Endings

It's hard to pinpoint the feelings that I have about this experience now that is quickly coming to an end.

I have appreciated being a student of what humanitarian aid really is troughout the past 6 weeks. I came thinking that I knew, basing my experience on the 2 years I spent in Mali. Working here has opened my eyes and forced me to recognize why there are organizations such as UNHCR and CARE and why the work they do is so important.

Being a part of resettlement has been remarkably evocative emotionally. There is an immediacy to the work that is being done with resettlement and there is a return that is far faster than in most departments or organizations dealing with aid work. That said, I still don't know how I feel about resettlement in the larger scheme of these people's lives. There are times I think that removing people from all that they know, people who lack any education and cannot fathom what an airplane let alone a sky scraper or indoor plumbing looks like is not the most beneficial to either the population being resettled or the population absorbing the refugees.

But then I see many of the heartbreaking cases that I have been witness to the past 6 weeks and wonder how we can leave people in a place like this until there is peace in Somalia (this is where everyone who knows anything about the current state of Somalia laughs really hard for a really long time....). There is no perfect solution. There are durable solutions, and there are interim solutions, but none are perfect, and none replace what these people have lost or never been party to in their lives.

I interviewed a man this morning who has been a refugee since 1974. 32 years of fleeing one war zone only to land in the next. He left Ethiopia for Somalia, Somalia to Kenya. Now, he has been waiting here since 1991 for the next place to flee. He had no real problems in the camp, but I recommended promotion of his case anyway simply because there comes a point where, from a human rights perspective, his life is no longer humane.

This afternoon I interviewed a family--a truly lovely family--who had come here with their children, again in 1991. Their son is deaf. Not fully deaf, but partially. I asked how we became deaf and almost lost any semblance of professional poise I had when they declared "Oh, when he was 6, he stuck date pits in his ears to see what would happen". The father, who spoke perfect English and had worked for the Somali government from 1969-1990 declared it very matter of factly and it took all the self restrain I had to not lean in and say "well, I bet you don't let him eat too many dates anymore, do you?". At the end of the interview the father presented me with all of his documents showing his high level of acheivement in typing--both short and long hand. My translator looked at him and said "Why do you not look for a job here, you are over qualified" to which he responded "I am an old man, and my head is no longer clear--I cannot type that fast anymore. I just want something better for my family".

And that's the essence of it, isn't it? All of these people just looking for something better, searching for a way out. At the end of the interview with this family, the last interview of my stint here, the mother and wife who spoke NO English said to me "Thank you for being such a good mother to us--a mother of resettlement, trying to help all of us, working for us." That statement broke my heart knowing how little I can do, how little, in the scheme of this problem, I have done.

But that is why I will keep coming back to this as the place where my heart lies. There is such honesty and truth in suffering, and the only way to respond is likewise. I cannot imagine a life that is void of this feeling--trying to find a way to better the lives of people who cannot do it on their own. In the end, there is no us and them. There is just us.

Kevin told me when I returned from the field and turned in all my cases that Stephanie and I had screened, to date, about 600 people each. For a remarkably short term internship that came together on a string and was a complete fluke, I don't think I could ask for much more than that. Kevin asked if I had maxed out my credit card paying for the plane ticket over here--frankly, it was the best spent money I can imagine and would do it again in an instant. It's worth any amount of money to feel alive, sometimes raw, often angry, but always passionate.