I’ve been
wondering: When does pain turn to joy? I wish I could push a button and make it
happen.
I am in Canada
for a summer hiatus. As I have had time to rest and contemplate and begin to
heal from the difficult blow of a transfer in my teaching position from one
school to another as of next month, I have been working hard to free myself
from the burden of it. I am fortunate to spend my summers on Lake Huron at a
family cottage in a place that is my soul reviver, with people whom I love and cherish.
I am plain grateful for the time and space that allows me to be here. The quiet
that I crave all school year as a high school teacher of New to Country immigrant
and refugee students is here in the wind, the waves, the trees, the rocks. And
I’m working hard on claiming joy.
I watch my
students choose joy as they come to school each day. I watch them intently take
notes as I write them on the board. I listen to them read chorally with pride
and confidence as we process works of fiction aloud. I see them wide eyed and
pleased when they receive an unexpectedly good grade on a paper that they
wrote. It is beautiful, really.
But there
are certainly tangible moments in my classroom when it is difficult to discern
between the loss and the joy of this newfound life that my devoted and
hardworking students now claim. I sometimes see their losses clearly embedded
on their faces. As refugees, they have lost their homes, no matter how spare. Many have lost parents and siblings to war and famine. Even though they now live in the safety that is Minnesota, they have left
behind families and friends, their sense of place, their very own countries,
often never to return. Bound up in their loss is sometimes their own very
identity as a people.
I look at
the wider world and see that the real, true, tangible and gut wrenching suffering
that I have recently endured matches that of my students and my neighbors in
myriad ways. As my students feel a sense of loss surrounding their homes and
their communities in Africa, I, too, felt a deep and abiding loss as I left
Apollo High School, my school of nine years, on June 8. Packing up my classroom on the last
days of school was nerve wracking. It felt senseless, even, and my anger and
denial regarding my situation was pushed to the deepest part of myself. It was
exceedingly difficult to leave my supportive and loving community where I built
foundational relationships and excellent rapport with my family of students and
staff. Locking my door behind me pretty much did me in; I turned in my keys and
shut my door on nine years of investment, on my sense of belonging, and on my
identity as a teacher who had helped to build a program for New to Country
students since 2008. My room, 510, is no longer mine.
But my
situation pales in comparison to that of so many: my dear friends who are
suffering from cancers and leukemia; friends whose marriages are on difficult
ground; the Syrian families who are fleeing famine and ISIS; the children of
Nigeria who are being coerced into becoming warriors for Boko Haram. And then
there is the pain that my students feel, which shows itself at unexpected
moments and to which I now feel more attuned.
Many of
them were born and raised in refugee camps or in countries where war and gang
strife was rampant enough to prompt their families to the desperate point of
fleeing the familiar for the United States. I speak to many of my students who
miss the simple life of their Ethiopian or Kenyan refugee camps. They tell me
of their old world, where neighbors and families shared everything: rice, pots,
water, showers, mats, clothing, and shoes. In the camps, children played freely
with pals for hours as they ran about from tarped hut to hut playing hide and
seek and endless games of soccer with makeshift balls made of duct tape.
So put
yourself in their shoes, won’t you? Think of leaving your family and your
homeland for good and heading to a country that you have never laid eyes upon,
where you will live out the rest of your days. Think upon leaving your set
routine, your livelihood, your identity as a member of a particular group in
whatever place you now live. Then mentally set yourself in a completely foreign
place where the people speak a different language that you do not understand,
where the clothing, religion, food, community structures, housing,
transportation, and weather is unlike what you have always known. And you have
to learn about it. And you want to fit in, but you don’t know how. And you miss
your family in your homeland but you can’t afford to get back to see them and
you don’t know when you might. And your grandmother has died back in Somalia
and you can’t attend her funeral. And the government in the new land seems to
be against you, and you feel loss, loss, lost.
At present,
I, too, feel deep loss. I am heading to a new school, and I have not yet laid eyes
upon my classroom; this shall be my work in the next few weeks. I am going to
have to build a new set of friendships with colleagues whose faces I don’t yet
know. I will not be on familiar ground. My darling students from Apollo whom I
know so well will not be stopping in each morning to check in, and I am already
missing my stellar Apollo colleagues, who have my back and who often know me better
than I know myself. And I want to fit in, but I know I’m going to be in
mourning. And I feel loss, loss, lost.
And so, as
my time of rest and healing in Canada wanes and I ready my mind and heart for a
return to a set of new realities, I am putting a roadblock in front of the
resentment that has tried to gain a foothold in my soul. I’m working hard on remembering
to be grateful for all that I do have and for what I know in my gut will end
with positives. I just can’t see them yet, and that’s okay.
