My experience with refugees

(I’ve taught English at the International Rescue Committeehttps://www.rescue.org/ for the last two years, and wrote this for a fundraiser last weekend that raised $2,800 for the ACLU and IRC. I am honored to have been a small part of that fundraiser, and encourage anyone to follow it up with support for these incredible organizations, more important now than ever. And deepest thanks for my friend Jane Bloch who edited and read the piece for me, as I could not attend in person.)

Nasim is in class today. His basic vocabulary and visible pride merge as he tells me about Baghdad before the violence. We agree that when peace comes, and he believes it will, he will show me his city. As always, he presses his hand to his heart in thanks as he leaves.

The family of four from Myanmar sit next to him. The mother and father are improving their English bit by bit, but their two sons, aged 8 and 11, are learning as fast as I can challenge them. They were among the Rohingya “boat people” who fled repeated attacks on Muslims by the Buddhist majority in their country. But as they compete to tell me about the pizza they ate last night, their first, “boat people” is not a concept or a headline, it’s these people. Real people. My neighbors, our community.

Amanuel is a young Eritrean man. He finished a baking certification class this morning and has brought me three fresh pumpkin spice chocolate chip cookies. There is quiet pride in his eyes at having something to give. I think he is slowly-slowly seeing that it’s okay to be gay here. I wish I could express how thankful I am that he’s here. He doesn’t know how much he gives me every day. Or how much he reminds me to be thankful for my own brother’s experience, whose own coming out was accepted with love by our family.

And Shayma is here! She is my best student. Syrian, she started with zero English, not even a shared alphabet, and after just three weeks she’s helping the other Arabic speakers. Today she brought little Zeinah, her two year old daughter who loves escaping from the classroom to toddle down the halls and say hello to everyone. We don’t even chase Zeinah anymore, knowing some IRC staff member will invariably bring her back with a huge smile on their face.

Finally, to my right sit Mutaz and Fatima. Grandparents from Sudan, their dignity and kindness are soothing just to be around. Mutaz just got his first job here. In Khartoum he was a university professor. In Walnut Creek he will change sheets in a hotel. He does not complain. Not a word.

Fatima approaches me after class with a piece of paper in her hand. “On Tuesday I told you how I taught Arabic to an American woman using Sudanese proverbs,” she reminds me. I loved the idea and had asked her about them. Now she unfolds the sheet and shows me lines of graceful Arabic above precise English translations. “I wrote some of them down for you.”

She reads them to me, first in Arabic then in English. “A child is a child of everyone.” Her pronunciation is clean and clear, just a soft underlayer of her homeland below the words. “You who dig a hole for evil, make your space in it.” Her words sound like her ancestors, my ancestors, our ancestors. “Seek the neighbor, before the house.”

In Arabic the proverbs rhyme, but I prefer the English versions, which sound like different cultures meeting in shared humanity. All three speak directly to the understanding and purpose of the IRC.

A child is a child of everyone because we are all neighbors, all one community, whether we’re born in Sudan, Syria, or San Francisco.

You who dig a hole for evil, make your space in it rings painfully true as our leaders make mistakes in the name of power and greed.

And finally, Seek the neighbor, before the house. It’s the person who matters, not the distractions of wealth or status, nationality or creed.

It’s pretty normal for me to feel like I am the student, learning more than I have to teach, when I come to the IRC. I’ve been fortunate to teach English in half a dozen countries and have felt that way before, but I’ve never had classes like these.

Normally in beginner English we talk a lot about about family and background. “Is your brother short, or tall? Is your town big, or small? Is your home clean, or messy?” But here, their home might be rubble, their towns occupied or destroyed, and their brothers….

Early in my days at the IRC, I saw my predecessor make an honest mistake. She asked an Afghani man about his children. He told us he had five. Three sons and two daughters. He told us he didn’t know if he’d ever see them again. He told us he didn’t even know if they were still alive. He sat, and he cried. And there was not a thing we could do to fix it.

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, rates of PTSD among refugees range from 39 to 100%. In comparison to 1% for the general population. 39%, to 100%.

All of my students are mourning something, but whereas someone in mourning might want to talk about the sadness in their heart, asking someone with PTSD about it can put them back into that original place of trauma. I wish I knew how to help more, but all I know is a little about teaching. And a little about refugees.

Here’s some of what I know. Refugees don’t come to America for a handout. They don’t come to take anyone’s job. They come because they are like you and me. They want to live, they want to earn an honest day’s wage, and they want to raise their children without fear of bullets or starvation.

When I hear politicians disparage and blame refugees, I feel anger, and I feel fear. But when I hear regular people speak against them, I just want to invite them to class with me. Prejudice and fear, contempt and aggression, none of these would survive ten minutes at a table with my students.

They are good people whose previous lives would have looked a lot like yours and mine. Family and friends. Work and play. Traditions and celebrations. Mourning in the natural course of time. Instead they have endured unimaginable suffering. And now they’re here, learning a whole new...everything. New rules, new society, and a new language, with its inexplicable spellings and baffling vowels. This transition is brutal, unjust, and some days surreal. But every class feels like a victory anyway.

Because they made it. Against all odds and overcoming excruciating obstacles. But they got here. To live. To heal. To feel hope again. That is the true beauty of America. That is what it really means to live in a land of tolerance, a land of opportunity, a land of the free.

God bless America, refugees welcome.

What to say about 2016?

Hands Around Lake Merritt gave me hope

2016. Whew. What do you say about this year? A year of plotlines that would have made dubious fiction, played out in the newspapers instead. I tried to make a concise list of the most egregious stories but google ran out of memory. And it was downright depressing. Made me want to find Merrick Garland and go get drunk down by the pier together.

So just the most salient point: 2016 is the year democracy failed. The British voted against their own best interests. Colombians rejected peace in the world’s longest running civil war (if you don’t count the murderous chaos in Myanmar). And then, inevitably, Trump.

But I don’t want to focus on that right now. That would be like the man with whom I went to Cuba who could only talk about the toilet seats. (Or maybe what goes through them would be a better metaphor?)

Watching the cows come home in Switzerland did me good

Personally, 2016 was (of course) a mixed bag. I lost the relationship I thought would last the rest of my life. But how wonderful to have had that love! And I have hope that some form of it will continue into the future. Pesky future, being all unknowable.

Professionally, I expanded into a job I feel inexpressibly lucky to have. I had truly incredible groups this year. Let’s be honest, Rick Steves groups are always great, we just draw from good people, who travel for the right reasons and in the right way, but this year was above even our high bar.

Perhaps when the news is preaching fear, those who come into the world anyway are the cream of the crop. People who know that staying home is exactly the wrong response to terrorism. Who refuse to be terrorized. (Or at least who know there is extremely little actual danger involved. Terrorism is still less dangerous than driving to work.) I am grateful for my company, and for the people who travel with us. Best of the best, they are.

Beautiful and bizarre Skopje, Macedonia

And I am grateful for the incredible people at the International Rescue Committee, both the staff and my students. Again I am privileged to meet the best. I wish my students’ confidentiality wasn’t an issue, because their stories and characters would benefit the nation to hear. They’re an antidote to Trumpism.

And finally travel, one of the great joys of my life, was good this year. On a Balkan ramble I enjoyed Bulgaria, was happily surprised by Macedonia, and felt love in Greece. Then this last trip, to Vietnam, where I felt a perspective that might make 2017 a more loving place within me. The articulation is still burbling in my subconscious, but for now I can focus on one truth.

Humans are good. We really are. We are a good species. Too good for our own sake, maybe, since it’s mostly our worst individuals who yearn for power. Anyone who wants to be in control...is exactly who shouldn’t be allowed to.

The Vietnamese people have forgiven a horrible war.
That gives me hope.

That makes for troublesome headlines, but a deeply reassuring foundation. I don’t know exactly how many countries I’ve visited or people I’ve met, but I can happily tell you that in every single one of them I met wonderful people. Almost exclusively. People I would live next to, eat with, and have in my life.

Every country, and every year. 2016 was a beast. No doubt about it. But it had such goodness in there! And 2017 will have that beauty too. Happy new year, my friends!

Something unexpected and totally normal happened today

I was well into my lineup of questions and answers, ordinal numbers and time sequences in class today, blue marker and red marker, hoping my students were getting something out of my antics when something unexpected happened.

She’s maybe three years old. She has the brightest eyes and incredible laughing smile, and she’d lost one of her shoes somewhere. She plays for most of my English class, blocks and panda bears, while her mother learns at a truly incredible pace, moving rapidly from knowing few words when she got to America two months ago to now, when she helps me teach the other Arabic speakers.

But the little one eventually gets bored and wanders off. She loves opening and closing doors, usually with herself on the other side, and the entire office knows her name and laughter, and soon someone will bring her back, a smile on their face, and deposit her at the table where she’ll look around, find her mom, and exclaim with the purity of a child’s joy “Mama!”

She’d snuck out during my lineup, somewhere around “Who arrived third to class today?” and I was just writing “Who got here next to last?” when she popped out from behind my white board easel with a giggle. Someone had given her a multicolored abacus, and she proudly presented it to me, setting it up with a three year old’s precision then stepping back to make space for my admiration and looking up as if saying “Can you believe this incredible thing!?”

And it was. It was an incredible thing. Because there I was on a Friday afternoon in Oakland, every cell in my body feeling heavy with the ominous portents for my country’s future, but here was this little girl, a Syrian refugee who had been through hell without even the words to name the horrors, and she was giggling up at me and presenting an abacus for my enjoyment.

It was something unexpected, and yet absolutely commonplace. I am privileged to spend some afternoons with these people, these incredible, beautiful human souls, and though the ostensible reason is so I can give them more English words and usage, the reality is that they give me hope, gratitude, and a love for our species that can be hard to grasp in the screen-shaped world.

So yes, I’m terrified for our country, but absolutely, I am confident in the human spirit. I am confident that we will continue to move forward. And I’m confident that we as America will continue to make this the kind of place people like this wonderful little girl and her mother want to come to for safety and a better future.

Gratitude for refugees

Eritrea, Myanmar, Iraq, Senegal, Afghanistan, Syria. It’s not my Travel List (well, that too) it’s a sampling of my students. Refugees all, they came from backgrounds I cannot imagine, experiences I want to ask about but dare not touch, since the pain of these lives torn apart is not something I am qualified to handle.

So I’ll try to teach them some English. (I'm far from a professionally competent teacher.)

And they’ll teach me increased gratitude. For the places I come from, for the places I’ve been, and for the place I am now. For all the many places I can go. For what has been given to me that I did not earn, but that no one should have to.

And we’ll have fun. A whole lot of fun. Because all the refugees I’ve met here, there’s not one that I didn’t enjoy meeting. Not one I wouldn’t invite to my home, have tea with, and like to get to know better. Every single one, I’m glad they’re in my class.

Sure there was that one guy last year who was a bit of a misogynist dickhead, but hey, we have a whole political movement of those. (And ironically, they’d benefit the most from his signing on, since maybe he’d show them humans aren’t all that different after all. They could cut their idiocy down from anti-everyone-but-them, to just anti-women. Baby steps, with baby brains. #Trump #NotOkay) He’d come from a repressive culture that viewed women as objects, and I hope he hasn’t been seeing the side of America that agrees with him.

But for everyone else, this is still a land of opportunity, not necessarily because of upward mobility (cuz you have to already be pretty well off to have a chance at that in America) but because it’s a land of safety, with a decent amount of legal protections, and impressive economic stability. And water. And no real infectious diseases. And plentiful food. And green growing things that make you think the world is a healthy place after all.

The sun is out again today, and as much as I love the rain, the sun is good for bringing students to class. So that’s where I’m going to go. Too bad the xenophobes of our country aren’t coming with me, since they’d learn more than anyone. But truth be told, I like the class as it is.

Happy Thanksgiving Mr R!

Happy Thanksgiving Mr R!

It was a pleasure to meet you a few months ago, and I dearly hope that your first American Thanksgiving is a happy day, when you can join me, join the nation and anyone anywhere who wants to participate, in giving thanks for the good things in our lives. I am thankful for the chance to meet you and your wonderful family. I am thankful for the chance to (hopefully!) teach you all some English, although your daughter already speaks impressively well.

I am grateful for the wonderful people at the International Rescue Committee, and the noble work they do, important in the best of times and crucial when things are running off track, when a small percentage of people abroad are pursuing inhumane agendas, and too many people here are doing the same. Violence and intolerance; intolerance is violence.

I am grateful that my country is still the sort of place people would want to come to. I believe we have been welcoming too few, but I am grateful and hopeful that we are moving in the right direction.

My patriotism

I am grateful that Obama is a much better example of our country than some of the people who want to take his place. For a long time in this country, people would sometimes compare each other to Nazis but it was always overblown and inappropriate, since at our worst, we were far from that vile. I have to apologize that you have come at a time when the spokescreature for half the political establishment is actually advocating Nazi policies (and citing Nazi fake statistics to scare up the paranoia required for the abdication of one’s mind and soul.)

But please don’t be scared, as off track as some of my nation is at the moment, I cannot believe we would ever actually pursue a Muslim database, or close your places of worship, or any of the other headline-grabbing idiocy with which our lowest element is currently hijacking attention in their competition to see who can be the least intelligent, the least sane, the least humane.

The only database she belongs
in is a list of happy humans

They are not this country. We have nutjobs, just like everywhere else! Come on over to my place, and we can shake our heads in disgust, laugh in disbelief, and shiver in fear. It will look like we’ve invented the world’s weirdest dance move. For a moment. Then we can move on, come back to earth, connect as humans in a beautiful corner of the world, and give thanks. That is required on this day. Turkey is optional.

PS. But cranberry sauce is obligatory, so since you, your whole family, and all of your friends are welcome in my home, just let me know how much I should make. Happy Thanksgiving!