on justice

The theme of my week has certainly been justice.

Not only have I been re-writing my essay for graduate school around this very theme (as "doing justice" is THE reason why I switched from teaching AP and honors English courses to teaching ESL, and what I am trying to explain to admissions), but I have also finished reading an unforgettable book this week based on the true life experiences of a refugee from Sudan.

If you are looking for a book you won't put down, and a book that will change your perspective entirely, please read What is the What by Dave Eggers. Since so many of the refugee students I have taught in the past year are from Sudan, and even more of my students have lived in the refugee camp that is the setting for 10 years of the narrator's life (Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya), the book was of great personal and professional interest to me. Lately I have been helping one of my own Sudanese students write her life story. She began the project with the accounting of fleeing her village, suddenly, as soldiers descended upon them. As she runs, a five-year-old with her mother, her mother tells her, "God will help us." And this is the title of the book she is writing--God will help us. I am stunned by her faith, honestly.

Two weeks ago I finished reading another remarkable true story. You may have seen the book featured in Starbucks last year (my reason for thinking, actually, that it might not be so great). I was wrong. It was extraordinary. The book is A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, and it is one of the most disturbing and hopeful things I have read in a long time.

So justice is on my mind lately. Sometimes at night, when I am sitting at home in a quiet and warm house, I wonder how it is that I can inhabit the SAME world as so many people I have met, whose stories are so traumatic, so gruesome, so terrible. I drink tea, and think about the refugees I know who used to eat only one meal a day, who have been raped, or tortured. One of my student's fathers had acid poured into his eyes by rebel forces because he refused to fight with them; he is now completely blind. How can this be the same planet? How can we let people suffer like this?

This week I have nearly cried at work every day. Today, I couldn't help it, and finally did. It's the injustices that get to me. Last week one of my favorite students--a refugee from Burma--moved to Ohio (we have seen a large migration of this group of people leaving our city, as they cannot afford to live here; a loss for our city entirely). Her school called me yesterday to ask for a missing piece of paper, and the woman on the phone complained to me about how many of "these people" they have in their school now. She refused to pronounce my student's name, though I said it nearly five times for her--she prefered to rushedly spell it instead (as in, "Can you send M-Y-A's paper to me?"), and I have a sinking feeling that my students will remain nameless in their new city. Other injustices, of just this week: the school personnel who yell at my students, imagining that if they yell louder, my students (who are learning English) will understand them better. Or the student whose family is barely eating each day, here in Lynn, in my own city. Today a student comes to me to tell me of a grave incident--something said to her by a person in our school who had no motivation to say any such thing (unless you include bigotry, racial prejudice, socio-economic assumptions, gender bias...). The student was demeaned, and degraded. She came to tell me because she wanted me to know, NOT because she expected me to do anything about it. And that's when I cried. I couldn't help it. It's one thing for a person to take another person's insult, or bigotry...but it's another for that person to be so beaten down by so much insult that they no longer expect that justice CAN be done. They no longer will fight, or will allow people like me to fight for them.

On days like today, I remind myself that at least I can tell the stories. I am challenged in my thinking to read these words from a Sudanese refugee, the closing paragraph of What is the What, as the narrator/refugee speaks directly to his reader:

"Whatever I do, however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories...I speak to these people, and I speak to you, because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelieveable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us...I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist."

On days like today, I am at least comforted to know that I am not pretending the refugee students I serve do not exist. I cry, and I care. I remember their stories.