The Middle of Everywhere (8 page)

While the others dealt with trick-or-treaters, Meena and I did dishes. We talked about time lines and I made the point that most lives alternate between easy and hard times. Meena looked at me and said with no self-pity, "Never in my life have I had one day that has been easy."

The trick-or-treaters were great fun. The sisters enjoyed every child, admiring each, discussing costumes, and laughing at the remarks the kids made. I hadn't enjoyed a Halloween as much since my kids were young.

I taught the sisters to play bingo. They loved it and happily called out, "Bingo." The prizes were embarrassingly small. I had gathered up the soaps, shampoos, lotions, and even mouthwashes from hotels I had stayed in and I'd put them in a hat. Whoever won a bingo, got her choice. The sisters agonized over their selections. They were excited and grateful for these gifts. I was almost chagrined by their gratitude, but I was having too much fun to be really upset. The evening passed, punctuated by a chorus of "Happy Halloween," "Trick or treat," "Say cheese." "Bingo."

Shireen and I had spent hours touring local campuses, reading catalogs, and filling out forms. The process of deciding on a college, getting relevant information for enrollment, and getting moneys arranged had been cumbersome. I was struck by how much there is to know about college. For example, whom do you call for information?; how do you arrange a tour?; how do you enroll?; what are the deadlines?; what do you put in the essays?; where, when, and how do you apply for funds?; what is a major?; what are prerequisites?; and how do you read a course schedule?

I am generations deep in family with college degrees. My grandmother graduated from Peru State Teachers College in 1907. My mother was a doctor. I'd attended half a dozen colleges myself, my husband has a Ph.D, and my kids are both college graduates. But what about newcomers working in a foreign language in a system unfamiliar to them in any language? The complexity and strangeness of the system puts up many barriers.

Shireen finally decided on the community college that was cheaper and offered both short-term degrees that led to relatively good jobs and an academic transfer program that led to a college degree. The community college had an adult education program, with a more flexible schedule for factory workers than our universities.

We had turned in her family's tax records and written the scholarship applications. Finally, we were ready to enroll. I picked Shireen up at 6:00
A.M.
so that we could be first in line at the 7:00
A.M
. registration. She was dressed up college-girl style, with jeans, a sweater, makeup, and big hair. She was excited and nervous, with all her papers in order, we thought.

At the college we stood in long lines. Shireen told me that she had seen the movie
Quills,
about the Marquis de Sade. I grimaced and said I was sorry she'd seen it. She asked what sadomasochism was. I tried to explain the word, but she couldn't quite grasp its meaning. She had never been exposed to anything like this. I said bluntly that mixing sex and violence was a terrible idea. I reflected on the irony that she was the war victim and refugee and I, the middle-class Nebraskan, was telling her about sadism.

Finally, it was our time to sign up. We found out that the classes Shireen wanted were full. A less-experienced guide would have given up, but I knew how to work the system and how to plead with a dean. Eventually Shireen was enrolled. I paid her fees. Later she would be reimbursed by her Pell Grant and could sign over the check to me. But, again, what happens to newcomers without American friends?

We bought her pencils, notebooks, and books, and she was shocked at the prices. As we walked out of the college and back to my car, Shireen said, "I am the first woman in the history of my nuclear family, in a thousand years of women, to go to college." She was beaming. Yes, I thought to myself, this paperwork and standing in lines has been worth the bother.

During the holidays my children visited and we had a holiday feast for them at the sisters' house with gifts and lots of pictures.

Zeenat met us at the door and hugged Jim and me and our kids. Meena made us chai and we sat in the small living room on the couch that used to be in my therapy office. Nasreen showed us pictures of their sister in Iraq and their home from years ago, before Hussein. Leila asked Jim husband about snow tires for her car. Then we opened gifts. We'd bought them a calendar, wind chimes, origami paper, and a cookbook. Zeenat carried them from person to person for examination. They gave me delicate gold earrings. All the gifts were much admired and appreciated.

Then Tanya and Shehla offered to paint my daughter-inlaw, Jamie, and my daughter, Sara, with henna. This took a while. They painted brown-and-gold fish on their hands. We looked at photos of our happy year together and they told my kids stories of our many trips.

Sara mentioned she had a dream the night before, and the sisters leaped in with dream interpretation. I noted with interest that Freud was not the first to develop symbol systems for dreams. Long ago, the Kurds had one all worked out. Sara had dreamed of a dog, which in the Kurdish system meant "enemy," but at least the dog was small and white. The sisters agreed that women were good luck in dreams and men were symbols of danger. Snake and scorpion dreams were bad luck. Dreams about roads were very important and predicted the future with great accuracy.

Then Shehla read our palms. She told Sara she would have three husbands, all handsome. I was to have two, not a good fortune for me since I was happily married to my first. Jamie would have many healthy babies.

Shireen showed Jim and my son, Zeke, the college essays she had written. Jamie and Sara and I watched as Shehla taught us to make a wonderful Kurdish dessert. It involved filling French crepes with crème, folding them, and then sprinkling them with pistachios. Zeke helped chop cucumbers and tomatoes for salad.

I had brought grapes and pomegranates, and Tanya had fixed her delicious biryani. Leila showed up just as dinner was served. She worked two jobs now and I almost never saw her. She had deep circles under her eyes but, as usual, she was cheerful and energetic.

We took pictures of our families together, of my two tall brown-haired kids and my slim black-haired daughter-in-law with all the dark-eyed sisters, who by now also seemed like my daughters. We took pictures of Shehla with her pistachio treats, of Tanya with the biryani, of Meena and Shireen acting like supermodels, of Nasreen and Zeenat embracing Sara, and of Zeke and Jamie hugging all the sisters at once.

We sat on the floor and shared the bountiful food. We applauded the chefs. I was happy having my two families together, my old family of Zeke, Sara, Jim, and Jamie and my new Kurdish family. There was lots of laughter and hugging. Today we all seemed like one family, the Kurdish and the Nebraska branches.

The Kurdish sisters are my friends. My respect for their adaptability has only increased. The sisters are brave, intelligent young women who have good judgment about time, money, and people. They have a thousand ways of being kind to me.

They have strong family loyalty, although that has been tested in Nebraska. In Pakistan the family all had the same dream—to come to America. Here, each sister is developing her own dream and sometimes these individual dreams collide and cause tension and anger in the family. Some members of the family want to move to India or Pakistan; others want to stay here. They all think that it is hard to pay bills in America. They argue about priorities. I think family therapy might be a good idea.

The sisters are examples of refugees whose individual attributes should slate them for success here. However, their jobs pay $7.15 an hour, not a livable wage. They have a great deal of academic catching up to do and not as many educational resources as they need. They are supporting family back in Iraq and have an enormous bill for their air travel to America. They drive an old clunker, which doesn't necessarily carry them where they need to go. The external environment is creating many barriers to their achievement of American dreams.

Zeenat continues to learn English slowly. She attends a group for Arabic-speaking older adults, and she is loved and cared for by her daughters. And yet she wishes she could return to Islamabad where she was surrounded by women she could talk to and where she held a central place in the family.

I visit the sisters once a week to tutor Shehla in social studies. My husband tutors Meena in math. Sometimes we all go on outings together. They all continue to love to swim. Shireen is at our community college. The sisters are slowly making a few American friends. Nasreen still has sad eyes. Meena continues to find life tasty.

Immigration is a story as old as the Pilgrims and Ellis Island and as new as the Vietnamese families that arrived last week on an airplane. What is really new in 2001 is the changing color of our nation. This century, whites will no longer be a majority. Kenneth Prewitt, director of the Census Bureau in 2000, said that the 2000 census documented a dramatic change and showed that "America is on the way to becoming a microcosm of the entire world." We have 28 million foreign-born residents, or one out of every ten people. One out of every five schoolchildren is foreign-born or has foreign-born parents. Prewitt wrote, "We are literally becoming a country made up of every country in the world." Increasingly, newcomers are being sent to cities in the Midwest and South. For example, Nashville police carry computers that explain the laws, simple requests, and commands in twenty languages. Because they are inexpensive places to live, easy places to find work, and relatively crime-free, towns like Salina, Kansas, and Fargo, North Dakota, are receiving newcomers, and Owatonna, Minnesota, has six hundred Somali refugees.

A turkey-processing plant in a small town in Minnesota was first staffed by Vietnamese and is now staffed by Somalis. A friend told me of a refugee in this plant who asked for her help with a placement test. She was trying to ascertain what he knew and wrote down a few simple math problems such as 4 X 2. He took her paper and wrote out a long calculus equation. He'd been an engineer in Africa for years and now was pulling out turkey guts.

Refugees and immigrants are often hidden in plain sight. Most Nebraskans aren't aware how much our population has changed. They drive down a street, see the same trees and buildings and don't realize how different the people are.

Some locals say, "We just want to be left alone." However, with 6 billion people on the planet, many of them in desperate circumstances, nobody gets to be left alone. The Dalai Lama made this point when discussing Tibet. He said, "The history of the last years shows that no place is so remote and small that it is safe from outsiders."

Environmental catastrophes, wars, and political upheavals have displaced people all over the world. According to the official World Refugee Survey 2001 of the United States Committee for Refugees, there were 14.5 million refugees and asylum seekers and more than 20 million internally displaced people at the end of 2000. Anthony Marsella in
Amidst Peril and Pain
wrote, "From a humanitarian perspective, the current international refugee problem is unparalleled in size, scope, and consequence in human history."

Many refugees arrive recently traumatized and with tragic backgrounds. Some have literally just been lifted out of a holocaust. About 40 percent of our refugees have been tortured. Many have witnessed genocide and seen family members killed. Others have been made to participate in acts of torture or murder. Many come from camps in which they were beaten or raped. The word
detained
is a terrible euphemism for what has happened to them.

People who have been in refugee camps for years have lost any sense of control over their lives. They have had years to learn helplessness, years without useful work, education, or meaningful decisions. Some have internalized a sense that they are nobody, chaff in the wind.

Refugees are sometimes portrayed as helpless victims, but the truly helpless victims don't make it here. Generally, it takes work, intelligence, patience, charm, and luck to be selected as a refugee. Arrival stories are survivor stories. However, after the victory of safe passage, years of hard work follow. And in their own way, the challenges of the United States can be as rough as the challenges of Sudan or Afghanistan.

Most of the refugees who arrive in Lincoln didn't choose to come to our city. They were handed a plane ticket to Lincoln by INS officials when they got off a plane in New York or Los Angeles. They may know nothing about the Midwest and they may have been separated from their closest friends by the assignment process. They may have bodies adapted to tropical climates or skills such as deep-sea fishing that they cannot use in the Midwest. They may be moving into a town where no one speaks their language or even knows where their country is.

Most newcomers arrive broke. In fact, I have never met a rich refugee. All arrive worried about jobs and housing, as well as about their legal status in the United States. Especially if they have been tortured or lost family members, they are not at peak mental efficiency. In many cases, refugees don't speak English and have never lived in a developed country. They have been warned not to trust strangers, yet everyone is a stranger. They have no way to sort out whether people are kind and helpful or psychopaths. All of us look alike to them. They fear robbers, harassment, getting lost, or being hit by a car.

Here in Lincoln, most refugees are met at the airport by people from their homeland and by someone from church services. An interesting thing happens at the airports. When the newcomers and their hosts meet, they all burst into tears. The moment of arrival has an intensity and poignancy that sweeps everyone away.

From the airport, refugees are driven to a furnished apartment stocked with food and used furniture. Their first day in town they get their social security cards and their immunizations. They enroll their kids in school, and, if needed, they receive emergency doctors' appointments. Sometimes refugees get off the plane with life-threatening illnesses and go directly to a hospital.