Crossroads

When I turned 10, a new girl came into my class and soon became one of my best friends. We would walk back home together for a while and then stand for a long time talking at the point where our roads separated. Two years later it looked as if our roads would never cross again as at the outbreak of war we didn’t have time to say goodbye. Her mother was of an undesirable nationality so I knew that they all had to leave. Yet, I had no idea of where they might have finally settled.

One year later I was in a different town, attending a different school and sitting in a different class when a new refugee girl from a far away place joined us and filled in an empty spot on my right side. I was relieved. I felt less stared at and whispered about. To other kids I was a “black sheep” and after discovering that my head became a habitat for a family of lice that had probably migrated from some of my constantly scratching classmates, I started feeling that sheep and I really do have something in common. I cut my hair short and sat for hours out in the sun like a chimpanzee with my mum working with her fingers through my hair until she would get tired saying “I’ll never exterminate these nasty bastards”. After all the smelly powders, shampoos and special extermination techniques she finally did succeed and I returned back to school, again relieved. And there, my new fellow refugee was waiting for me impatiently, eager to ask me a question “Do you know a girl whose name is… ?“ and just like that, one after another the sound of a name I hadn’t heard for a whole year and a half rolled out of her mouth. I was paralyzed for a few seconds before I answered with “Yes, but how do you know her?”. What followed was a bout of joy, clapping and hooraying on her side, before my curiosity was eventually satisfied. She told me a story of a letter that travelled for months determined to fulfill its mission.

Miles away, in a different country my crossroads friend wrote down “I’ll hope this letter will reach you…” , put it in an envelope and set it sail to my grandparents’ village with only my name and my father’s name on it. That was all she knew. There was no address. The letter reached the village but ended up in the wrong hands of a girl with the same name, surname and father’s name. So my double opened up the letter and was struck with this bizarre coincidence. However, the girl decided to try to help out and find the missing person so she searched high and low, all to no avail. Some months later she told the whole story to her newly arrived refugee cousin who was accidentally placed in my class to sit right next to me. By the time I answered the letter and sent it back to my friend, many months had passed. She later told me that she had almost given up hope on ever receiving it so when it finally arrived she jumped all around like crazy.

I’ve never stopped wondering whether this strange sequence of events was just a coincidence or something more than that? Can it be that when two people long for each other miracles can happen? Or perhaps future knew that we had some pretty hard challenges before us and so decided to make it a little easier for us? I leave all the options open, but I believe that in the years to come, our long conversations that moved from the street onto the paper meant a lot to both of us. There was somebody out there for whom you were not an alien, a connection with the world familiar to you that at the time seemed as if it had never really existed.

The two of us still keep in touch. Not as often as we used to but there is always this air of familiarity and closeness whenever we meet, even after a long time of no contact. I visited her a couple of days ago and she told me she still hasn’t been back to the old place. She doesn’t want to go alone and is looking for a chance to travel with somebody. I was later thinking of how it would be nice to do this adventure together. We would probably end up walking to that same crossroads together and just stand there talking for hours.

Have you helped someone today?

Once again it was morning, in another city, in another country, sunny, fresh and full of surprises. The bus stopped after a half an hour of rhythmical clink-clanking and I stepped off a little drowsy into an early morning hustle and bustle of the city market. Rivers of people hurrying to work were intersected with sellers dragging huge bundles of this and that, honking, grumbling, bellowing.  So even I, who normally wouldn’t notice if an elephant walked by at that time of the morning, spotted an old lady ahead of me stooping to pick up some dropped oranges. I quickened my step to give her a hand but, just before I reached her, she had dunked the last one into her bag and was already marching in front of me. A minute later an orange missile whizzed past my ear straight into the old lady’s back and was soon followed by another one. The granny surprisingly didn’t look back. She just kept on marching, even if not a little faster. A shout that accompanied the second flying orange made me drop my jaw, “Shame on you! Stealing in those years! Here, take some more with you!”.

A little further, if you turn left around the corner, a long street will get you right to the city center. However, after only a couple of days of walking up and down the local main street, you might  start approaching it as if it were a ski path and adopt a zigzagging technique trying to evade “the money collectors” bumping into people, getting into their way or dragging them by the sleeve to sell some cards or badges to help the abandoned kids, animals or refugees. Always the same plastic smiles on the same faces, never early in the morning though. If they hadn’t been smiling so much they might have persuaded me that all the money was really going to end up in the right hands and not just some symbolic percentage of it.  

Obviously, so many phonies in the streets account for some of human disregard for those who really need help, yet not for all of it. Many studies have confirmed that a person could easily die in the middle of the street full of people if they suddenly collapsed. The scientists explain this social and psychological phenomenon as the Bystander Effect. I witnessed one such unfortunate event and was horrified feeling all the cruelness of the humanity in those very long minutes of trying to call for help as I realised that I couldn’t move a collapsed man on my own. He was lying in the middle of the street and the cars just kept circling around us. The man was unconscious and in some sort of physical agony his body shaking and twitching, whereas I trembled for quite a while later from the emotional agony of this shameful incident.  

Anyhow, such human reaction, or rather lack of it, in a situation in which somebody is spread on the street and another person cries out loud for help gives you a clue of what happens to those who are not as loud.

@ UNHCR/Florian/Transparency/Photovoice

However, being ignored is not the worst that can happen to a person. In a clash of two ethnic groups, at the time of madness, when my family had to leave home, not only were we ignored, we were kicked out of a temporary shelter we managed to find in the exile. We were kicked out into the street again, only this time by the people of the same nationality, the locals. The motive was as ancient as the human race - pure, old-fashioned, insatiable greed. Somebody needed more space for themselves. So it happened that our lives were threatened again. An important lesson was learnt however on realising that one is not to fear any ethnicity or religion but some ever present human flaws.

The society is indeed full of controversies. On the one hand you have a whole new spectrum of volunteering agencies making money on the increasing number of people who want to cross oceans to help and, on the other, you have people dying before the eyes of passers-by. Sometimes people don’t realise that you don’t have to go far away if you want to help somebody. Why not start with your closest members of the family, friends and neighbours, fellow citizens? Perhaps volunteering agencies would then go bankrupt.
                                                                                                 
An interesting idea has been launched through a book called Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde and later a film made by it in which a little boy Trevor does a favor for three people, asking each of them to "pay the favor forward" by doing favors for three other people, and so on. It sounds much like a fiction so I was surprised to find out that The Pay It Forward Movement does actually exist as well as its Foundation.

If you ask the professionals, they will tell you that helping people works in two ways - by helping others, you help yourself. When a renowned psychiatrist Dr Karl Menninger was asked what a person should do if he or she felt a “nervous breakdown” coming on, he said “Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, find someone in need, and do something for them.”

I would just like to add another aspect to it by returning to the unconscious man in the road. After a while, one of the cars that were circling around us finally stopped and a guy jumped out of it to help. He quickly moved the man to the pavement, put him in the right position, rubbed his temples with some water and continued stroking his head even after the man had regained consciousness. I think the guy wasn’t aware of it, but his stroking silenced more than the man’s pain and fear. I could as well feel my shivers subside with every gentle move of his hand and the world suddenly appeared to be a friendlier place to live.

A survivor

Believe it or not,  this smiling face has been through a couple of wars, lost a son and a husband, had to flee her home with nothing more than a bundle of clothes and travelled for days on a small tractor-trailer, some years later ended up in a hospital with a broken hip and was quickly sent back home because the patients who make it over eighty are here considered to be too old for surgery. The doctors said she had a few months left to live so they sent her home to die. Boy, were they wrong! She is over ninety these days.

Unfortunately, not many people manage to smile themselves out of depressing lives (as described in the previous post  How to survive escaping a bullet? ) so I became intrigued with this rare phenomenon. What makes my only surviving Granny beat all the  medical statistics and common fates?

Is it hours on end of a hard field work in the scorching sun dressed in her black mourning clothes, tiring herself to sleep? And when the night finally comes, sleeping in the open on a bare land to protect sheep from wolves with her tiny body? Living next to a son she adores and  keeping a motherly eye on him and his family, even today when he is over sixty? Being under constant care of her daughter and son-in-law until her hip healed and she learnt to walk again with a stick? Settling in a place with lots of grannies in the neighbourhood and having coffee sessions with them on a daily basis? Making long walks to return the visits or just to stretch her legs and breathe in some fresh air? Living in her own separate space, free to set up her own daily rhythm? Doing her own cooking, cleaning and washing with an occasional help from the outside? Knowing that there is always somebody she can count on in case she needs it? Accepting whatever life brings her way without too many whys? Being a believer? Making jokes about everything, including death?

When after five years of living in the exile my Granny was finally told that it is safe to return home, she decided not to. The reason she gave was that she could not live without people. Her village was almost empty as some of her former neighbours died in the exile while others had gone who knows where in search of better and more promising future for their children.  So each summer Granny travels a distance of 500 miles to spend a month in her home village, but always returns. The only one-way trip home will be when she dies. She has been saving up all these years to be buried next to her dearest.

In the meantime, Granny needs people to live. The photo above was taken at a friends and family gathering late in the evening after she refused to be taken home to take her usual medicine. She explained it in her simple, straightforward manner: “Medicine? What medicine? This is my medicine!”. She was the last to leave the party.

How to survive escaping a bullet?

In one of his nineteenth century novels, Balzac complains that doctors have come up with so many new specialised terms for illnesses that on hearing them you have no clue as to their origin and cause. As if these names live a life of their own, alienated from an individual and the possible complexities of his of her life. In the old days, people would say that one suffers from unrequited love, envy, worry or disappointment and today you have technical terms like irritable bowels, dementia, cancer, stroke. They used one of these to explain my grandfather’s death when he collapsed on a cold winter day in front of the house while collecting some wood for the fire.

I don’t remember what was the exact word except that it sounded irrelevant and even misleading. If anybody had bothered to know why his big generous heart failed I would have told them that after four agonising years of living in the exile it received its final blow just a month earlier when his wife died and was overwhelmed with immense grief. And even though many people concluded that living up to your seventies is not that bad, it didn’t comfort me much. I was sure both he and my grandmother would have lived to see many more sunrises if life hadn’t been so hard on them at the very end. During those four long years there was not even the slightest glimpse of a chance that they would ever get away from the dirty ugly urban suburb of a big city where they lived entrapped between four gray walls and return to their home that was miles away in the countryside. With their family and friends being scattered to different corners of the world and the busy locals keeping at a safe distance, there was not much comfort for the aching hearts and weary minds. And even though my grandpa was a man of strong constitution and even stronger will, I had seen him crushed.  

© UNHCR/Zalmaï

Only four years earlier, we were all relieved when after a couple of days of waiting by the phone we finally got the news that they had escaped the cruel death that befell some of their neighbours who stubbornly refused to leave their homes. Little did we know at the time that this immediate death was only to be replaced with slow dying.

However, my grandpa wasn’t the last victim. Four months later, their eldest son, my uncle, followed the same road, again exhausted with disappointment, disorientation, hopelessness, desolation and quiet suffering. They were like falling dominoes, yet nobody considered them casualties of war because they did not fall by the bullet or knife. Nobody keeps a record of these slow deaths in the exile. Perhaps because it would be terrifying to hear the number. Rarely anyone acknowledges them and takes them for what they really are. It is much easier to tag them as cancer, heart failure and diabetes. As if they weren’t ignored enough at the end of their lives.

I wish the society as a whole had paid more attention. I wish people close to them had shown more understanding. I wish they had had somebody to talk to. I wish they could have made themselves talk. I wish they could have accepted the injustice as one of the life’s tricky ways to challenge us. I wish they had been just a little stronger to live to return only a couple of years later. 

Related post:
A survivor

Hello Mr/Ms Harp!

Are you a refugee who sticks to your clan because you feel at ease with those who know what you’ve been through?
And you think that the rest of the world would never understand it anyway?
You believe “they” wouldn’t even understand your jokes, let alone your dreams and fears?

Of course, your fellows in war, or whatever, will understand you better but is that all there really is to  friendship? Don’t you think you’re missing a lot if you just stick with one group of people gathered around the same idea or need? Aren’t you as an individual made up of a little more than only one experience no matter how much it influenced you?

Or you may be one of those people who instead of sticking their nose into other people’s business and life prefer to think about who they are and what they are here for?

Well, that is a good start, I would say, a precondition for any self-improvement! However, sitting alone in your room, mulling over things and pondering might not yield many answers to your questions. Are you even aware of what you like and don’t like? How can you know whether you like mango if you have never tried one? How can you explore yourself if there is no one you can relate to? The physicists would put it like this:

Imagine yourself alone in the midst of nothingness and then try to tell me how large you are. (Eddington, A. S. The Nature of the Physical World).

People often forget that through meeting other people not only do you discover what connects you but also what differs you. How else would you know what makes you distinct and one of a kind? And how far do you expect to get in this self-exploration process if you restrict yourself to hanging out with people with whom you only have certain things in common? And if this always happens to be the same group of people?

Just as you can recognise that you were (un)fortunate to get your nose from your father or flat feet from your mother so you can recognise little pieces of yourself in your friends. The more different these pieces are, the more puzzles you’ve put together. The only downside may be birthdays and other social gatherings when all these people you have something in common with are, well, seated next to one another only to discover that they are mutually not very compatible.

However, as birthdays are once a year, I think the idea should not be altogether rejected. It came clear to me after reading a book by Anthony Storr on the Integrity of the Personality. After describing the process of how a young soul gradually acquires its form within a family, he continues to follow its lifelong development and emphasises the role other people also play in modelling it. I think the following passage sums it all up nicely:

Personality is like a harp with many strings. Not all the strings are plucked at once and some may lie silent throughout life. Others may be set into vibration by the impact of personalities with the same frequency.  

The beauty and the complexity of the melody you will produce is therefore not just up to you but rather up to you in relation to other people. Each and every person that has entered our lives and stayed there at least for a little while has struck a chord or two, added a few tones, minor or major, some already familiar and some never heard before.

The music of a war child

If you are a teenage refugee, lucky enough to be able to continue your education in the exile, you’re likely to be confronted with some or all of the following questions and comments:
 

So, what sort of music do you like?

What’s your favourite band?

Fancy a smoke?

You don’t smoke?!

(After scanning you from top to bottom) “Interesting” shoes, where did you get those!?

How about plucking your eyebrows?

Where do you go out?

Why don’t you go out?

Got a boyfriend?

What did you say? You’ve got such a funny accent!

Why are you so quiet? 

And the thoughts usually never spoken out loudly but commonly simplified into  “hm, well, no, I don’t know...” would be: 

It’s hard to tell about my music preferences after a year or more of living mainly without electricity or otherwise having a priority of listening to the war field reports and how’s the enemy progressing, which was occasionally interrupted with war chants that were supposed to encourage people for the fight, boost up the moral and the like. At night I would often fall asleep listening to the guns and cannons roaring and thumping here and there. 

When I last went to a normal school we were still kids. How come everybody is now wearing make-up, peeling off all the traces of hair (except for those on the scalp) and smoking? Did I miss a decade? I feel like Sylvester Stallone playing a frozen cop who wakes up after 20 years or so. 

Well, I don’t have any clothes of my own. I didn’t have time to pack it up with me and I have no money to go shopping. Especially not for branded ones that are a must have around here. The shoes belonged to my older relative and the sweaters and T-shirts to my brother or again relative. A few have been kindly tailored by my aunt (such as a silky tracksuit made of an enemy flag).

I don’t really feel like going out in a weird looking clothes and wouldn’t have money for drinks anyway. 

You happen to speak in a funny way too, you know. But you were lucky not to be uprooted and displaced to a place where you’d be a minority. Can I finish a sentence without somebody repeating words after me, if you mind? Oh, I guess it’s easier not to speak at all or only when I have to.

Not having a boyfriend is quite self-explanatory in the above mentioned circumstances.

In fact, at the time, having a boyfriend was the last thing on my mind. Namely, the differences between me and other non-refugee kids were not only in the appearance. Even greater discrepancies were obvious on the inside. 

An average teenager detests school and looks for every possible way to escape it, spends minimum time with the book and most of the time with friends. According to what I’ve seen, an average refugee teenager usually reacts to school and education in one of two very opposite ways: 

             They either completely give up on everything in life including school, thinking “What the  hell it matters when everything is falling apart? Why bother with school, only criminals and war heroes prosper.”
             Or they more clearly than their peers see education as a means to help them out of a life they don’t like, the only tool left for realisation of their future dreams.

So you can imagine my misery when I heard that I might not continue my school semester because of the war escalating, and nothing made me as horrified as the possibility of missing a school year. What a teenager!? After the experience of losing everything over night, school seemed like the last tiny straw of future hope and I hang on to it desperately. 

Unfortunately, the majority of refugees falls into the first category and nobody is there to set some values back into their heads. There is nobody to encourage these kids to fight for themselves and not to give up, not to waste their talents and spend the rest of their lives in bitter disappointment and despondence. To make it worse, such hopeless attitude is often encouraged by equally disoriented parents and the society resembling the Titanic crowd concerned only about saving their own lives, even if it means stepping over dead bodies. In such circumstances, you are a nuisance to everybody. 

One of the most moving and convincing confessions I have heard of a refugee struggle and the importance of education was given by Emmanuel Jal, a war child refugee speaking at one of the TED conferences. He was lucky enough to get some education and smart enough to realise the importance of it.

Who is your fellow Martian, oops, I mean refugee?

If you look up the word in a dictionary, it might give you a clue http://www.thefreedictionary.com/refugee but I'm sure it will still sound pretty abstract. What danger is it about? Do these people just walk away? Maybe they did something bad so they were rightfully kicked out of their country? Are you to trust these people?

Try to imagine your life changes over night. Or maybe not over night but too fast for you to keep up with all the calamities that strike one after another. People react to it differently but a complete shock is unavoidable. It's like somebody plunges your head under the water and just when it pops back to surface the hand pushes you back again leaving you no time to grasp some air in. Again and again. You wonder if your life before was a dream or the moment you are in is a nightmare.

You might refuse to accept the changes by shutting yourself in and trying to ignore the reality as much as you can, because the reality cannot be for real, right? You can only accept that it is a short period of confusion and madness, similar to a tropical storm that strikes randomly, out of blue, but eventually calms down and then everything slowly gets back to what it used to be. Or as close to it as possible. Of course, it never does, but at that turning point in life it's hard to believe anything else. Too painful. The experience stripes the world off its fancy clothes right in front of your eyes and you stare in disbelief. You never forget the picture and it might take a while before you figure out how to best deal with it.

However, life can only move in one direction and that is forward so sooner or later you must learn to embrace whatever comes your way. People react to pain differently. Some become more inert, some more active, some more observant and tactful and other more angry and resentful. Some seek to fight the universal wrongdoing whereas other seek personal revenge. Perhaps it would help if all of them could work this out together, exchange ideas and compare possible answers?

When I first found myself in a group of people tagged as "refugees" I thought everybody outside this group would without much explaining be familiar with all the emotional luggage that goes along with it and then perhaps show some understanding. It seemed only natural because to a person affected this uninvited turmoil equals a huge global catastrophe and then comes another disappointment when you realise that other people look at you as if you were a Martian. Or even worse, an intruding, threatening and unwelcome Martian. 

To be honest, this viewpoint is not far from the truth in some aspects. Refugees are unlike most of their fellow non-refugee humans, lost in time, space and universe and, moreover, depleted of everything they'd learnt about the ways of the world. They have to start from the scratches, not only in finding their new home but in finding their place in this chaotic universe.

Most people don't bother to dig in much further than "Hello Martian" attitude, and yet even those who are willing to share some of their burden are usually just left wandering about those high thick walls people build around their pain.

I've decided to throw some light on this matter hoping that it might help somebody somewhere, whether it be a refugee or not. And it doesn't have to be all that gloomy if you approach any experience as an opportunity to learn and grow, as a personal challenge. This is how, after a lot of brooding and questioning, I've decided to view this substantial part of my life and it made it a whole lot easier.

Oh, by the way, I'll leave out the unimportant details such as my name, family name, nationality, country of origin or exile, continent, planet. The juicy details such as the names of presidents, politicians and other puppets are equally irrelevant for this matter or any other matter if you ask me. They are being given too much publicity anyway.