Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [10]
I laughed and said, "No, not really." That broke the ice. I realized, that strange as these men looked to me, I seemed equally weird to them. They must have been looking at me, a plain-faced, curly-haired, middle-aged woman in blue jeans, and thinking, "What is she doing here?" Or even, "Is she animal, vegetable, or mineral?"
My immersion in the world of refugees has not been anxiety- or mistake-free. At first, like many people who have lived mostly in a world of their own kind, I was clumsy with people who didn't look and talk like me. I worried I wouldn't be able to understand people for whom English was a second, third, or fifth language. I wondered if I would be accepted and understood. I was embarrassed that I was fluent only in English.
I had trouble mastering names of people from foreign cultures. I knew too many men named Ali or Mohammed and especially on the phone I had trouble keeping them straight. I wasn't quite sure how to talk or touch, what behavior was appropriate in what settings, and when I might inadvertently offend. Encounters with people very different from me were hard work. Often I was anxious, awkward, and even suspicious. What were they saying about me?
Ridiculous misunderstandings occurred. One time a mother from Iraq told me her son had been hit by a car. I thought that she had said that he had a ride to school and I asked, "Are you happy?" Understandably, she was angry and insulted.
Another time, an African woman pointed at her daughter's bosom when the girl was wearing a tight shirt and said over and over, "Beautiful, beautiful." I was confused by this. Was she asking me if I thought her daughter's breasts were beautiful? I didn't know what to do. Fortunately, I just waited for the situation to become clear. At last, I understood that the mother was praising the cloth of the shirt, which came from Nigeria.
Gradually, I learned to relax and even to laugh at mix-ups. I learned to tolerate more ambiguity in conversations, to speak more slowly and clearly, and to smile and hug when other ways of communicating fell apart.
I was often overwhelmed. Families had so many problems with language, finances, health, housing, jobs, schools, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). They needed lawyers, doctors, and help with taxes. They wanted everything at once—to learn to drive, to read, and to find dental work and day care. They didn't have cars, shoes, or telephones. Most of their early problems were crises—the INS would deport them if they couldn't get fingerprinted, or it was January and the gas had been turned off, or grandmother had a stroke and there was no health insurance or Medicaid. And, even as they struggled to survive here, they had relatives in their old country who desperately needed money.
Sometimes I felt burned-out and discouraged. Eventually I figured out where to get good legal advice, who to call about INS problems, where decent health care could be found, and who had free bus passes, bicycles, clothes, and food. There were many people in our town eager to help, but it took a while to find them.
The other thing that saved me was the occasional remark that let me know that what I did mattered. A young woman from Romania thanked me for a scarf that I had wrapped and given her on her birthday. She said, "No one has ever given me a present before. I never had a birthday until I met you." I drove a Somali man to the doctor and paid for his appointment. He said afterward, "I didn't like Americans until today. People have not been friendly. Some steal from me. But now I know some Americans are good."
Writing about people from other cultures is fraught with social peril. Sentimentalism or romanticizing can be insidious forms of dehumanization. Generalizations about ethnic groups can easily become stereotypes. It's hard to master even the rudiments of knowledge about the fifty different cultures