The Middle of Everywhere (4 page)

Ridiculous misunderstandings occurred. One time a mother from Iraq told me her son had been hit by a car. I thought that she had said that he had a ride to school and I asked, "Are you happy?" Understandably, she was angry and insulted.

Another time, an African woman pointed at her daughter's bosom when the girl was wearing a tight shirt and said over and over, "Beautiful, beautiful." I was confused by this. Was she asking me if I thought her daughter's breasts were beautiful? I didn't know what to do. Fortunately, I just waited for the situation to become clear. At last, I understood that the mother was praising the cloth of the shirt, which came from Nigeria.

Gradually, I learned to relax and even to laugh at mix-ups. I learned to tolerate more ambiguity in conversations, to speak more slowly and clearly, and to smile and hug when other ways of communicating fell apart.

I was often overwhelmed. Families had so many problems with language, finances, health, housing, jobs, schools, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). They needed lawyers, doctors, and help with taxes. They wanted everything at once—to learn to drive, to read, and to find dental work and day care. They didn't have cars, shoes, or telephones. Most of their early problems were crises—the INS would deport them if they couldn't get fingerprinted, or it was January and the gas had been turned off, or grandmother had a stroke and there was no health insurance or Medicaid. And, even as they struggled to survive here, they had relatives in their old country who desperately needed money.

Sometimes I felt burned-out and discouraged. Eventually I figured out where to get good legal advice, who to call about INS problems, where decent health care could be found, and who had free bus passes, bicycles, clothes, and food. There were many people in our town eager to help, but it took a while to find them.

The other thing that saved me was the occasional remark that let me know that what I did mattered. A young woman from Romania thanked me for a scarf that I had wrapped and given her on her birthday. She said, "No one has ever given me a present before. I never had a birthday until I met you." I drove a Somali man to the doctor and paid for his appointment. He said afterward, "I didn't like Americans until today. People have not been friendly. Some steal from me. But now I know some Americans are good."

Writing about people from other cultures is fraught with social peril. Sentimentalism or romanticizing can be insidious forms of dehumanization. Generalizations about ethnic groups can easily become stereotypes. It's hard to master even the rudiments of knowledge about the fifty different cultures in our community.

I apologize in advance for the terminology with which I refer to people and places. Respectful language changes monthly. Different people prefer different words. Do I refer to people as from traditional cultures, developing nations, or the Global South? Do I use the word
Latino
or
Hispanic
? What is the best
way to refer to whites and nonwhites? These are highly charged political and personal questions. I am reasonably sure I will inadvertently offend someone. I have been as careful as I could be in my use of language, and no offense is intended.

I use the word
American
rather loosely, to refer to native-born Americans and to some others who have become citizens or lived here long enough to become Americanized. Essentially, I use the term
American
as a contrast word for newcomers. Almost all the refugees I discuss are new arrivals, here only a few years at most, and not yet sure what the deal is. Of course, I acknowledge that Americans are not monolithic—we have many value systems among our native-born people—and not all Americans are Nebraskans, the Americans I write about most of the time. But for brevity and flow, it's better not to constantly reclarify the word.

This book is not an academic tome or an in-depth analysis of our policies toward refugees. It doesn't tackle many systemic issues, such as the root causes of the worldwide displacement of people or the political, economic, and social issues that come with this displacement. There are academics far more competent to discuss these issues. Rather, I attempt to show, by telling the stories of real people, the effects of our current policies. My goal is to increase the interest of ordinary Americans in refugee issues with the hopes that they will then dig deeper into more scholarly works.

The United Nations defines a refugee as a person who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her country because of a well-founded fear of persecution. These claims of persecution must be based on race, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social group or political party. Refugees are resettled in a third country when they are unable to return home and cannot stay in the camp or country in which they were granted asylum.

Latinos are underrepresented in this book even though they are the largest ethnic group in our state. I met newcomers through refugee services and most Latinos are not legally refugees and therefore do not qualify for many of the services in our community.

Of all Latino populations, only Cubans are considered refugees by our government. Colombians are not considered refugees, even though their country has 2 million displaced people and is rapidly becoming unlivable. This classification system is a remnant of the cold war. The United States government destabilized governments in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Brazil and helped build the death squads in Honduras and Nicaragua. People fleeing those places couldn't be called refugees without acknowledging our government's foreign-policy errors.

In many ways, newly arrived Latinos have the hardest time in Nebraska. They have experienced as much trauma as other groups and they tend to work under the harshest conditions in our state. However, because they are not labeled refugees, they don't get the social services other groups do. They are almost invisible except as workers. They are even called "illegal aliens" which sounds like they came from Mars.

I don't in any way attempt to discuss all refugee populations in America, just the major ones in Lincoln. There is not much in the book on the Hmong, for example, because Lincoln doesn't have many Hmong people. And I do not claim to be an expert on any of the cultures I discuss. I do try to understand and to present honestly the lives of the people I met. My hope is this presentation will give readers a glimpse of worlds they didn't even know existed in their hometowns and motivate them to discover more about these worlds for themselves.

This book is written for ordinary people, especially those who live in communities with refugees. It's for teachers, doctors, nurses, counselors, police officers, lawyers, employers, church workers, community volunteers, anyone who works with or knows someone from another country. My hope is that this book will open the eyes of ordinary Americans and allow them to see refugees with knowledge, empathy, and respect.

It is also written for refugees. I hope the book is a guide to America, but also a warning that here there are new dangers and perils. American streets are not paved with gold. Freedom is not absolute. Credit-card bills can create new kinds of servitude. Families can cross the tundra on horseback, fearful all the way of being shot, only to encounter what they consider a worse crisis here: children who won't come home at night and don't obey their parents.

Looking at America through the eyes of refugees, I have seen a very different America than the one I've inhabited for fifty years. I've seen Americans' kindness and eagerness to help newcomers. But I have also seen how some businesses use up their employees, how some landlords manage not to rent to people who have accents or brown skins, and how some doctors and police give very different kinds of service to the rich and the poor. I have seen the INS treat refugees like criminals and make their lives needlessly anxious and difficult.

Refugees reveal the strengths and flaws of America. To be fair, we are the country that takes people in. We educate refugees and allow them to become citizens. And yet, when they arrive, we often exploit them and make them suffer needlessly. And, for the most part, we Americans are abysmally ignorant about the rest of the world. We have both an immense innocence and an enormous sense of entidement. We are spoiled children in a world of hurting people, and we take far too much for granted. As my friend Pam put it, "We were born on third base and we think we hit triples."

I do not want to idealize refugees. All cultures have lazy, cruel, and even dangerous people. All cultures have malcontents as well as people who are wiser and kinder than others. Some people are more open to experience, more eager to learn, harder workers, and more fun to be around. Some operate on a higher moral plane. I wanted to study this variation between people across cultures. Why do some people crumble and withdraw while others with equally difficult situations move into mainstream America? I identified what I call the attributes of resilience, which are the personal qualities that help refugees make it in their new situations. These attributes have relevance to all of us as we move in an increasingly new world with all our familiar props left behind.

Refugees come from a fire into a fire. Like all who live in crucibles, their experiences are defining ones for them and for all who witness their lives. We all are interested in what happens to people in extreme conditions. That's why
Tuesdays with Mor-rie, The Perfect Storm,
and
Into Thin Air
were best sellers, and that's why
Titanic
was a hit movie. After we see or read a story of trauma we ask, "What would I do in that situation?"

Ernest Shackleton said, "Optimism is true moral courage." The ways people are damaged are also the ways they are made strong. Suffering can create bitter people but it often creates people with depth of character and empathy with other people's suffering. Easy lives can produce spoiled, soft people. Hard lives can produce lovers and fighters. Refugees who make it in America manage to find meaning in their suffering. Many become kinder and more generous people. Anne Frank's father, Otto, a refugee himself, said, "Giving never makes anyone poorer."

Another great survival strategy is connecting with family and community. Many have lost some loved ones, but they have held on to others under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Their attitudes toward family put ours into perspective. An American might be in therapy complaining of an intrusive mother. An immigrant will be working three jobs so that she can bring her aunt to this country.

Globalization will change everything forever. Soon we will all be as mixed together as a bowl of salt and pepper. Refugees in our town offer us a heightened version of the experiences we'll all share as our world becomes one vast fusion culture. They are the harbingers of our future. The coping skills that refugees need—flexibility, the ability to make good decisions in the face of a dazzling number of choices, the ability to stay calm in a tough situation, and the ability to deal with people different than themselves—are the skills we will all need. All of us will require a global positioning system to tell us who and where we are.

A track is not the shape of a foot; it is the shape of a foot in the ground. Identity can only occur in a context, that is, in a social environment. Refugees, displaced and disoriented by their rapidly changing world, have shaky identities. Increasingly, we will all have identity issues in our globalized world. Who are we when we don't have a hometown, when we don't know our neighbors or our kin? Who are we don't know the history of our land or the names of common plants and birds in our area? Or when our stories come from television sets instead of grandparents or village storytellers? Who are we in a world where the universal language is, to quote Pico Iyer, "french fries"?

"We think the world apart," said Parker Palmer. "What would it be like to think the world together?" Teilhard de Chardin had a word—
unfurling
—to describe that "infinitely slow spasmodic movement towards the unity of mankind." He saw education and love as the twin pillars of progress. At this amazing point in history, we have the opportunity to get things right.

"
It was hard, but we got used to hard.
"

One of the best ways to understand the refugee experience is to befriend a family of new arrivals and observe their experiences in our country for the first year. That first year is the hardest. Everything is new and strange, and obstacles appear like the stars appear at dusk, in an uncountable array. This story is about a family I met during their first month in our country. I became their friend and cultural broker and in the process learned a great deal about the refugee experience, and about us Americans.

On a fall day I met Shireen and Meena, who had come to this country from Pakistan. The Kurdish sisters were slender young women with alert expressions. They wore blue jeans and clunky high-heeled shoes. Shireen was taller and bolder, Meena was smaller and more soft-spoken. Their English was limited and heavily accented. (I later learned it was their sixth language after Kurdish, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi.) They communicated with each other via small quick gestures and eye movements. Although they laughed easily, they watched to see that the other was okay at all times.

Shireen was the youngest and the only one of the six sisters who was eligible for high school. Meena, who was twenty-one, had walked the ten blocks from their apartment to meet Shireen at school on a bitterly cold day. Shireen told the family story. Meena occasionally interrupted her answers with a reminder, an amendment, or laughter.

Shireen was born in Baghdad in 1979, the last of ten children. Their mother, Zeenat, had been a village girl who entered an arranged marriage at fourteen. Although their father had been well educated, Zeenat couldn't read or write in any language. The family was prosperous and "Europeanized," as Shireen put it. She said, "Before our father was in trouble, we lived just like you. Baghdad was a big city. In our group of friends, men and women were treated as equals. Our older sisters went to movies and read foreign newspapers. Our father went to cocktail parties at the embassies."