the merit badge books.

But we definitely use the outdoors as a method for developing character and leadership and the adult association where they hang out with the American adults, including myself, who come on the camp outs.

Packing sounds - All right, what else do we need right here?

So we need this if the Nepali kids go.

Packing sounds - Gotta work on that tomorrow, that door trim.

- So we talk to them about things they're going through in life, especially with myself and one of my good friends from Scouting when I was younger, Avery, he, we both are from immigrant households and they look at us and they know that we're from those immigrant backgrounds.

They can relate to us and they can say, look at this guy.

I trust him because of that a little bit more.

And we can talk to them about their jobs, about dating, about school, about, facing racism themselves in their schools.

- I at least camping once a month.

And that's a, that's a great thing.

Yeah.

So these campouts are giving these boys a great opportunity to appreciate the outdoors, to learn a new skill.

We give them choices, positive choices, because they are susceptible to poor choices.

Crime, drugs, alcohol, gangs.

And here we give them a choice to appreciate the outdoors and to learn new skills and to be successful.

- Scouting offers these kids an opportunity to experience a different reality than just the underserved neighborhoods and especially their house.

When they're in the house with five 10 of their other relatives, they have no privacy.

Nowhere to go except sit in a corner.

You know, maybe on their device if they have one.

Camp sounds - Give a stick because I'm scared.

Why don't you go, look, I feel like a fish will come and bite my hand.

I mean, my feet.

Okay, - It's a perfect place for something to live.

- Do you see that?

I knew it.

There's bubbles.

Look at that poop.

It has poop inside.

That's not poop.

Look at that.

That might be a brain of heart.

That's like the brains or something.

That's not poop.

That's not what it's, - They're definitely not taken out too often out of their home and school routine.

And so scouting gets them far away.

And when you're taken far away, as any of us know, we get to take vacations.

These guys don't, when they're taken far away, they're, their thought process changes.

It opens up to new possibilities.

They explore their friendships, they explore what it means to be an American, because our scout group is largely led by Americans.

- I walked in the door and I just asked them, how can I help?

I've been involved now for almost six years.

It'll be six years in July.

So I would probably say I've been on, it has to be at least, at least 70 campouts by now.

What have you guys been doing back here?

- Playing soccer, sitting, talking.

My buddy Ali, who's almost as tall as me.

Camp sounds Camp sounds - P.J.

He somehow found a way to take Boy Scouts, which is kind of like the most white conservative program in America.

And he made it work somehow for refugee kids.

And I think it really took his unique perspective of, of himself being an immigrant, growing up brown and growing up in Scouting to really know how to do that.

- You're Kurdish, right?

Yeah.

Can you speak Kurdish?

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

It's same like Arabic.

- Not really - Totally different.

- It's a really radical way of looking at Scouting and, and it's a really fantastic way of looking at Scouting because it works so well for these kids.

- Go!

- He's, he's built something that no one else has built up to this point.

And he's made a huge difference in the lives of, of all these kids by making this opportunity available, but also made a big difference in the lives of all of us adults for giving us an opportunity to get involved - You're getting there.

Worship music - It's part of the American dream to be able to practice your religion with without fear of oppression, with having a safe space.

And hopefully that's something I'm providing here.

Worship music - We have a number of Christian churches, including Burmese and Nepali, but the Burmese ones, they break down by their language.

So we have a Daai Chin church, we have a Kachin Rawang church, we have a Kachin Lisu church, we have Mosque Muslim Masjid here, which is run by Rohingya folks.

- I am from Burma.

Like Rohingya, the Rohingya Muslim in Burma.

I was born in Burma and after two years I left the country.

And I live in Bangladesh close to 17, 18 years.

And after that, in 2009, I came to the U.S.

The organization we have is called Burmese Islamic Association of Colorado.

For me, in our community, the Muslim is one of the place where we feel most welcome and where we feel comfortable coming to pray.

So the Mango House make one of the biggest happy.

We all community pray together Every Friday, plus any holidays, plus any Islamic holidays we have, we use this place.

So this is one of the biggest opportunity to come together and to meet together our community.

And when we come together, you feel freedom.

You feel like, oh, I'm free with any, any dangers from any problems.

Then make people happy because they feel like, oh, we used to be like that in back home.

- Our restaurants include Nepali, Syrian, Burmese, Ethiopian, Sudanese, and a Pan-Asian restaurant.

Also, our latest one right now is a Rohingya-run Boba shop.

Cooking sounds - We have a, a little restaurant here, it's a food court nature restaurant, and that's called Nepali Mountain Kitchen.

And we cook spicy good food.

Our restaurant is the food from our grandma and also from our culture.

Food is also a part of culture.

So that culture, we wanna give it to Denver community.

- Here - You can find African food, middle Eastern food, Indian, Nepali food, Burmese food, all at the same time.

It means a lot.

I feel good when I come to Mango House.

That means a lot to my, me and my family.

- So I see myself as a bit of a bridge for the refugees, both medically and business wise.

They are all facing institutionalized racism.

And I'm out there as a risk taker to where I help buffer those risks and give them affirmative action.

I call it affirmative action capitalism, because my clinic is private business as, as are most of the businesses in the building, which I believe is the way that people work the hardest to not only help people make money, but to help people serve each other.

- I think I thrive and work better when there's all these different things going on at one time.

Part of it is having a little bit of spirituality in the outcomes, knowing that I can't have control over the outcome of every one of them.

So there's some path that this is gonna take and it's gonna be okay.

But part of it all is also just that I think the human brain works better like that.

If all I did all day was doctoring, it would use, say this part of my brain.

But if I'm doing HVAC work and plumbing and fighting with some component of the legal system here, or dealing with tenants over here, these are different parts of the brain.

If all I was doing was medicine as an employed physician somewhere else, I would then go home to exercise those other parts of my brain, be that with my hobbies or whatever.

But here I don't, I don't actually have that many other hobbies and I don't, I don't need them.

Those are those other parts of those brains getting, getting worked.

And so they can all get worked simultaneously.

In fact, I think the human brain works better like that.

A lot of the refugees come to me for paperwork, type of medical needs because a lot of paperwork needs are put on a primary care doctor.

So we do all the green card paperwork in this state, a hundred percent of it for refugees.

And there's another one also five years later when they go from green card to citizenship applying.

If they can't take the English test where they ask you, where's the Mississippi River?

And so forth.

The older folks, I can say that they have trouble remembering, there's a medical paper called the 648, the N-Six-Forty-Eight, which is a goofy game with U.S Customs and Immigration Service.

I do these, a number of these every day.

These 648's, so many that I put a clock above my desk with the batteries taken out.

It's stuck at 6:48 P.M.. And I have a sign saying it's 6:48.

It's always 6:48 time where I'm at.

That's kind of my inside humor, which the thing is the, the people who work with refugees who bring them to me, they absolutely understand that humor.

A number of our, my patients have a birthday of January 1st.

In fact, I ran the numbers at one point, about 20% have a birthday of January 1st.

And for, there's about 5% more of that.

It's July 1st, which became the new January 1st, especially out of our middle Easterners, it's July 1st.

They're assigned the birthday because no one can figure out their records weren't kept properly.

And not only that, but some of them, their birthday's off by a year.

They don't know their, their birthday.

Like in a traditional medical practice, you say, hi, what's your name?

What's your date of birth?

They come to me and their name is hard to spell or long or hyphenated or, or foreign.

And somewhere in the processing, their name was mixed around, flipped around and put down differently on their medical paperwork, their school paperwork, their employment paperwork on every piece of paperwork.

And so they come to the desk and we say, what's your name?

And birthday?

They're looking at us like, you tell me what's my name and birthday.

Because in every setting they go to, they have a different name and birthday - We're described as aliens.

When you come here to the US they give you an alien number, which is very interesting to me.

And I joke about it all the time.

I'm like, how dare you?

My eyes are big and I have an A number, I am an alien.

But yeah, it's a, it's really, it's a shame.

If only they knew the stories of families and fathers, daughters, mothers have gone through to reach a safe place.

They would also understand because they are also fathers and daughters and mothers.

Ari's my partner, my girlfriend, my significant other.

She's wonderful, she's phenomenal.

I, I met her about the time that I started Mango House At first I thought he was extremely humble.

Like he just said, you know, I work in social services and try to, you know, promote some social change for, for the good of everyone around me.

And I thought that was so cool.

And like, what a genuine, nice guy.

And then I find out he's a physician.

I was like, well, okay, that's a different level of social services.

And then I found out that he specifically works with refugees.

And that was just, I mean, you melt when you encounter people who are really in what they do.

- We've been great partners in parenting together and also in business.

She runs our dental clinic.

She helps make a lot of it happen.

I'm able to bounce a lot of ideas off of her.

She's a wonderful partner in everything that Mango house has to offer.

- So I'm a dental hygienist, I clean teeth.

I am the clinical director, which is by default there was nobody, nobody else to do this.

PJ wanted to start a dental clinic.

And so we built it bit by bit.

And our dentists are amazing.

They're super kind and, and really explain the procedures to people - It settling down.

- My name is Dr. Brigitte Steegs and I work here at Mango House.

I am one of the dentists who provides dental care to our refugee population.

Really fulfills me more than, than the patients realize - Your friends again.

Yes.

Okay.

- Filmmaker asks: What does your son mean to you?

Oh, my son means the world to me.

He's my day and my night.

- Hey, you do, you do, you do.

Got a bowl of bubbles.

- It's really fun to be able to bring him to Mango House.

He gets to see that there's different parts of this office that I built, which makes me feel proud.

But the fun thing with Mango House is he gets to see a number of aspects of what we do.

And I'm not just talking about that.

He gets to see different ethnicities and cultures.

Of course, he gleans something from that and eats all their food and looks at all their stores and smells, their smells.

But he also gets to see all the different aspects that go into Mango House because I do a lot of them myself.

I mean, him and I will go climb up on the roof and take apart a heating unit and try to figure it out ourselves.

It's kind of an all-encompassing, many aspect thing that he gets to delve into.

I wish I could spend every moment with him, take him on every adventure that the world has to offer him and keep him engaged and constantly learning and, you know, discovering new things.

It's, it's just wonderful.

PJ reads to his son Groan, gros groans Parking lots sounds - Oh, some of these are old DVDs and some of them are not age-appropriate.

Like by the time someone's old enough to read this, our kids don't want that.

I mean, the refugee kids and neither do the parents.

These are all somehow ended up in the children's section, like Little House on the Prairie.

Ain't nobody got time for that.

Marvin's Best Christmas Present Ever.

I'm sure his best Christmas present ever was a but like you look at that scene, it doesn't speak to me.

Okay, here's a prime example.

Okay.

The Babysitter's Club, it, that's not happening for our kids.

It's fun.

There's a slight ulterior motive.

I get lots of books to take home and read with my kid before I bring them here.

You gotta be a risk-taker.

I think in private business, in small business, you have to be anybody is even my, all my tenants here who are, who have businesses, they are absolutely risk-takers.

So I'm taking risks in a number of fronts here.

And the reason I'm doing it is to, to help our people along.

They know that they can come here and rely on us, trust on us medically, dental-wise.

They know that they have their place of worship and so forth and they can have that safe space because I'm the one taking the floggings.

- I mean, I do worry to some extent, but I know that his goal is to highlight that these micro or macro aggressions happen and they happen all the time.

And the darker your skin is, the worse your outcome is.

And that's not okay.

And it's, it's something that he really is not shying away from.

We - Had a bomb threat on the property saying, we are gonna blow up all you refugees.

Or just last week there was the police pull his gun out on me, on my own property, pointed straight at my head and tell me that he doesn't know that I belong on my own property.

While I was trying to put away Boy Scout gear.

I pull in to my, what's a very small parking garage and there's a police officer sitting in there.

So I, I stop the moment I see him, I stop and I honk at him and I get outta the car and I ask him to leave the place.

And he jumps out of his car at the exact same moment that I'm jumping outta mine.

And he pulls his gun out and points it at me, walks toward my car and tells me, put your hands up, let me see your fucking hands.

What are you doing?

He was using that tone of voice in an authoritative sense.

And so we have like, suddenly it's a, well who's, I hate to say it like this, but who's nuts are bigger.

You don't swear at me.

Okay, well you don't sit on my property without asking.

I didn't know it was your property.

Please leave the property now.

Okay, well you're trespassing.

There's signs that say trespassing.

What?

I'm not trespassing on your property.

Please leave the property.

Okay, I got stuff to do.

You're making it harder for me to serve your community.

If you'd get off my property, I'd appreciate it.

I got better stuff to do than to placate you on a Sunday night.

I'm trying to do some work to help your community.

I had a long list of things to do.

I'm like, I gotta get over there and get that stuff in there and be gone.

The moment I see cops there and then more cops, I'm like, great, there goes the whole evening for nothing that I did.

Now there's three of you!

Could I interact with that in any different way?

And I don't know that I could.

We've seen plenty of it in the media of, of confrontations between police and, hate to say frequently, minorities.

- A really good job of that.

- City of Aurora's Inspection division.

You tell them they'll, they'll cite me fifty-five dollars for shoveling the snow.

They'll cite me for my trash.

Some of them end up dead.

We know this many end up dead.

There's many, unfortunately black people in this country who are killed by police.

You tell them, you guys go solve murders, which is what you told me you do.

When I had bomb threats on my own property.

Get off, keep going.

Eventually they, they had to walk, leave with their tail between their legs.

I don't think I could have gotten out and said, good evening fine sir.

And I don't think he would've said, oh, hello.

He wouldn't, he saw what looked to him like someone who didn't belong there.

The local state congressperson got involved and asked the chief of police investigator.

That's where it is right now.

I'm not sure where that's going to end up.

I guess we'll actually find out in the next few weeks.

I don't have much faith in the process.

It's like the wolf investigating the wolf den.

Like the police are investigating themselves.

Like what, what do you do with that?

So Hopeful music Achieving social justice takes risks and the police dealing with the police is just one part of it.

But it's worth it.

It's worth it because somebody's gotta stick their neck out for the folks here because it's one part of using one's privilege.

My privilege to help those less fortunate here - And, and it all goes back to finding a home and feeling at home.

And I believe that PJ has done a really, really, really, really great job with creating a good home here.

Hopeful music - In any society, in any point in history, we have those who are more fortunate and those who are less fortunate.

Almost anybody in any walk of life can find someone who's less fortunate and find some way to unload some of their privilege onto the other person.

Whether that's money is one way, but some people may not have the money, but they have the time, they have the skin color, they have facial features, they have education, they have, in many cultures, it's like their last name buys them a certain ranking in society.

And there's always someone in a lower tier that they can help.

And why wouldn't we?

Closing dramatic music