A Man in Washington, D.C., Is Hosting Refugees Through Airbnb

Amr Arafa was just a kid in suburban Cairo when Schindler’s List came out, but he remembers the protective impulse he felt while watching it. “I wished that I lived in the era, so that I could help hide people,” the 34-year-old tells me, perched on a high-backed chair in his studio apartment in Washington, D.C., on a sweltering June afternoon.

The international refugee crisis—specifically, viral footage of a reporter tripping a father and child fleeing police at the Hungarian border—reignited those early sentiments. Arafa, who works with Fannie Mae as a business consultant, couldn’t draw political cartoons, as his brother does in Dubai. Nor could he donate huge sums to humanitarian organizations. But he could code and strategize for the web. So he built a website, EmergencyBNB, modeled after Airbnb but designed to connect refugees to people in their host country with a room or apartment to spare—for free. (It’s similar to a German effort launched in 2015, but according to Arafa, easier to use for both hosts and guests.)