Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

volunteer work

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.

I walked with a refugee

More than eight years ago now, our new little family moved the 800 miles across country from the farmlands of the Midwest to the edge of Amish country, Pennsylvania.

At the time, I was mildly interested in reading Amish fiction. As I sat in our rental house with the windows open in early fall, reading while our baby girl napped, I could hear the clip-clop of horse hooves on the road. Occasionally, a buggy would roll by. I was giddy. It was like my books were coming to life right outside my door. I shopped where the Amish shopped. Sometimes, we spoke.

Fast forward and we now live in what I think is the heart of Amish country. The newness of this community has worn off and I rarely read Amish fiction anymore. But the lure of the real-life communities on which so much fiction is based is a lucrative business, one that supports our family, so I really can’t complain.

But I’m no longer awed by the buggies rolling past my house at all hours of the day, or the passel of Amish children walking to school. (Okay, maybe it is still a little bit interesting. I’m human, after all.)

Time and proximity have lessened the novelty of the Amish community.

These days, my thoughts are consumed by another people group.

—

Not long ago, I read a book about the world’s largest refugee camp as told through the eyes of nine of its residents. The camp is in Kenya, which is part of what drew my interest. I read whatever I can these days about Africa and refugees, and I will spend my last breath talking about these precious people with whom the world does not quite know what to do.

Lena Bell via Unsplash

Lena Bell via Unsplash

Once a week, most weeks, I sit in a church basement next to newly arrived refugees from a variety of countries. We listen to presentations on family finances and nutrition and diseases and I do my best to help them understand the English, even though I have no fluency in any other language. Sometimes, most times, it is messy and awkward and maybe of no help at all.

But it is my favorite time of the week because my world gets just a little bigger each time.

Some weeks, we take a walk through the city down to the indoor farmers’ market so they can see the kinds of things available to them: fruits, vegetables, meat, cheese, milk. For many of them, it is a somewhat recognizable environment.

I’m never quite sure what to do on these walks. I love keeping quiet and just taking in the city, but I often feel the need to fill the silence with questions I haven’t had a chance to ask yet: How long have you been here? Where did you live before this? How many in your family? 

photo-1436303892196-e039f81a04aa

Jamie Taylor via Unsplash

They are surface questions, for sure, but the answers say so much. Every refugee I meet identifies himself or herself by the country in which they were born, or their family’s country of origin, even if they have never lived there, even if it is a land they do not remember. It would be like if we told people we were English or Irish or German instead of American.

I want to listen and understand, but the noise of the streets and my failing hearing make understanding difficult.

On this most recent day, I walked with a Somali man whose English was better than I expected. We exchanged the initial information about families and kids. He expressed excitement and praise when he found out my husband is named “Phillip.” (This I want him to explain the next time, though my husband tells me it’s a nod to the Philip of the Bible who explained the Gospel to the Ethiopian eunuch.)

I tried to figure out where he had come from between here and Somalia. Most refugees do not come to the U.S. from their country of origin. My question was lost in translation. But as we walked, he told me of his family, some of whom are still in a refugee camp in Kenya.

“Ifo,” he says. “They are in Ifo.”

“I know Ifo,” I say, knowing that it is Kenya and I have heard of it somewhere.

Later, it hits me: Ifo is one of the camps I have recently read about in City of Thorns. I tell my husband that I walked with a man whose family is in the largest refugee camp in the world. And I pause because Ifo is no place to call “home.”

Let’s be honest: any refugee camp is no place to call “home.” Thousands of people crammed into a plot of land in a host country, maybe unwanted, relying on assistance from the U.N., given the bare minimum to survive. The camps are full of disease and danger, worse than any slum you could imagine. No one wants to be there, and yet, there they are. In the camps, life goes on for years. Decades. Babies are born. Couples wed. Family members die. Some find work. Others turn to drugs to numb the despair. Some dream of a better life, of a chance to resettle somewhere else. (The truth is only 1 percent of refugees resettle. One. Percent.)

I think about my own dreams and I wonder if I could hold on to them for years. Decades. Especially if I saw no evidence of my dream coming true.

I think of none of these things as I walk with this man who is speaking to me as quickly as his English will allow. Eventually, I realize, he is trying to teach me his language. So, I find myself leaning in a little and listening to the sounds that are similar to English yet altogether different. He teaches me to say, “How are you?” and “I am fine” in Somali, and though I know my attempts must sound ridiculous to him, he is effusive in his praise.

And I am oblivious to the people around me. We walk through the city laughing and repeating after each other, flanked by an older Somali man wearing a knit cap and a young man and woman, the latter fully covered from head to toe except for her face.

When we arrive at market, I point out my husband and my new friend walks over and hugs him like he’s an old friend. (My husband is not terribly surprised by these greetings.) After a short tour of the market, we wave good-bye, and I hope I will see him again next week.

More than that, though, I echo his hope for his family, stuck in the world’s largest refugee camp.

“If Allah wills,” he says, “they will come here.”

I do not call God, “Allah,” but I am also not offended by the name. Yes, I think. I will ask God for the same.

—

I am reading another book these days. This one is about a woman desperate to make a difference to the poor and the wanderers in her community but who finds her efforts falling terribly short of her goals. She calls herself a failed missionary, and she writes story after story about her work with a Somali population in the Pacific Northwest.

And as I sit in the basement room with a group of Somalis, as we walk the city, I think about the characters coming to life. I feel like I am in her story or her story is walking around with me.

Yet these are more than characters in a book. They are real-life people. Flesh and blood.

It is easy to read about these people or those over there, to think of them as a cause or a charity or a need we should support. I do this, too. Much harder to remember that the people we read about, the people whose lives we pity, are people just like us. They have families. They have skills. They smile and laugh and dream.

They have survived things we cannot begin to imagine.

And to walk with them is an honor.