Today I got angry at one of my refugees for the first time.

Here’s how it happened: Nirmal, the youngest, was practicing the English alphabet with me. We have seen over the semester that Nirmal has the weakest grasp on the English language out of Gopal’s three children. There’s a lot of good explanations for it – primarily, it’s because Nirmal is only seven, so he doesn’t like to work and would rather play with me and his nephew Ujwal during our visits. However, Nirmal’s grades came in over the Thanksgiving break, and now Gopal sees that Nirmal isn’t putting the same time and effort into his studies that his brothers Suk and Harka have. Gopal asked me to review the alphabet with Nirmal until he showed some degree of progress.

I already knew that this was easier said than done, because I suspect that Nirmal is dyslexic, as mentioned in previous entries. I had the faint feeling that this was going to wind up being a rather Sisyphean task. (For those who don’t know, Sisyphus is a figure from Greek mythology who was punished by the gods for imprisoning death, so no one else would have to die. His punishment? At dawn, he had to roll a boulder up the top of a mountain, and when he reached the top, he would be released. The twist? Whenever Sisyphus neared the top, the boulder would invariably slip from his fingers, and roll back to the bottom; Sisyphus would descend the mountain over night and resume his task in the morning. The Greek gods were not known for the sense of mercy.)

So we went through the alphabet: A, B, C, D… after two or three runthroughs, Nirmal could recite the whole thing as soon as I prompted him with the letter A. Good work. After another recitation, however, I notice something a little odd; Nirmal isn’t looking at the letters when I prompt the, he’s just staring at the window lazily reciting the alphabet at a rate faster than I can point.

I decide to test something. I point to the letter K and ask Nirmal what it is. Nirmal stares for a moment and says, A.

Wrong. I grimace and ask him to try again. After some deliberation, Nirmal admits that he just doesn’t know. Oh, great, I thought.

I run through the alphabet with Nirmal again; once again he recites every letter from memory. Then I point to the letter E, then U, and for both letters he says he just doesn’t know. My suspicion, then, was confirmed: Nirmal had only memorized the phonetic sounds of the alphabet, but he couldn’t distinguish between letters.

Harka, who was studying near us, must have realized this as well from afar, because as I tried to teach each letter to Nirmal (his attempts to duplicate the letters I drew for him also met with failure), whenever his little brother faltered, Harka shouted the correct answer in Nirmal in annoyance. (As mentioned before, Harka is deaf in one ear, so as a consequence he tends to raise his voice when he communicates with us.) I appreciated his help, but I wished Harka hadn’t done it; I knew Nirmal would never learn at that rate, and it was only distracting him further. Nirmal, like any mischievous little boy, only laughed at Harka’s attempts to help him.

While at first it seemed that Nirmal’s dyslexia was interfering with his ability to learn the alphabet, another theory struck me. I had seen behavior like this before in working with elementary school kids back home in Connecticut, kids who didn’t think it was “cool” to learn so they acted like they didn’t know or didn’t care about the material in order to seem funny, or even just cool. Indeed, this seemed to be the case; after a while Nirmal said he didn’t know to just about any letter other than A, B, C, or W (why he could distinguish W over the other letters was never explored by me). By doing this, he was getting attention from me, from Harka, from Ujwal, and from Gopal – which seemed like something Nirmal would do, the more I thought about it.

This really rubbed me the wrong way because Gopal had asked me so graciously to teach his son English, and I really like Gopal, so I didn’t want to let him down. Eventually I became so fed up with Nirmal’s behavior that I dismissed him from his lesson. It’s what he wanted, and he had pushed me to the limits of my patience.

This incident reminded me of how a long-term relationship with refugees is often an awful lot like Sisyphus’ labor. Sometimes you feel like you’re making a lot of progress, but then something will happen that make all your hard work slip through your fingers. I wish I hadn’t experienced something like this so late in the semester; it just made me feel frustrated with myself and with Nirmal, neither of which are attitudes I should have going into my visits with the family. But what else can I do? I’m only human, and so are they.

It has been a while since I touched this thing. So much has happened over the past month that I’m not really sure where to begin, but I’ll do the best I can to summarize the best parts.

In some of my early entries, you might remember that I expressed some trepidation over whether or not the members of my refugee family were appreciative of the efforts that Emma, Armaan, and Sam have been making with them. To reiterate another earlier point, this is not to say that none of us expect them to grovel at our feet in gratitude for all our hard work; such a desire would completely defeat the point of community service and civic engagement.

Nonetheless, I do remember feeling very awkward and uncertain of my actions at the very beginning of this semester, when the family and I were first introduced. The language barrier was so difficult at first, and I couldn’t shake the idea that the refugees didn’t see me as anything beyond a “stupid, inconsiderate white person”.

But all those fears were dispelled when Gopal, the patriarch of my family, expressed to Emma and I a few days before the Thanksgiving break that he considered us to be like siblings to him.

Which was a pretty beautiful thing to say, really.

I personally have become very close to the youngest son, Nirmal; he and I always play after finishing homework. I was kind of surprised by this, since I spent so much time with Suk (the oldest) and Harka (the middle child) in the beginning. I was so proud of him during my last visit when he, who visibly struggles with dyslexia and it greatly inhibits his ability to write English correctly (which is an issue that absolutely needs to be addressed in the future) drew the letter S correctly after my gentle coaxing. I gave him a big hug afterwards and a “rocket” – when I lift him up over my head as if he were blasting into space in a rocket ship.

I think this is what was meant by “deep harmonious relationships with others”; our family has told us, in their broken English, that our visits are good and that they look forward to them. I am saddened by the fact that I won’t have as much time to commit to them next semester, because I really do feel like I’ve become part of their family and I want to continue my work with them if at all possible. I know that at the very least I will try to keep in touch with them through the ECAC, but beyond that, I’m struggling. Does anyone else have any suggestions? I’m certainly open to them.

“You got a case of motion sickness. But the only cure for rootlessness, is to keep moving.” ~ Belize, “Angels In America”

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be rootless.

Refugees carry their homes with them wherever they wind up relocating. For the last couple weeks, the boys in my family have asked Emma and I to watch Nepali music videos and movies with them; they have a huge collection of DVDs that display those goofy shorts as well as some Bollywood movies. They’re all really goofy, but cute nonetheless. It’s cool that they have these resources at their fingertips.

Also in the case of my family, they surround themselves with friends and acquaintances from their old lives back in Nepal. When I was first assigned to them, I remember fearing that they would not be able to acculturate well without a support system. Fortunately, they do have that support system in order to keep them afloat as they transition to life in America.

This became most clear to me yesterday during the Halloween party. Sam and Arman left to pick them up from their apartment, but I was the first to arrive and saw most of them there. They had come with their friends, who function as an extended family for them in America. It was a display of independence (from me and other befrienders) and solidarity (with the Nepalese community in Rogers Park) that really resonated with me.

Even in America, Nepal is very much in their hearts.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I’ve been thinking about this for so long. I think the reason why these thoughts have infiltrated my head is because I can’t say the same thing about myself. I personally feel very rootless.

Hear me out a second.

I was born and raised in a small town in Connecticut… but the older I get, the more I realize that I don’t feel any attachment to the place where I grew up. I never applied to UConn when I was doing my college searches three – four years ago, because I just didn’t want to stay there anymore. When I visit over the breaks, it’s always great to see my friends and family, but I increasingly feel like there’s nothing left for me there. I don’t identify with the cultures that prevail there, nor do I feel any affinity for them.

That rootlessness extends beyond me, as well. Both my parents were born and raised in Buffalo, NY, but months before I was born my parents moved to Connecticut, where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. I had a very small, tight-knit family (my parents, my little sister, and myself); I am envious of the dynamics that exist in my refugees’ family, because they are always coming in and out of each other’s homes.

Basically, what I’m trying to get at, is that it’s easy for me to feel disconnected. If there’s anything I can learn from my refugees, it’s how to establish those connections and nurture them for the rest of my life. Maybe Chicago is the place to start.

I’ve been reading a lot of Saussure lately, and it’s starting to influence my understanding of a lot of my interactions between myself and my family.

Saussure was a French linguist who argued that language was a sign system that was arbitrary. Truth could not be found through the expression of language, because the values that emanated from one language system might undermine the values from another. For example, when I introduce myself in English, I announce that “I am Max Wright”. Pretty standard, right? But when I introduce myself in Spanish, I use the phrase, “Me llamo Max Wright”, which translates to “I am called Max Wright”. When you contrast this simple phrase with a simple English phrase, like I’ve just done, the values from the language systems become evident, and more often than not a moral dissonance occurs.

I’ve been wondering if my family has been going through a similar process over the last two months. I work the most with the oldest son, who has some difficulty in creating his own sentences in English. He can read well enough, and understand a sentence in so much as he can copy it down, but I wonder about the kinds of cultural barriers he encounters in his head as he tries to transcribe his thoughts into a completely different language.

I guess this is where Saussure comes in – what kind of values does the Nepalese language have that may come to blows with those of English? In terms of spelling and grammar our language is weird enough already, I can’t imagine how he must feel about the kinds of morals that the English language propagates. Not that the values of our language are bad, they’re just different from the values of any other language.

This also extends to how the youngest son struggles to use the correct letters when he is writing his sentences. Saussure said that all signs were arbitrary, and as I watch Nirmal make chicken scratches instead of the letters T or H on his homework assignment, I think I’m starting to see for myself just what Saussure was talking about.

Lots of exciting things happening with my family in the past week!

First of all, I’m pleased to say that Emma and I are now aided by another pair of students from our class: Arman and Samantha. We will have “joint custody” over the Nepali family for the rest of the semester, or so to speak. I think this is great, because they are still adjusting to life in America, and their children still need to be brought up to speed.

Progress with the boys is moving at previous rates, with no real changes occurring in any of them. What I have noticed over the past four weeks, though, is how tutoring quickly turns into a family affair in their household. When my group and I come over to visit, the two youngest boys are there along with either their father or their mother, rarely both. However, as soon as we arrive and set up shop in the living room, word quickly spreads throughout their building. The absent family members return home; relatives stop by to say hello and to give their children an opportunity to work with us after we finish work with Gopal’s, the apparent patriarch, youngest children.

I’m equally astounded and annoyed at how quickly studying turns into a group affair. Sometimes it’s difficult communicating the lessons to Gopal’s sons, because they have such a limited grasp on the English language. More often than not, the boys’ relatives or friends (if they’re also visiting) will start shouting out the answers in English and playfully chastise Gopal’s sons in Nepalese until they write down the correct answer.

Usually I find this irritating. It’s pretty obvious that the friends, who speak better English than Gopal’s sons, are trying to impress Emma or I (and now Arman and Sam) with their knowledge. It bothers me in particular because I continually stress that none of Gopal’s children will actually learn this material unless they figure it out for themselves. I can give them all the correct answers to their math homework, and they’ll get a good grade for the assignment, but what will happen on the test? I won’t be there to tell the correct answer when they stumble.

Still, despite my frustrations, I am nonetheless impressed by the older generation’s involvement in the younger one. Gopal and his wife often sit on the sidelines and go over previous assignments, urging their boys to practice writing after they finish homework. They also bring assignments from their ELL classes for the volunteers and I to correct; in some respects they are actually much more eager to learn than their children.

Gopal himself provides an interesting example. Gopal carries a worn little black notebook that he can usually be seen writing in from time to time. On Monday he asked me to explain the values of different American currency, so we went through the motions: a penny is one cent, a nickel is five cents, etc. He wrote all this information down in that notebook for review later that day, or perhaps in an ELL class. I noticed that he has rather beautiful handwriting; even when he writes in English, everything is neat and legible.

But make no mistake, Gopal and his wife are totally and fully dedicated to the development of their children. We offered to take the boys to the park after homework, but by the time we finished (5PM – after tutoring for two hours straight) Gopal laughed and told Arman that it was too late for that. I was disappointed to hear that; we had planned the trip to the park, and at 80 degrees the weather couldn’t have been better, but I digress. I still want to take them there, before the weather gets too cold or the sun starts to set too early in the afternoon.

I am left wondering what else my group and I can do for this family. So far their sole interest in us is our ability to teach their children; every so often a trip to the clinic is mentioned, but that would be for the two oldest sons, and only when neither parent nor relative is around to chaperone them to Wilson.

Not that I haven’t found this enjoyable or rewarding, but I can’t help but ask: what else needs to be done? Since we now have four volunteers working with the family in groups of two twice a week, there has to be something.

Despite the cross-cultural barriers that my partner Emma and I continue to encounter in our work with the family, I realized something during our last visit (Thursday, Sept. 30th) that began putting things into perspective.

As mentioned before on this blog, we work with a family of five: the two parents and their three sons. None of them speak English very well; most of our sessions are spent teaching English to the children while their parents watch in the background, trying to encourage / motivate their sons when they falter. (That’s how I view it, anyway – it’s hard to know otherwise when I don’t speak any Nepalese…) On this front, progress has been very slow. Emma and I only meet with the family once a week, and a 2 & 1/2 – 3 hour session is not enough to teach someone English when it’s not their first language.

But nonetheless, I am amazed at what we CAN communicate to the children beyond the English / Nepalese barriers. A smile goes such a long way with them. For example, on Thursday only the father was home, and when he went next door to visit the neighbors, we took a study break by playing with the boys. We juggled balls, hid under the bed, tickled each other, and made silly faces. Absolutely no verbal communication whatsoever. It’s amazing how much body language and actions can tell a story when words don’t suffice. I never realized that until the other day. I felt like everything that I’ve wanted to say to these boys since meeting them finally came across during and after this exchange.

Onto more business related matters: Carmen’s Pizza Fundraiser on Tuesday. If you’re reading this, and don’t have anything to do on Tuesday from 5 – 9PM, you should come to Carmen’s Pizza for all-you-can-eat pizza and pop for $12 a person. All the proceeds will be going to the purchasing of CTA tickets for the refugees living in Rogers Park.

If you don’t want to spend $12, let me frame it for you this way: for every Loyola student who donates $12 to the cause, TWO refugees will receive a CTA pass of their own. So your money is directly going to something tangible, AND will be going to more than one person from a single donation. Most importantly, it’ll be fun! so please, come hang out with Loyola Refugee Outreach.

“Is Obama the President of South America?”

When I heard this question a week ago, I immediately stopped what I was doing and stared at the man who innocently voiced this question in a mixture of awe and disbelief. The only thought going through my mind at this time was: what?

Gentle readers, some context: last week, Emma and I officially began tutoring the three boys of our family. They are all struggling in school – the oldest son, who was placed in ninth grade upon arrival to America, has the equivalent of a fourth grade education in the United States. To say that they need help catching up is an understatement.

So, Emma and I were working with the two youngest sons on their math and spelling homework, respectively, when the neighbors – another group of Nepalese refugees – came over to visit. They were eager to meet us, having heard (hopefully) good things about us from the boys’ parents over the weekend. The father, who did not look much older than myself, was sharing his appreciation for his new country with us when he asked how far South America was from Chicago. We explained that it was pretty far, and that it had a much different climate than Chicago, possibly more akin to the weather in Nepal than here.

Then he asked the question mentioned at the very beginning of this article. At the time, I remember thinking the question was funny – it was like something straight out of a movie. The newcomer asking a longtime resident a question that he, as an immigrant, has no good answer to, but naturally seems obvious to the longtime citizen (and subsequently, the audience). It was a good question, though, one that Emma and I were more than happy to set straight – that Obama was the President of the United States of America, which was a country in North America. He was not the president of two continental landmasses. Being a political science major came in handy in this situation!

I tried to ask how he came to the conclusion that the United States encompassed both North and South America, but judging by the look he gave me I think the question was lost in translation. Instead, Emma and I explained how North America was divided into three countries – Canada, the US, and Mexico – while South America had much more countries there. Mr. Neighbor asked if South America had democracies there. Once again, political science came in handy: I explained that there were some, but that some bad people controlled some of the countries there; bad people who mistreated their citizens. Mr. Neighbor nodded gravely, and expressed empathy for their plight.

This exchange made me wonder if this is how my teachers have felt at my questions all throughout my life. It’s a strange feeling, to possess the knowledge that others seek from a designated intellectual (or in this case, cultural) broker. It’s almost empowering, too. I’m not sure how I feel about it quite yet.

It does raise an important question for me, though. When the neighbor asked that question, he had the wide-eyed innocence and enthusiasm that one of the children I work with at after school programs at home or in Chicago have. So, I’m beginning to wonder if I might be talking down to these people – people who have seen and endured more suffering than I can possibly imagine.

Now, I don’t mean “talk down to” in a derogatory fashion. I mean, I’m not criticizing these people for being uneducated… With the limited grasp of English and geography that they have, and most likely an even smaller grasp on politics, I’m not surprised if they thought Obama was the leader of the continental Americas. what concerns me is that I want to treat them with the respect that they deserve as adults. It’s one thing for me to talk that way to the kids that I work with, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I crossed any lines with how I explained things to Mr. Neighbor.

Tomorrow I’m meeting with my family again. Maybe I’ll bring a map, so we can point out places in the US, or the world, and teach some new words to the family. Mr. Neighbor had been living in America with his family for nearly five months, and he still thought that Barack Obama was the leader of an entire continent. I can’t imagine what kind of assumptions my family has about America.

Before I begin, I want to clarify something. The events that I’m about to relate to you actually happened a week ago, on September 16th; by this point I’ve put in two visits with my refugee family, so consider this a little bit of backlog. I should be caught up by the end of this weekend, however, so fear not!

So, on September 16th, Emma and I left Loyola University to visit with our family for the very first time. We were very excited, and pleased to know that they responded so quickly to our request to visit; the previous Tuesday, we told Sarah Masri that our soonest availability was on the 16th (a Thursday), and we were very pleased at the thought that they were excited to see us so soon.

Now, I’ve traveled abroad before – to parts of Europe and Central America – but I’ll admit, both times I left the country it was strictly as a tourist, so my interaction with other cultures was very limited. My visit with my family that day, though, was the first time that I felt like I crashed into an invisible wall that separated me from the Nepalese.

When my partner and I arrived at their apartment, it quickly became very, very apparent that they spoke little English beyond a few token remarks – like “hello”, or “thank you”, such as when we gave them a bag of oranges we picked up on the way there. The father spoke no English at all, while the mother and children could say a few token phrases and words. They directed us to sit with them in their living room, and what proceeded from there was one of the most awkward half-hours in my life.

Having spent less than a month in America, and nearly eighteen years in a refugee camp in Nepal, their English was fragmented at best. To make matters worse, neither Emma nor I spoke Nepalese, which made communication frustratingly difficult. The father was wearing a Cubs hat on our first visit. I pointed at my head and tried to convey to him that I liked his hat. He looked at me in confusion and with great hesitation removed the cap from his head. Emma quickly gestured to put it back on, and I nodded in agreement, but he kept looking between the two of us, unsure of what we wanted to tell him, but he put the cap back on anyway. I wondered what was going through his head. Did he think we were chastising him for being rude, wearing a hat in the presence of a woman? Which prompted another thought: do the Nepalese consider that bad taste, to wear a hat in front of a woman, or indoors? It raised a number of questions that, frankly, I didn’t know the answer to.

I had so much I wanted to say to them. But how could I? Every time I tried to get a thought out, the parents would laugh, look at each other, and remark something in Nepalese – very often did I hear the word “English” come up. Fortunately, I remembered to bring a deck of cards with me before I left my apartment, and I brought it out of my pocket. The father joined Emma and I for a few games of Go Fish while the children helped their mother prepare a snack for everybody. Despite ourselves, the three of us laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation: two Americans and a Nepalese refugee playing Go Fish without being able to convey the most basic rules of the game in the other language. (In other words, it was impossible to convey “Go Fish” without thinking it was a different request.)

My family has only been in America for a month. The translator who arrived almost an hour into our visit told us that they five of them were very happy to be in America, which was a relief to us. Even more fortunately, they have a number of friends from Nepal who live in their building and in the Rogers Park neighborhood, so we were relieved to know that they were not alone in America, without anyone to lean on. It was not quite the uphill battle for them that I had begun to fear.

But the translator didn’t have all good news for us. The two oldest children have some physical deformities – one has a cleft lip, which inhibits his ability to speak either language, and the other is deaf in one ear. Periodically, they have visits at a clinic in Wilson and often the parents cannot take them there themselves. Through Uma, our translator, they asked if we could do it for them.

Despite my better judgment, I agreed to the request. How could I have refused at the time? I felt so insignificant under the crushing weight of the sheer thought of their situation. In my eagerness to be of service to them, I extended myself far beyond my limits. I still haven’t explained to them that I don’t know if it’s a good idea for my partner and I to escort the children to the clinic. Hopefully I’ll get to before they ask.

All in all, my initial visit with them completely defied my original expectations. After reading Mary Pipher’s book and hearing some stories from other people in class, I thought at least one of the family members could speak enough English to communicate with us, but I was wrong. I need a new strategy in order to help them within my own means.

Let’s hope that I think of one soon.