It was my friend Ed Gulley who suggested we might be brothers from another mother. I have felt the same way about Ali, and today, I felt this same connection with Saad, a man I barely know from the other side of the world.
When we said goodbye, we both gave each other a great hug, and I thanked him for trusting me, for telling me his story, for letting me take his photography, for hopefully making his awful journey of pain and loss and isolation better in some small way.
We can do some small things for him, but the big ones are in his hands, and I feel guilty, almost as if I am abandoning him now in some way. He is a good and kind-hearted man, and I pray he is strong enough for what lies ahead. I think he is very strong This week, we are trying to help Hawah find a permanent home for herself and her children, and will meet a Syrian mother whose son and family were all killed in the dreadful Syrian civil war.
She is also abandoned in America, and in need of a small studio apartment. Ali and I are meeting with her on Tuesday. I hardly know Saad, but I will miss his gentle and soft-spoken presence, I think he knows I will always respond if he needs help.
__
I wanted to mention that tomorrow I will undergo additional surgery on my left eye, I have a retinal disorder that threatens blindness if not treated. The first round, several months ago, did not quite work, so we’re going to try it again sometime around mid-day. I should be home in the late afternoon and running my mouth on the blog if all goes as planned, and I am sure it will.
Thanks for following the Saad story and for helping to give him a new start in life here.
In the country, the sky puts on a light show every day, no matter what the weather, especially at sunrise or sunset. It rained for much of the day, then at dusk the skies opened up and the sun came out. It looks so fresh and clean and green her, our Mother, the earth is giving us some lovely days of Spring. it is gracious of her to do that, given how badly we treat her.
Ali and I call ourselves the Start Over Crew sometimes, we have helped some of the refugees start over a bunch of times now, and he and I are quick and efficiently about it. When Maria is around, everything goes twice as fast. She is a dervish, she moves so fast I almost never see her move, she just pops up in one place with a hammer or a screwdriver or knife, and then another.
She put up six framed prints and paintings in about four minutes, gauging straightness, position, angles. Being a refugee is all about starting over, by definition they have lost everything. In more compassionate countries, refugees are given months, even years to acclimate, find housing, learn a new language and customs, recover from their trauma, work with citizens of their new country.
This is America and compassion is considered elitist and a weakness. Like the medieval courts, the refugees either skim or swim, nobody seems to care as long as the economy is good. They arrive with nothing, are given little, are on their own.
We try to help give people an open field, a start, a fighting chance. We are not magicians or millionaires, after our meager attention, they are on their own, and we know it and they know it. It was a bitter pill for me to swallow, but I have swallowed it, it’s the only way we can survive in our work, emotionally or financially.
There is a lot of laughing, story-telling, translating. Saad looked a little bewildered by the commotion, it was as if an Army of bees had invaded his spartan apartment. We warmed it up, it now looks like someone lives there.
In a very short time – an hour or two, we gave Saad’s apartment a Start Over. Books, a jacket, learning materials are all on their way, and when they come I will give them to Saad and give him a hug and say goodbye for now.
He and Ali both asked if Maria could come with me all the time, I think I am slow and boring. I said, she had her own work to do, she just helps when she can. You’ll have to put up with me. Ali translated, and they both laughed, as if I were making a joke.
I liked this scene very much, Maria hanging a photo, Ali putting the TV together.
I took a break from holding the wall art for Maria to capture the moment. I’m the recorder of events, I said, it’s my job to preserve the moment.
If you wish to join this parade, this Army Of Good, you can contribute by sending a check to The Gus Fund or The Refugees, c/o Jon Katz, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816., or by donating via Paypal, [email protected]
The news these days is full of war and migrants and nativists and populists, and the world sometimes seems to be falling into pieces.
It appears to be fragmenting, the rural areas pulling away from cities, nations pulling away from regions, everyone coming together and falling apart at the same time.
Nations are losing their borders, and people are losing their nations, the everyone questioning what role they and their countries out to play, country after country slamming the door.
The refugee has never been more evident, or more feared and despised and demonized.
The refugee is right in the middle of maelstrom. They and their children have seen too much. And it is never enough. There is no expiration date on suffering, they fled suffering to come her, now they must suffer to be here.
Working with the refugees more intensely in recent weeks, I am reminded it is not easy to start over in a new place. Exile and dislocation is not for everyone. “God never told me to kill another person,” a Muslim refugee told me two weeks ago, “and i asked a man to his face, did God tell you to kill my son”?”
She said he laughed and struck her with his rifle in the face. She showed me her still twisted nose.
The people who choose to start over are, to me, a chosen people. They all have horror stories they rarely tell, they have lost their family, friends, language, communities, identity, their ability to communicate. But their resilience surprises me again and again.
A soft-spoken mother will tell me how her family was butchered in a genocide, she spent a dozen years in a filthy and overcrowded refugee camp, she ended up in America with no money, no friends, no family, no support, no work.
And yet she will never complain, or quit, or go to pieces, blame anyone else for her troubles or sorrows. She still smiles and bows to strangers and offers them sweets.
In their determination to become American, they are very much unlike Americans, who whine about almost everything and are shocked and aggrieved by any kind of trouble.
We still have it in our heads that life is supposed to be perfect, that we are entitled to a perfect life, and we and our loved ones will live forever. The refugees have no such illusions.
They appreciate what they have, will take any job to get more, work day and night to learn English, get their licenses, labor for pennies and they mostly accept betrayal, cruelty and suffering as just another part of life, like music or the weather.
Saad never speaks of perfect life. He just wants to live here.
They refugees are teaching me a lot about acceptance.
Saad was waiting patiently for us when we pulled up from of his new apartment just outside of Albany. He is a warm and welcoming man, he speaks almost no English. A friend gave us her old Arabic-English dictionary and he just lit up when he saw it, he gave Maria a big hug and immediately began poring through it and then spoke the first English sentence I had heard him, he said he was “grateful and happy” that we came.
I think he had been working on that sentence.
It was almost like a speech, and Saad was quite proud of himself, and Maria and I congratulated him. They both seemed quite triumphant and I wanted to catch their joy on my camera.
Seeing how happy he was to get the dictionary, I realized how hard he is working to assimilate, to be able to find work (he has heart disease, diabetes and low blood pressure) to build a new life for himself from scratch. There is no hatred, anger, bigotry or lament in him. Life is hard and he will make the best of it.
Maria and I both loved helping put his apartment together.
He doesn’t need too much more from me. He is asking for nothing. But I can see some of his needs. A spring jacket, some more Arabic-English translation books and apps. I told Saad that in a month or two, he will come to the farm and we will be having long conversations about life and struggle and rebirth.
He looked at me and smiled, and shook my hand vigorously. “I am grateful and happy that you came,” he said.
We gave Saad a linen map of Arabia to hang on his barren apartment wall, he was happy to see it, he named each country on the map and showed us where he was born and lived. I thought the map made him sad for a moment, but then he said it comforted him. It is not easy to start over. He and Maria found many ways to communicate.
