Let There Be No Strangers

Let There Be No Strangers

It is no secret to those who know me that I have a heart for people who immigrate to our country, not all of course, but many. I have long known these people through our churches and my therapy practice, through casual conversations and sponsorships. Most have left difficult situations in their homeland, have suffered long journeys and threats to their lives, have waited and waited to be admitted to our land. And when they are finally here, I have seen them struggle, working hard for low wages, learning new language and customs, and hoping for their next generation. As I have come to know them and chose to raise our children in their midst, I have been deeply blessed.

My closest immigrant relative was my grandfather who came as a child from Ireland during the potato famine. His father became a gold miner in Colorado but died of miner’s lung when my grandfather was 14. So, my teenage grandfather became a gold miner to support his family. And he also developed miner’s lung and had to move to California and work in the open air of the shipyards and then in the sugar beet orchards, always suffering from lung disorders, and raising his family (my mother) on little income. I believe that we all have such stories in our backgrounds, some more recent, some more distant, but most with struggles.

While immigration is a heavy political topic these days, I am drawn to remember a personal story from many years back when I was training as a chaplain intern at UCSF Hospital. During that training year, it was assigned to the ICU, where I felt that my most significant ministry took place, often in the waiting room with families of the critically ill. Once a week each chaplain spent the night at the hospital, experiencing what happens when the daylight is gone.

Habiba

While on hospital duty I noticed a large family moving in and out of the ICU waiting room for several days: dark, handsome people of varying ages, all in traditional Muslim dress, apparently recently here from the Middle East. I have not gone out of my way to be with them, for what would I as a Protestant chaplain say to Muslims in crisis?  We probably don’t speak the same language. So, I visit others more like me in the waiting-room but choose to smile and move past this family.

One late evening while it was my night shift, I notice her alone in the ICU. As I come to stand with her by the bed of her mother, she moves quickly into my arms. She is Habiba, a young Afghani woman. At that time Afghanistan was simply a “foreign country to me, about which I knew nothing. The others in the family have gone home, as they do every evening, for it is late at night. She tells me that she cannot go home, because she is nursing her baby, and there is no one else to translate for her mother, who has been in the United States for less than two months. (Actually, there are translators for every language, but this is not the real issue).

Mother and daughter exchange words in their own language, and though she refuses to translate these for the nurses, Habiba whispers to me that her mother has just said, “I hate you, Habiba – you allow me to come here and suffer.”

How must she feel: she who has been sleeping in the waiting room with her six- week-old baby for more than a week; she who has been staying in the hospital after the rest of the family leaves at night; she who needs a bath, some food and rest; she who has left her eight other children without her at home. How must she feel? “I hate you, Habiba. You allow me to come here and suffer.”

Sometime in the days and nights that follow, in the hours we sit together in her temporary home, the ICU waiting room, she asks for my telephone number, because she wants my family to come to her home for lunch.  She gives me a box of Afghani candy for my children.  “I love you,” she tells me.

The barriers put up by culture, ideology, and religion, by assumptions and fear fall away in moments of suffering shared, in words of love exchanged.

“I love you too, Habiba.” And I remember you well to this day.

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And if you are interested, here are some books that I’ve appreciated and recommend that humanize the immigration experience.

            Soldiers and Kings by Jason de Leon. This author is an anthropologist at UCLA, who embedded himself with the Coyotes from Central America and Mexico who “guided” migrants to the US border. He makes a distinction between “coyotes,” who tend to care about those in their charge and “traffickers,” who take every advantage of them. It is an insightful, up close, discerning, and compassionate book. (non-fiction)

            Solito by Javier Zamora. When Javier was a young child both his father and his mother left El Salvador for the US, saving money so that he could follow. At the age of nine, after his family scraped together enough money for the trip, he departed alone for the US, alone but in the company of five other immigrants and a coyote. This is a true story of a little boy on a journey to his parents, of the people he met and grew to trust, and of the feelings and fears he remembers vividly. (non-fiction)

            American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. There is cultural controversy about this book because the author, who not Mexican, is telling a story set in Mexico and about a troubling reality there. However, I found it a compelling story of a mother and seven-year-old son’s flight from the cartel that killed fifteen members of her family at a celebration, and was seeking to kill these last two as well. It is gripping and informative. I had never envisioned what it would be like to ride on the top of a freight-train car for days on end.  (fiction)

Let There Be No Strangers