Sunday, Maria and I head for Albany for a gathering of Shithole Peoples celebrating their faith, their culture, their new lives in America. There will be food and dancing and singing.
My friend Ali, who invited me, says the parents of the RISSE boys and girls want to meet me, and I think it is about time we meet and shake hands and get a look at one another.
We are, after all, important to one another. These are hard working people, often single parent families due to tragedy and destruction, they don’t often get a chance to come out in support of their children, as many parents in America get to do. They work too many jobs.
They have made time for this day, in part a celebration of the Koran, in part a coming together to honor the cultures they have left behind, in part to meet me, and to meet Maria.
These are wandering peoples with broken lives, individuals and families in search of dignity within an alien and sometimes hostile community.
“The story of our struggle has finally become known,” wrote refugee Hannah Arendt in her wonderful essay “We Refugees” in 1943. “We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life.
We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expressions of feelings. We left our relatives behind and saw our best friends killed in camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.”
Nevertheless, she wrote, “as soon as we were saved – and most of us had to be saved several times – we started our new lives and tried to follow as closely as possible all the good advice our saviors passed on to us.”
I call this the Shithole gathering out of respect, not derision. I use the term because most of the people I will meet tomorrow came from poor and troubled countries, the “Shithole” countries, as they have been labeled, the dark and broken countries, crippled by war, genocide and natural disasters.
The people to whom America has always offered itself as a beacon of light.
It has been suggested that we can do better by admitting people from countries that are not poor and troubled, that are not “Shithole” countries, and it seems, that are also white. It seems small and bitter to me to dismiss these people in that way, perhaps because I am one of them. My people all came from some of the worst shitholes on the earth. I see them as my brothers and sisters.
I can’t quite imagine how they see me.
The people I will meet are huggers, I have been told, shy and quiet people not used to small talk, many still working to learn out language. I think there will not be a lot of talking, but a lot of feeling.
I will be touching, shaking hands with and hugging people from Africa and Haiti and some of the most devastated countries in the world. I admire them, love some already, and find their children to be brave and kind and loyal and courteous. They have suffered horror before, and some are suffering horrors again, there is indifference and hostility to them all over the world, even here, in the land of the free and the brave.
These people do not ever complain or whine, or dwell on their suffering. Mostly, they live and work to give their children better and safer lives. “I just give thanks for whatever Gods brought me and my family here,” Maulidi the carver told me.
We are taking lots of stuff. Our car is stuffed with bags:
Winter jackets, waterproof socks, games for children, books and CD’s, sweaters and carving tools, games and puzzles. Maria has joined in this work with me, we are doing it together.
We have been collecting things for a while and putting them aside. After our meeting with these people at a local school, we will join with our friend Ali and distribute some of the things in our car to the tiny apartments in and around Albany, N.Y., where many of these families now live, a different world that the world most grew up in.
For many, this is their first winter, and that is a journey in itself.
I will give Ali a check for $200 for winter books for kids, and another check for $500 for Maulidi, whose beautiful carvings Maria has sold quickly and all over the country. He seems to be quite skilled. Maulidi comes from a “Shithole” country ravaged by genocide and civil war, he lost his carving tools when he came here, and they were replaced by the Army Of Good.
He is a quiet, honest and brave man – he spent 22 years in refugee camps, and he reminds me that working at a Hedge Fund or as a CEO is not the only valuable skill to offer the world.
Maulidi is quite highly skilled.
He does not seem a waste to me, but a brilliant artist whose very existence and life was saved by America, even as many of its leaders and people now turn their backs on him and people like him.
We are excited about tomorrow.
We will see one of the families who have already gotten groceries from our new monthly Refugee Grocery program, and we will see dozens of adults and children wearing the clothes and jackets and shoes sent to them as part of our Refugee Winter Clothing program.
We are, I think, showing them the true heart and soul of America.We are excited about going. It feels good. More tomorrow.