Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [26]
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.
POSTSCRIPT
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.
BROWN NEBRASKA
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