The Middle of Everywhere

Title Page

Table of Contents

...

Dedication

Copyright

Epigraph

Contents

Foreword

Prelude

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

PART TWO

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

PART THREE

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

CODA

Appendices

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

A HARVEST BOOK
•
HARCOURT, INC
.
Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London

To Sara, Zeke, Jamie, Kate, and Aidan

Copyright © 2002 by Mary Pipher

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be
mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

www.HarcourtBooks.com

Translation of "Hoa Sen" ("The Lotus Flower")
taken from
The Lotus Seed
by Sherry Garland.

A portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to
The Pipher Refugee Fund, Lincoln Action Program,
210 O Street, Lincoln, Nebraska 68508.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pipher, Mary Bray.
The middle of everywhere: the world's refugees come to our town/
Mary Pipher.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-15-100600-8 (perm. paper) ISBN 0-15-602737-2 (pbk.)
1. Refugees—United States. I. Title.
JV6601 .P56 2002
305.9'0691—dc21 2001005863

Text set in Bembo
Designed by Linda Lockowitz

Printed in the United States of America
First Harvest edition 2003
K J

There seemed to be nothing to see, no fences,
no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road
I could not make it out in the faint starlight.
There was nothing but land. Not a country at all but
the material out of which countries are made.

—W
ILLA
C
ATHER

Foreword
[>]

Prelude: Ellis Island
[>]

PART ONE: HIDDEN
in
PLAIN SIGHT

Chapter 1: Cultural Collisions on the Great Plains
[>]

Chapter 2: The Beautiful Laughing Sisters—An Arrival Story
[>]

Chapter 3: Into the Heart of the Heartland
[>]

Chapter 4: All that Glitters...
[>]

PART TWO: REFUGEES
across the
LIFE CYCLE

Chapter 5: Children of Hope, Children of Tears
[>]

Chapter 6: Teenagers—Mohammed Meets Madonna
[>]

Chapter 7: Young Adults—"Is There a Marriage Broker in Lincoln?"
[>]

Chapter 8: Family—"A Bundle of Sticks Cannot Be Broken"
[>]

PART THREE:
The
ALCHEMY
of
HEALING-TURNING PAIN
into
MEANING

Chapter 9: African Stories
[>]

Chapter 10: Healing in all Times and Places
[>]

Chapter 11: Home—A Global Positioning System for Identity
[>]

Chapter 12: Building a Village of Kindness
[>]

Coda: We're All Here Now
[>]

Appendices

1. Working with People for Whom English Is a New Language
[>]

2. Becoming a Cultural Broker
[>]

3. Universal Declaration of Human Rights
[>]

Bibliography
[>]

Acknowledgments
[>]

Index
[>]

As long as there is respect and acknowledgment of connections, things continue working. When that stops, we all die.

—J
OY
H
ARJO

I finished this book on refugees in Nebraska on September 9 and on September 10 my husband and I flew to Canada. This was our first vacation in a year, a well-earned vacation—a time to catch up on laughter, sleep, hikes, and novels. We drove from Calgary to a cabin nestled along Baker Creek in a valley between Castle Rock and Storm Mountain. On our way we stopped to watch caribou and mule deer. The bushes and grasses were turning mauve and rose, the aspens golden. In the late afternoon sunlight, we marveled at the luxury of living cradled in these mountains for a week.

Tuesday morning we woke early and planned our first hike. As we walked out into a blue and gold day, a man stopped us and asked if we were Americans. When we nodded, he said, "Some terrible things are happening in your country. You'd better go to the basement gym and watch television."

We sat on folding chairs with other tourists for several hours. No one talked—we just watched and cried. At first I was in shock, then slowly I began to piece together the personal implications. I worked with three publishing companies in New York and I worried if my friends were safe. My daughter was scheduled to fly to D.C. from Cape Town, South Africa, Tuesday morning. Where was she? The Canadian/United States border and the airports were closed. How would we get home? Yet never had my own little life looked so petty. There were bigger issues: How many people were dead? What did this mean for America? What would happen to my refugee friends? Was the world as we knew it gone?

Later we walked outside into the crisp September afternoon. The world had changed and the world was the same, the same golden aspen and purple grasses, the same ripe rose hips and rushing water over smooth gray stones. We were safe in a beautiful place, but we weren't thinking and feeling what we had planned to be thinking and feeling.

As I looked through our binoculars for grizzlies and mountain sheep, I was thinking
is my editor dead? Are people trapped under the rubble right now, scared and in pain?
I imagined how frightened the passengers on the hijacked jets must have been, and I kept hearing imaginary airplanes. Watching the river, my husband said sadly, "No matter how crazy we humans act, the water keeps on flowing."

The beautiful time and place seemed to deliberately induce irony and contrast. The silver glaciers, emerald forests, and turquoise lakes humbled us. I kept thinking about all this sacred beauty in our sad, deformed world.

On 9/11, the book I had just finished seemed meaningless.
The Middle of Everywhere
felt like it had been written in and for a world that no longer existed. But later that afternoon, as I tried to read the books I'd brought with me—one on the Sand Hills of Nebraska and another on the life of Ben Franklin—I realized they were irrelevant, too. On September 11 everything—Shakespeare, Broadway, flower gardens, Bob Dylan—was irrelevant. Only Jihad and death seemed to matter.

Fortunately time didn't stop on September 11. As weeks passed we all began to put our terrible tragedy into perspective. My book began to seem applicable to the new world, maybe even more so than before. Refugees were still here, and they were even more beleaguered. A Kurdish family called to say, "We are confused and frightened and cannot eat. We have been harassed at work for being Muslim." Mohamed told me, "Bintu and I fear we have brought the war from Sierra Leone to America. We thought America was safe. Now we don't know where to run."

One of our greatest needs as a nation is to understand how other people see us, and this book is filled with stories about how people from different countries and religious traditions view Americans. In the aftermath of the disaster we all have images of Arab terrorists in our heads. In spite of our values and best intentions, we all are occasionally guilty of racial profiling. This book gives readers other images and replaces fearful stereotypes with stories of real and interesting people. I truly hope it will be an antidote to hatred and fear.

I have been struck by the kindness of many Americans toward our Muslim neighbors. One of my friends, a psychologist, lost his brother who worked at the World Trade Center. As he flew back to New York to pack up his brother's apartment, he made arrangements to start a Muslim-support group for local people. At Lincoln High students asked their teachers how they could organize to help Muslim kids. Twenty members of our South Street Temple volunteered to help refugees who were frightened by the recent events. Our politicians, our newspapers, and our churches have worked non-stop to make sure no hate crimes were committed in our town.

All over our country people have an impulse to help, to make our country safer and stronger. One of the best ways to help is to befriend newcomers. As we welcome refugees and teach them about us, we learn about them, and we develop wiser and more nuanced views of our world. This book encourages Americans to become involved with newcomers and offers many ideas about how to do that.

After September 11, we are all refugees from what was once our America. We have been exiled from a country that felt safe and calm and now we live in a new country filled with fear. We can learn from the refugees among us how to deal with our fears and sorrows. Our newcomers have experienced panic, loss, disruption, and vulnerability. They have learned to cope with catastrophes, and they can teach us how to survive these things. They can help us learn to live in the world with broken hearts.

Now that we have been terrorized, we have more empathy with others. When I returned from Canada I told Mohamed that, for the first time, I felt I could understand how he felt in Sierra Leone, not that our situation was as terrible, but that I had experienced similar feelings of shock, fear for my children, confusion, and depression. He was very quiet and then said, "I'm sorry you have to know how I feel."

On September 11 Americans felt what many of the world's people have felt for years. That day ended our illusions about our invulnerability and our isolation from the rest of the world. We joined the world's huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We need more than ever what I call "the attributes of resilience." We all want and need what refugees want and need. We yearn for family and friends, meaning, calmness, routines, useful work, and spiritual solace.

One of the main points of this book is that identity is no longer based on territory. The world community is small and interconnected. We are all living in one big town. This tragedy has provided us with the most significant teachable moment in our history. We can learn from this to be kinder and more appreciative of life. And we can learn the importance of understanding the perspectives of all our neighbors in our global village. We can learn that the entire world needs stronger international courts and policing bodies and an agreed upon standard of acceptable conduct. All of us can work together to enforce the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in all countries and to provide our global community with economic and social justice.

The great lesson of September 11 is that we are all connected. Either we all are safe or none of us is safe. Either we are all free of fear or none of us is. Right now we have a window of opportunity to rethink our policies and to deal with the world differently, more fairly and compassionately. These events can lead to a national renewal of energy and compassion as well as to what Gay Talese called "an enlargement of our capacity to be human."

Buddha was asked about the effects of enlightenment on his life. He said, "Before enlightenment I chopped wood and carried water. After enlightenment I chopped wood and carried water." That is how I feel about life now. Everything is totally different. I see the world and feel the world in a new way and yet, I carry on as before. In the end, I decided that to let this book die was to let terrorists be the storytellers for our global village.
The Middle of Everywhere
is my way to chop wood and carry water.

ELLIS ISLAND

Jane and I sailed to Ellis Island from Battery Park on a gorgeous summer morning. As Manhattan, once called New Amsterdam, sparkled in the distance, we found a place on deck among the other tourists.

Jane has been my editor for the last seven years. She's the first-generation daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants. I'm the great-granddaughter of Irish peasants who came to America escaping the potato famine and of Scottish immigrants who came as bond slaves.

Our ferry retraced the immigrants' voyage into the harbor. We stopped briefly at the Statue of Liberty to unload sightseers. Jane told me that one immigrant saw the statue and asked, "Is that Mrs. Roosevelt?"

Jane recited from memory the famous words:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Then she said proudly, "A Jewish woman, Emma Lazarus, wrote that poem."

We docked at Ellis Island and walked under sycamores into the same central hall immigrants once entered. A poet described this hall as a haunted ballroom where people danced their lives away. She was referring to the ghosts of those quarantined and IQ tested, then sent back home. Or perhaps to the twenty thousand people who died here in one month during an influenza epidemic.