This blog contains experiences and reflections of 42 students who are enrolled in Anth 361: Refugee Resettlement, a Service-Learning and Civic Engagement and Leadership course at Loyola University Chicago in Fall 2009. Please follow appropriate blogging etiquette (for example, the recommendations at http://blogs.suite101.com/article.cfm/blogging_etiquette and this recommended Code of Blogging Ethics http://blogethics2004.blogspot.com/ when posting to this blog. In addition, please limit each posting to no more than 250 words.
Because of the sensitive nature of this blog, posts are not allowed to contain refugee family names, addresses, photographs, or other such information that would represent an invasion of personal privacy of these individuals or the supporting refugee assistance agency. Please contact Jessica Cilella (your classmate) or me if you have any questions about how to post to this blog or how to include web links or other supporting materials.
Students are expected to post once per week according the schedule provided in class and students are encouraged to respond to the other postings so that we can advance our conversation about the issues we encounter during this experience. The ultimate goal of this exercise is to improve understanding about the issues faced by refugees in America through self-reflection about our own experiences with the members of this community.
To students in this class — please begin making your entries on the next assigned blogging date that falls after you have meet your refugee family.
Nothing can really prepare you for meeting someone new. First impressions are usually the hardest hurdle to jump over in any new relationship. The whole situation sometimes can be extreme awkward especially if the two person have cultural differences. You don’t know what to say or how you should act out of uncertainty of what is proper or appropriate to the other person. Meeting my refugee family for the first time presented these characteristics. With an obvious language barrier between us, I was extremely nervous meeting people I didn’t know how to communicate with. What would I say? What would I talk about? What if I kept talking and all they did was nod and smile because they didn’t understand a single word I said? In an ideal situation I would have loved to try to learn some of the basic vocabulary and grammar in my refugee’s native language, but unfortunately, the bookstore doesn’t sale to many English to Burmese dictionaries. To prepare myself, I tried to image myself being displaced in another country, forced to leave my beloved homeland. What would I do to acculturate myself into this foreign culture and could I survive without any help. I came to the conclusion if I was forced to flee my homeland I’d be highly depressed and helpless. I would need a friend. As scared as I was meeting my refugee family, I knew in my heart that if I was in the same situation, I’d appreciate someone taking time and energy out of their day to made mine a little bit easier. When I meet my family, I was so surprised how much English the younger gentlemen had picked up in the short time they had been in Chicago. They even managed to find the elusive Burmese to English dictionary written in the Burmese written script I couldn’t find on the internet.
Thanks for helping get the conversation started, Lauren!
We met our family on Monday. We had trouble getting inside the building, and people came and went the whole time we were there. As the visit went on, we started to realize that nobody from the family was talking to us – we were communicating with a neighbor who lived down the hall. Through him, the others turned down offers to help with homework and English. They were very courteous but seemed a little confused as to the reason for our visit, and led us out after half an hour. We only found out later that they were moving to Pennsylvania today. In the meantime, we’d already made plans to return to see the neighbor, and had understood firsthand how fluid family delineations are – people popped in and out, their relationships unclear, and greeted us with wildly varying degrees of English proficiency.
I was left wondering what expectations they must have harbored about us, since they knew we’d been placed with them while they were planning a major move.
Last Saturday morning Vince and I found our selves ready to knock on door to random apartment. Immediately, I thought of the times I found myself near tears when reading Pipher’s The Middle of Everywhere; asking myself, “am I emotionally stable enough to be doing this type of work?” We finally knocked; and after an hour of attempted translations and odd silences, we realized we were at the wrong apartment.
Half an hour later, again, we found ourselves standing in front of another random door. This time, however, we were greeted with smiles that seemed to be expecting our arrival. The apartment was strikingly similar to the last; bare walls, no furniture, just beds and a few folding chairs.
I thought, like Lauren, that the whole experience was going to be extremely awkward. And at times I felt a little insecure as to why I was there; not knowing what to do or say, I felt wholly inadequate for the situation. But I found that everyone had just as equally timid smiles as I did, and in a time of awkward silence, we’d all just laugh a little.
We walked to the beach and the young adults of the family started explaining their situation; they consider themselves happy to be here, happy to be refugees, but were quick to list what they didn’t like. They have nothing to do, no phone or computer to contact friends and family in Nepal. They have no jobs, no car, and haven’t quite figured their way around the city yet. And after two and a half weeks, they no longer want to spend any more time in the apartment. I could see their frustration; young, university educated and confined. No friends, no job, no outlet.
And even though I had only met these individuals an hour and a half before, I reminded multiple times how happy one of the girls was to have me as her sati (in English, friend).
As we walked back to the apartment I realized that it was alright if we had nothing to share but each other’s company; for the first time I truly came to understand that is half of what they need.
That visit kind of got the ball rolling for me. I’m really beginning to question why the U.S., superpower that we are, can’t be more preemptive on human rights struggles. Burmese refugees often escape forced labor, sky high taxation, physical and sexual abuse among other injustices, only to enter Thailand as exploited, poorly paid workers at the mercy of the Thai government, which essentially shuts the door to justice in their faces. No wonder Burmese refugees are typically shy in America – they are probably used to being shut down. My question is this: Why doesn’t the U.S. engage in sanctioning countries that violate human rights? And sanction them in such a way that only the government is harmed, not the people? Perhaps these questions are naive, but I just don’t understand. I thought we were founded on justice; you’d think we’d recognize it when its being denied elsewhere.
I apologize for that incomplete entry – I originally had an opening paragraph that somehow got deleted. I can paraphrase what I opened with, though:
We are surrounded by stuff. Take a look around you right now – if you’re a student, odds are you’re on a laptop or a school-owned, publicly-available high-speed PC. And, if you’re anything like me, you might not be able to remember the color of your desktop, since you’ve got scraps and books and pens and receipts from who knows what littering the surface. Now take a step back – away from the desk, outside the room, back from the building – and into the apartment of a broken, penniless, verbally disadvantaged family from Myanmar who has been here less than a year. Culture shock? Sure, but for whom? Although moreso for them, quite a jolt to us, too. My visit taught me that gee, “speaks no English” means that they, well, probably don’t speak any English. My partner and I realized that we had to be the initiators of the afternoon, if we were to break through the man’s shyness. And so we did – through teaching techniques such as repetition, visual demonstration, writing, etc. However, I think the most important lessons we learned were that A) these experiences that we read about are not just happening outside our realm of knowledge – they’re happening right down the street. And B) Our own privilege is incredible.
Okay, now you can go back to that first entry and read it as if it were finishing this one. Sorry…!
As I anticipated meeting my refugee family I had mixed emotions of anxiousness while at the same time I was a little bit nervous. While reading, “The Middle of Everywhere,” I had an idea of what to expect and what I was getting myself into; however, I found that there is no real way to prepare for the situation except by experiencing it.
Initially my partner and I had went to the wrong apartment building due to a mix up with the ECAC. The family that we had encountered there was also a refugee family from Thailand who were of Burmese origin. They knew no English, and they seemed somewhat scared. This put my partner and I in an awkward situation because it was hard to converse with them and we both felt out of place in their household. Something that has stuck in my memory from this encounter was the blank stare in the man’s eyes. In my mind I was thinking, “I wonder what this man had gone through before arriving here in this country.”
Finally, we settled the mix-up with the ECAC and my partner and I were off to our actual family. Upon meeting them they expressed how happy they were to have us in their home. They also told us how they had waited outside for our arrival. After we all introduced ourselves they fed my partner and I and then proceeded to show us around their apartment; mainly their living spaces and prayer shrines. It was then that the grandmother of our family presented my partner with a necklace. It was then that I felt truly welcome in their household. They also shared with us that the father of the household had been ill and upon arrival he was taken to the hospital. They explained his condition to us the best that they could in English and we discussed the possibility of going to visit him. That visit in itself was very moving and if I were to blog about it I think I may be taking up to much space. I will say that being in the company of others is one of the purest forms of medicine anyone can experience.
In a final thought, this initial experience is just the start of what will become probably one of the most amazing experiences I will have in my life. I understand that at times, it is going to be very frustrating, while at the same time it will be a very rewarding experience. I feel that we may sometimes take our lives here in the U.S. for granted but through the eyes of newcomers we can truly see what we have via resources, freedom, and the ability to live.
On Monday we visited our family for the first time. I had worried about meeting the family all week and hoped that the family and I would hit it off. I had hoped that by the time we left I would have a better idea on how I could help this family. After introducing ourselves we struggled to carry on a conversation. There seemed to be more awkward silences then anything else. It was hard to get their names and there seemed to be a language breakdown when I asked the kids where they went to school and what grade they were in. We asked if they needed help with homework and again it seemed more of a language breakdown. I had been told by someone that had previously worked with the family that the kids would need help with homework and was really confused when they rejected our help. After about 30mins we were gently pushed to leave.
The next day we got an email saying that the family was moving and that we will be reassigned to a different family. From this experience I am left wondering what this family was thinking and how confused they must have been that we were asking to help the kids with homework and asking how we can help them the day before they were moving to another state.
Brian makes an interesting point about the difficulty of working with resettled refugees. Remember the point made in the video we watched about how immigrants usually know exactly where they want to relocate while refugees have little choice in the matter. As a result, resettled refugees often move to other locations once they arrive in their new country. Mary Pipher also discusses this relocation pattern in her book. Reasons for moving include wanting to be near other family members or friends who live in other places, better employment opportunities, stronger cultural support networks, etc. Please try to see the world from the perspective of your refugee families as well as your own perspective. Remember, it is not about us, it is about them.