Ray of Light

Sometimes it's good to be angry.

I was upset on Wednesday, as my last post stated. I did not understand why if we are here as a protection agency there are so many people who are not being protected. I went made the case, plead the reasoning, and tried to illustrate to people who had not been sitting in that room why this mattered so much. I talked to Kevin, and I talked to the head of the Protection department. This morning Kevin came out to the camps with a team of people to conduct a much longer, far more extensive and in depth interview with this family. I sat and waited and knew I was either going to come out of this having a made a solid case for granting this case emergency status, or I would walk away looking like a total jack ass.

The hard thing about these cases is that it's rare when you have a family who tells the WHOLE truth. On a good day, you get families who are telling most of the truth, with facts changed and scenes deleted. They are looking for the magic bullet that will move them on to the next stages of resettlement. Often times the misinformation revolves around the father of a child who has suddenly divorced the woman who has the baby and has "disappeared" with no one in the family knowing anything about his whereabouts. Later we'll find out that this conveniently absent person is actually still in the camp and sees his exwife and baby on a regular basis, and we cannot separate them for custody reasons. Often times there will be the extraneous people attached--no one is really sure where they came from, but a tenuous relation is created and they get to come to the land of milk and honey as well. Later we'll find out that that tenuous relation was actually trafficked, with the family who claimed them being paid a gross amount of money to include them on the card.

Needless to say, this morning I was nervous. I was nervous because in the cursory interviews that we do in the first stage are the basic information gathering interviews that allow the team to assess quickly who fits the criteria and who does not. If the family fits the criteria the more indepth interviews are persued many times uncovering what I have mentioned above, thereby making them inelligible for resettlement. I was PRAYING that this would not be a case like this. Please...no skeletons in the closet.

I finshed my cases this morning and watched the door of the room where the family was being interviewd. They had been in there for 3.5 hours. I kept thinking that it had to be a good sign since if something glaring came up they would not waste their time or the family's time. You never want to feel like you're wasting anyone's time. I was particularly concerned because I was so upset on Wednesday. Had I been snowed?

No concrete answers came from the interview today, the only decision being that the family was to come back on Monday, but it appeared to be a credible and necessary case to promote on an emergency basis.

Deep sigh of relief. Maybe something great will happen, maybe she will be removed. Maybe, just maybe, being passionate about something, someONE is worth the emotional outcry every now and then.

I consider this a small victory that occurred this week. It's far from over, and the road that this is going to take will be bumpy for sure. But I am content knowing that there is a chance and a possibility for something better for this child, where she might not be tortured, and she can get the medical treatment she needs. And where her sisters and mother can breathe a little easier knowing that the struggle might be aliviated even in the slightest. I am excited for the possibility.