Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Refugees Welcome

The lure of the American Dream

“How do you buy a house in America?”

She passed me her phone displaying the question in English beneath the Arabic words. My fingers hovered over the keyboard on my phone as I considered how to reply.

The woman and her daughter sat next to me in a stuffy upper room of an old church, newly arrived in the United States, refugees from Iraq.

Iraq. The place I read about in the news. The place where, even as we sat safe and secure in a city building, is at war. The place my husband spent a year on a military base. A place I can’t begin to imagine.

“America is beautiful,” she told me as we earlier tried to talk about what she spent money on Iraq. Our poor attempt at communication left me with the understanding that she hadn’t needed to pay for much. Or that there wasn’t much she could buy anyway. Maybe I misunderstood.

“You need to get a loan from a bank,” I finally typed back on my phone, the Arabic characters displaying on my screen in what I hoped was a clear answer.

“How do you get a loan?” she typed in reply.

I typed out a short answer about applying to the bank, paying bills on time and having a good job.

“Houses cost a lot of money,” I typed. “Thousands of dollars.”

She pressed me for how many thousands so I ventured a guess, one that disheartens me. I underestimated by a lot, knowing that even a low number could be discouraging. We calculated the equivalent in Iraqi dinar, an incomprehensible amount to my brain.

“Ah. Okay,” she said.

And that was that.

—

A lot of the refugees I meet have this goal: to buy a house of their own. They rent houses and apartments in our city and many of them dream of getting out into the country.

Confession: I am not unlike them. Phil and I will be married 10 years next year and we have rented apartments or homes in that entire time.

I want to buy a house. And even to us, it seems almost out of reach. Income is one of many factors, and we have one full-time job and one part-time job in our household. I don’t know if I’ve ever truly latched on to The American Dream, and if I have it seemed a reasonable goal. Shouldn’t getting an education and working hard lead to dreams come true? (I know it’s more complicated than that.)

I wonder how this American Dream in the Land of Opportunity looks to refugees. And how does it live up to their expectations? How does it fail?

One of the most common observations refugees make about our country is how expensive everything is. Here, we pay for a house, utilities, transportation, food, clothing, Internet. It is not the same in these countries, and sometimes that is because of life in the refugee camps, where food and clothing are provided through humanitarian organizations and other things are unavailable or also provided in limited quantity.

The closest comparison I have is when I moved into my first apartment after college back in my hometown. Until that time, most of what I needed had been provided by my parents. We didn’t have a lot but we always had enough.  Less than a year after starting my first full-time job, I was in an apartment with a roommate and my very own bills to pay. It can be a bit of shock to discover what it costs to heat a home or use electricity or gas up the car.

—

It is not only refugees who face these kinds of circumstances. I know legal immigrants who live here and cannot find jobs in their field so they end up working second shift cleaning a school or housekeeping at a hotel. Or they have a legitimate background in a scientific field but cannot find anyone to hire them. Some of the refugees have medical backgrounds. They teach us when we try to teach them about disease prevention.

Sometimes there is a language barrier, sure, and sometimes it is a scheduling problem with childcare or the school day.

So, I wonder sometimes if the American Dream is a letdown.

Maybe we oversell it.

I love the opportunities we have in this country and I love that we are mostly a land where children can go to school in safety. Where we do not have to worry about bombs falling in our neighborhoods or dictatorial rulers. I think we have a lot to offer people from other countries where this is not the case.

I just think maybe we need a reality check on what the American Dream really is and how attainable it is. Even some who are born and raised here in the United States do not have a guarantee that they will achieve the American Dream.

—

I don’t know where exactly this mother and her daughter are from, but as we sat in that upper room of a downtown church, half a world away, a military offensive began in Iraq to free its second-largest city from the control of militants.

And the little girl colored pictures.

picture

Maybe the American Dream is flawed. But the little girl smiled at me as she drew and colored while we taught the grown-ups about finances. She left early with her mom for a dentist appointment.

I don’t want our country to fail her.

My biggest struggle when I work with refugees is to find a balance between hope for the future and reality of the present. Settling in to American life can be a long walk uphill, but so many of these men and women have already traveled great distances, literally and figuratively. I believe they can persevere here.

But they can’t do it alone, and that’s why I’m there on Tuesdays when I could be other places.

To make the transition a tiny bit easier if possible.

And to cheer them on to the kind of future we all want for our kids and families:

Better.

The issue at hand

Languages filled the air. French. Arabic. Spanish. Swahili. A world contained in a basement room. My English-only brain has a difficult time with all of them. Translation was well covered on this particular Tuesday, so I spoke the only other language I know: the language of children.

Each week that I volunteer with our local refugee community is a mystery and a surprise: who will be there? how many people? From which countries? Will anyone speak a little English?

That day, the room was full. Numerous families with multiple small children, attending one of eight required cultural orientation classes as newly arrived members of our community. It is an exhausting stretch of time for a rested adult. For children, the two hours drag on.

Playing with children is never my first instinct (you can ask my own kids) but on Tuesday mornings I will myself to do what needs to be done. So, I brought the bin of blocks out to the main meeting area. These ubiquitous colored-cardboard church blocks that look like bricks are a safe option almost anywhere. I dumped them on the floor. I couldn’t use my voice to call the children to me, so I sat on the floor and began building a tower.

Sometimes invitation needs no words.

The first child approached with cautious interest. I handed him one of these brick-blocks and he held it with two hands. A second child came close and I handed one to him. Soon, the other children took interest and eventually six children surrounded me on the floor as we built with blocks.

I could not take my eyes off of them.

Three were Ugandan/Congolese. Three were Syrian.

Children of conflict, so the news says, but that morning they stacked blocks as tall as they could reach and higher (with my help) before the little boy with mischief in his eyes knocked down the tower. I have one son, so I also speak the language of boys and even though we could not communicate with words, we were having fun.

We did this again and again. Build the tower tall. Knock it over. Repeat.

We attempted variations stacking the blocks vertically until they toppled. We built a “road” stretching the blocks from one side of the room to the other. My favorite was when we arranged the blocks into a rectangle, and three of the boys sat down inside the rectangle. Two Ugandan, one Syrian, and they sat inside the block shape as if they were lifelong friends.

I wanted to snap a picture but my phone was across the room, and I would have needed to ask the parents’ permission and language was already a barrier. I captured the moment in my mind. I hope you can see it, too.

What impressed on my brain was how these children played. Like any child anywhere. I could have been playing with my own children at that age. There was no difference.

Photo by Tina Floersch via Unsplash

Photo by Tina Floersch via Unsplash

Later, we walked through the city to the market, our bi-weekly adventure to introduce the newly settled refugees to the fresh produce and food offerings at the indoor farmers’ market.

The youngest Syrian boy ran circles around his family until the father finally picked him up and slung him over his shoulder. I could not keep the smile from my face, for my husband would do the same when our son got rowdy or restless. The boy laughed and squirmed and the father kept at it as we walked. The girls took turns holding hands with their mother and each other and sometimes their father.

I offered my hand to one girl and she took it as we passed through the streets. We all stopped to watch the water squirt up from the ground in a splash pad/fountain near the courts building. The children watched in awe. Their restraint at not jumping into the water was admirable.

A Congolese couple took turns taking pictures in front of this building, proof of their new life in the United States. Their smiles, they are contagious, and already I feel they are my friends. I would greet them on the street or anywhere in public.

We are only a few blocks from the market when the young Syrian boy slaps me on the lower back, either to get my attention or because it is what mischievous little boys find funny. I offer him my other hand, and he takes it, and I walk this way for the remaining blocks, holding the hands of two Syrian children, exchanging smiles with their mother, laughing with the father, as if all is right with the world.

Photo by Kazuend via Unsplash

Photo by Kazuend via Unsplash

Yet as I hold the hands of the children I cannot shake from my mind the images of war I have seen from their country. The children dead or injured. The weeping parents. The desperation and relief of those who have taken the risk to leave and who make it to another shore. I both want to know and don’t want to know which of these is part of this family’s story.

This girl with the pigtails, skipping down the street, her hand in mine is the global refugee crisis in the flesh.

This boy with his antics so much like my son is the issue everyone is talking about, and I can feel his small hand in mine.

A week later we gathered in a different room in a different part of the city. Fewer children were present but two of the Syrian children and one of the Ugandan children were there. They begged me with their eyes for paper and colored pencils and they scribbled on scraps, delighted to be doing something. They tapped my leg, my arm, whatever they could to get my attention. They spoke to me in Arabic, their eyes wide with pleading, and I replied in English that I did not know what they wanted.

The little girl, the older sister, whispered in her brother’s ear, and it is the exact same thing I have seen my daughter do with her brother, the younger one.

We are not so different, no matter our country of origin, the language we speak, how we dress, whether our hair is covered or not.

We can talk all we want about policies and plans and provisions. We can share and react and comment on social media. We can fear and hate and protect in the name of security.

What we cannot do is forget or ignore or deny the issue at hand. Quite literally, the issue was at the end of my hand, and I will not watch the news now without thinking of these children. The lucky ones, I call them, because they are among the 1 percent of all refugees who reach resettlement.

And on a Tuesday morning in a small city in Pennsylvania, I got to hold their hands.