Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [33]
The ability to love new people
Good moral character
Cultural Values
To a certain extent, a culture influences the attributes of its members. It is impossible to separate what is cultural from what is personal. (It is especially difficult to do this if one knows only one or two members of a culture. As one knows many people from a culture it is easier to distinguish between individual and cultural characteristics.) The cultural and personal are as intermingled as coffee and cream. But in every culture, there are people who do and people who do not have these attributes of resilience.
Refugees who come alone are much disadvantaged. Families work together, share resources, and support each other emotionally. Both tradition and circumstance encourage the closeness of immigrant families. Over and over, family is literally what keeps people alive. Some members are housed, fed, and cared for by others. And the caretakers have a sense of purpose because of their responsibilities. In hostile environments there is no greater protection and comfort than the protection of close-knit families. Our word wretched comes from the Middle English word wrecche, which means "without kin nearby."
Supportive ethnic communities also make a tremendous difference in adjustment. Nothing is as important as friends, not food, shelter, work, or even language. When I asked a man from Sudan what the Kakuma refugees most needed in our town, he said they needed to live near other Sudanese people. He was absolutely right. Newcomers need people from their own culture to orient them to America. The first family to come has the hardest time. The second family has an easier situation.
Newcomers gravitate toward places where there are others from their homeland. In fact, before we understood the importance of support, our government had a different settlement policy designed to keep local communities from being overwhelmed. Refugees were encouraged to move one family at a time into isolated communities. However, the newcomers were lonely and didn't setde in. After many failed attempts, our government changed its policies and we now encourage refugees to setde near people from their old country.
In traditional cultures, survival was a social achievement not an individual accomplishment. Pleasure and comfort were associated with being with one's tribe and with being home. One of the best places to experience community in America is in an ethnic neighborhood. The streets are lively. Generations mingle freely. People help each other out.
The American pleasure in privacy and independence is strange to many refugees. To them, our autonomy simply feels lonely. Many refugees comment on how empty our public spaces are, and, in fact, the people in those spaces are often refugees. Afghani, Iranian, and Iraqi families are the ones grilling meat and onions in our city parks and sitting on public benches talking to their friends.
The closeness of refugees to their families and communities protects, but sometimes at a cost. The ethnic community can become a feather bed, a little too soft and difficult to climb out of. To really succeed in America, refugees must learn to deal with Americans. The best way is to somehow hold on to the good from the old culture while taking advantage of the new, which is much more difficult in practice than in theory. Linh's struggles are a good example of the difficulties of combining cultures.
The age-old refugee's dilemma is whether to stay in a small, safe cultural enclave or to leave this secure place and venture into the broader culture. If they stay in an ethnic stockade, they can't really succeed in America, and if they leave, they are risking their connection with the old culture.
People from traditional cultures with no sense of clock time and languages very different from English have a harder time adjusting than do, for example, the Bosnians, many of whom come here from Germany. Older people have a harder time. Also people who are dark-skinned have a harder time. Because of racism, the darker one's skin, the harder it is