The Middle of Everywhere (41 page)

Communication difficulties can be overcome. Most immigrants are eager to have American friends. They have been kind and generous with me. A kind heart and an eagerness to learn allow much to be forgiven.

When I meet newcomers, I have learned to ask, "How do you like to be greeted in your country? How do you like to be addressed?" If the content is right, the form can be awkward. The message must be, "I respect you, I want to understand your situation and be of use." Wherever I went, I learned to say, "Welcome. I am glad you are here."

Some lessons were funny. I learned that gender trumps body mass. Once my husband and I delivered a couch to a refugee relief center. A Laotian man weighing about seventy-five pounds insisted on helping Jim carry in this couch while we hefty Nebraska women stood by. I felt ridiculous, but I understood it was a matter of pride.

Other lessons made me ashamed. Watching
The African
Queen
with African friends, I was acutely aware that the heroes were all white. The non-whites were props—nameless, servile, and mostly stupid beasts of burden. Their culture was primitive and their personalities were childlike. I was embarrassed for us and for them.

Writing this book, I have learned more about my own city. Before my work with refugees, I didn't know what people experienced in our human service system, our community action program, and Catholic Social Services. I didn't know what it was like to be on food stamps or Medicaid. For years I had driven by factories and never noticed them. I knew nothing about our many large food-processing plants. I'd never called OSHA or the INS, or sat in the health department waiting to apply for the WIC program.

I'd never tried to rent an apartment for a large family with no wage earner. I hadn't noticed my city's pawnshops or check-cashing joints. I had no idea how much was bought and sold through our newspapers. Before my work for this book, I'd never been in certain parts of Lincoln. Studying refugees was studying my town from a very different angle.

In Lincoln I found two worlds. We have a prosperous middle-class culture and a culture of the poor. I had been in one and I began to move in the other. Neither culture has a monopoly on happiness or truth. I enjoyed the second culture a great deal. Sometimes it seemed more honest, more authentic and caring. Poor people can't afford not to share.

I felt schizoid. I'd spend time with my friends and we'd talk about new movies and CDs, and book signings we might attend. My friends talked about the stock market or whether they should remodel their kitchens. Then I'd visit refugees and talk about slavery in Sudan or how to smuggle insulin into Iraq.

Once I left a potluck party with tables filled with fruit, salads, and sliced meats and fish. I stopped by Bintu's to hear that two of her friends from the camp in Ghana had starved to death. They were allowed only four cups of rice a month. She said, "They will all die eventually if we don't get them out of there."

A friend told me about meeting a man from Togo. He had been the bodyguard to the king, but he had joined a small group trying to bring in democracy. He was arrested and sentenced to die. He swam with his family across a river to a refugee camp where they lived for seven years. Now he was in Nebraska. He asked my friend for a desk that had been carried to the street for trash pickup. My friend said he could have the desk and later saw him carrying the desk down the street on his shoulders.

Too often we Americans, myself included, indulge ourselves in the great white whine and complain about the .001 percent of our lives that is not perfect. There was a
New Yorker
cartoon labeled "Yuppie angst" in which a character driving a car says to his rider, "Oh no, I spilled cappuccino on my down vest." I realize that much of my misery is "Yuppie angst." I worry about a postponed hair appointment or a dying rosebush. Meanwhile, my refugee friends worry about whether their relatives will starve to death or their friends are being tortured.

Even though I always have played some variant of the globe game, that is to say, I have always been interested in others, I started this project as a white protected Nebraskan. I am Irish-English married to a Heinz 57 German. Most of my friends were of European background. As I've made friends with people of Mideastern, Latino, African, and Southeast Asian backgrounds, I've changed a great deal. I've stopped seeing myself as a member of a majority culture. Instead, I see myself as a member of a world culture that flourishes in my hometown.

I have grown both more and less aware of differences. I have more appreciation for the endless variations of the human experience, and yet I'm aware we are all more alike than we are different. Leonard Peltier described my feelings exactly when he wrote, "You reach across the world of otherness to one, and you touch your own soul." I have become part of that new American race that includes all colors and is characterized by Alice Walker as "people who love." Lincoln has become for me the middle of everywhere.

We hope the world won't narrow into a neighborhood until it has broadened into a brotherhood.

—L
YNDON
B
AINES
J
OHNSON

Researching this book has made me both more critical and more appreciative of America. I have seen through the eyes of newcomers how we treat our most vulnerable residents. During a time when we gave ourselves a tax cut, our government refused to allocate funds to support the Kakuma refugees while they attended high school. These refugees had spent their childhoods without parents, eating grass, and watching their friends being killed. Now, in this country, they desperately needed to learn to read. Instead, our government told them they must support themselves and even repay their plane ticket expenses. Meanwhile, we gave tax rebates to billionaires.

I don't like our isolationism and "America first" tendencies. We Americans are taking more than our fair share of the world's resources. To use Carol Bly's term, we are "lucky predators." We do not deserve more than other people. I would like to see a fairer distribution system and more aid going whenever and wherever there is great suffering. To quote David Brower, "The world is burning up and sometimes all I hear is the sound of violins."

The INS is a mess, underfunded and burdened with red tape. And we criminalize the victims of our inefficient system. We have factories and businesses that use up people and toss them away. We have too many laws that favor the rich and the propertied and not enough laws to protect the poor. We make it very difficult to call OSHA and report health hazards at a factory. Our town has its share of sleazy landlords and salespeople.

But many of us are better than our institutions. I have seen the kindness of ordinary Nebraskans to the newcomers. Attorneys and doctors work for free. Churches sponsor families. My friends have delivered piles of supplies and clothes to my doorstep to help the families I know. One friend, not very wealthy herself, told me, "Call me if you ever need money for a refugee family." Another said, "I have too much stuff and will give it to anyone you suggest." A local businesswoman risked her life to take in a Laotian woman being stalked by an ex-boyfriend. When Joseph first went to work, his supervisor greeted him warmly, saying, "Welcome. We are happy you are here."

Even though I am critical of our government in many ways, I also realize how lucky we are to live in the United States. I bristle when I hear people criticize all government as bad. I have met many people who lived in places where there was virtually no government. We don't want to live in those places.

I have great respect for our constitution, our schools, and many of our institutions. But love means wanting to make things better. People can be greedy and imperfect; institutions have important roles to play in keeping us civilized. Having heard stories of governments crumbling and of lives changing overnight, I am more aware of the fragility of governments, even ours.

The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you won't know what justice is.

—H
OWARD
Z
INN

Refugees are vulnerable people and like all vulnerable people they are exploited. They will work the worst jobs for the lowest wages, live in the lousiest houses and drive the crummiest cars, for which they are overcharged. Just because we can exploit newcomers doesn't mean we should. As Albert Camus wrote, "It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners."

The Portes and Rumbaut research makes it clear that for newcomers the first few years in America are a critical period. They have an initial optimism and energy that enables them to work hard and in some cases achieve enormous gains. They will either move into the middle class in a generation or two or they will languish at the bottom of our socioeconomic hierarchy.

We are making it difficult for our newcomers to climb out of entry-level jobs in America. Today there is no longer really a ladder into the middle class. Of course, a few amazing people will always be able to make it, but there are too many barriers for the average refugee. We are leaving too many people behind.

Unless we once again develop that ladder, we will have a permanent underclass of disaffected, resentful people. We need a livable wage, housing subsidies, and more access to education and job training. We need stronger unions and better regulations to protect our most vulnerable workers. The INS needs to be reformed. Its procedures need to be fester, kinder, and more comprehensible.

Helping our newcomers with living wages, decent housing, education, and health care will be expensive and require commitment and compassion. These tasks will be hard, but we Americans have done hard things before. We underestimate each other's basic goodness. We could do this.

The worst thing about America is its exclusivity, and the best thing about America is its lack of exclusivity. We are not bigger or richer in natural resources than Russia or China. It is our open arms and hearts that have made us a great power. The central fact of our American identity is that we take people in. We make room for refugees. We are the city on the hill.

Community does not mean "free of conflict." It's inevitable and even healthy to have great differences. Diversity in community is as healthy as diversity in any ecosystem. Without diversity in age, ethnicity, and ideas, we don't have communities; we have lifestyle enclaves. Even conflict can lead to closeness. As Dennis Schmitz wrote, "Humans wrestle with each other, and sometimes that wrestling turns into embracing."

Long ago, Carl Rogers noted the paradox that the most personal is the most universal. The deeper we go into our souls, the more they look like everyone else's soul. Carlos Fuentes wrote, "
Reconozcamonos en el y ella que no son come tu y yo.
" Or, "Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me." At heart, we all want the same things—happy families, good health, close friends, and useful work. We want freedom and respect.

One time I sat at the health department with a pregnant Sudanese teenager. She was tall and wore her hair in dreadlocks. She had on a red polka-dot dress and purple slippers and was a marvelous, but unusual, sight. As she and I sat waiting for her appointment, a Vietnamese toddler approached us. The little girl stared at my friend for a very long time.

At first it was cute, then it grew a bit uncomfortable. The toddler was examining my friend as if she were trying to decide if she was human. All of a sudden, the little girl smiled broadly and blew my friend a kiss. We laughed in relief, but the laughter was about something deeper than relief. It was about the ability of us humans to recognize ourselves in another. It was about our ability to see our common humanity and blow each other a kiss of welcome.

"Civilization can in a certain sense be reduced to one word—welcome," Stanley Crouch said on the Ken Burns PBS series on jazz. For all our flaws, we Americans have been, for hundreds of years, the people in the world who said welcome.

When Europeans arrived on this continent, they blew it with the Native Americans. They plowed over them, taking as much as they could of their land and valuables, and respecting almost nothing about the native cultures. They lost the wisdom of the indigenous peoples—wisdom about the land and connectedness to the great web of life. What a different America we would have today if the first Europeans had paid more attention to native traditions.

We have another chance with all these refugees. People come here penniless but not cultureless. They bring us gifts. We can synthesize the best of our traditions with the best of theirs. We can teach and learn from each other to produce a better America. This time around, we can get things right.

On a sunny Saturday in July, my husband and I walked into our farmers' market which is down by the train station in the oldest part of town. We walked by Jim's friend of thirty years who was selling sweet corn. Gary looked hot and harried, so Jim stopped and gave him a quick shoulder rub. Gary smiled gratefully and began to joke again with his customers.

We walked past various brightly colored displays of Super-soynuts, kolaches, gourmet mushrooms, sausage, and prairie flowers. A Latino family sold gladiolas, iris bulbs, and catnip. Beside them a man in overalls grilled green onion sausage. Its spicy pork flavor filled the air. An Italian man and his son stood behind quart jars of homemade pasta sauce. An aged Vietnamese couple sold bean paste dumplings and egg rolls. Many Vietnamese families shopped at the market for fresh produce and flowers. I looked in vain for Ly, the student who thought I was beautiful. I would have given a great deal to see her smiling face this morning.

Women in hijabs examined tomatoes alongside women in shorts and tank tops. Children speaking many languages splashed in the fountain by the old train station. One boy I didn't recognize wore a faded shirt that looked like one I had given to Goodwill years ago. It was from a distant KISS concert.