Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [13]
A track is not the shape of a foot; it is the shape of a foot in the ground. Identity can only occur in a context, that is, in a social environment. Refugees, displaced and disoriented by their rapidly changing world, have shaky identities. Increasingly, we will all have identity issues in our globalized world. Who are we when we don't have a hometown, when we don't know our neighbors or our kin? Who are we don't know the history of our land or the names of common plants and birds in our area? Or when our stories come from television sets instead of grandparents or village storytellers? Who are we in a world where the universal language is, to quote Pico Iyer, "french fries"?
"We think the world apart," said Parker Palmer. "What would it be like to think the world together?" Teilhard de Chardin had a word—unfurling—to describe that "infinitely slow spasmodic movement towards the unity of mankind." He saw education and love as the twin pillars of progress. At this amazing point in history, we have the opportunity to get things right.
Chapter 2
The BEAUTIFUL LAUGHING SISTERS—An ARRIVAL STORY
THE BEAUTIFUL LAUGHING SISTERS
"It was hard, but we got used to hard."
One of the best ways to understand the refugee experience is to befriend a family of new arrivals and observe their experiences in our country for the first year. That first year is the hardest. Everything is new and strange, and obstacles appear like the stars appear at dusk, in an uncountable array. This story is about a family I met during their first month in our country. I became their friend and cultural broker and in the process learned a great deal about the refugee experience, and about us Americans.
On a fall day I met Shireen and Meena, who had come to this country from Pakistan. The Kurdish sisters were slender young women with alert expressions. They wore blue jeans and clunky high-heeled shoes. Shireen was taller and bolder, Meena was smaller and more soft-spoken. Their English was limited and heavily accented. (I later learned it was their sixth language after Kurdish, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi.) They communicated with each other via small quick gestures and eye movements. Although they laughed easily, they watched to see that the other was okay at all times.
Shireen was the youngest and the only one of the six sisters who was eligible for high school. Meena, who was twenty-one, had walked the ten blocks from their apartment to meet Shireen at school on a bitterly cold day. Shireen told the family story. Meena occasionally interrupted her answers with a reminder, an amendment, or laughter.
Shireen was born in Baghdad in 1979, the last of ten children. Their mother, Zeenat, had been a village girl who entered an arranged marriage at fourteen. Although their father had been well educated, Zeenat couldn't read or write in any language. The family was prosperous and "Europeanized," as Shireen put it. She said, "Before our father was in trouble, we lived just like you. Baghdad was a big city. In our group of friends, men and women were treated as equals. Our older sisters went to movies and read foreign newspapers. Our father went to cocktail parties at the embassies."
However, their father had opposed Saddam Hussein, and from the time of Shireen's birth, his life was in danger. After Hussein came to power, terrible things happened to families like theirs. One family of eleven was taken to jail by his security forces and tortured