Sunday Night With John: Ma Familla

Ma Familla

John Paul Derryberry

*I was granted permission by the family to write this blog and waited until I no longer worked for the agency to ensure professional standards were maintained."

The door closed behind me and I wiped away the last of the tears.  I was experiencing a profound feeling of pride, sadness, and disappointment. I just had informed the first refugee family I had assisted that I would be relocating my family and could no longer be their case manager. They cried, I cried, and they said it was some of the saddest news they had ever been given. As a social worker, I pride myself on not getting emotionally involved in my cases. There is always another person to assist after I finish a case. If I get too high on the outcome, it becomes about me, not about the work they did to fix their life. This case and this family made it impossible not to become personally wrapped up in their great story. To understand this, we have to go back to the beginning, the most difficult start of a case I have ever had.

It’s early May 2018, and there is the talk of a border wall, our government is separating children from their parents when the refugee crosses the border. Our president has laid out his vision for solving our immigration issues. I had received a phone call requesting we admit a family of six who had been granted legal parole status by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). One daughter was separated from the family in a center in Chicago. The family spoke four languages, French, Portuguese, Lingual, and a little Spanish. I informed the caller that I spoke English and enough Spanish to ask where the bathroom was and request a beer.  The caller laughed and stated that it is going to have to be enough because, if you do not take them, they are on the streets.

There I sat in an office with the family. I explained my program; they blinked and then looked at the interrupter. Fifteen minutes later, they signed a document they could not read to join our network. We admitted them and this family from another country, whose journey I did not have a whiff of a hint of how treacherous it was, looked at me, and I looked at them. I realized I was not swimming in the deep end of the pool but the Marianas Trench, the deepest trench in the ocean. They needed clothes so we went to Goodwill to stretch out the limited budget as far as we could. Each family member came back with one outfit and nodded they were good. Now I had to figure out how to communicate, "fill up the cart."  I finaly settled on grabbing a whole rack of clothes and putting the rack into the cart. I then pulled out the clothes. I pointed a them, then the rack, and the cart. They all nodded and ran off. Within five minutes, the cart was full. We then played social work charades for the next year with assistance from Google translate from time to time.

I learned of their horrifying journey but will not share the details here because that is their story to share, but I often cried as they recited, as best they could, their steps to make it to our country. They, through sheer strength of will, laughed with me as we muddled through our broken communication style. They made fun of my attempts to speak their language as I attempted to learn a new word a day. They laughed at themselves when they butchered the English they were learning at school and the adult Ed class we enrolled them in. One day, a day after our current administration defended its separation policy, the father stated, “Wow John, America, Good Place!” I witnessed the reunion between their daughter and their family at the Cedar Rapids Airport. The pure joy of seeing a divided family reunited caused hope to swell in the soul. As the young teen looked at me, her dad explained to her that I had assisted in the reunification. She hugged me, a stranger, with so much love that I felt my world shift at that moment. I had changed as a human being after that hug. You could call me AH-John (After-Hug John).  I was caught in a paradox of knowing America was safer for this family than their home country but struggling with the direction we were taking with inhumane policies toward immigrants.

After about six months with us, the mom spoke of the trust she had in me to assist her family, I asked why. She said because of the compassion you have shown us. You have made sure we still eat African meals, taking the time to explain as best you can in our language the difficulties in our case, and you have made us laugh while you cared for us. The people who are against our crueler hard-liner stance against the current immigration policies have trumpeted, Love Trumps Hate.  I’ve always campaigned against thinking love will drown out hate. I view love and hate as opposite equals, with the slight advantage to hate. It’s just easier to hate; love scares the human condition. I always say, we all have been so screwed over by feeling love, that we struggle to trust it. But compassion and its complexities wear down even the most hateful person over time.

Compassion is filled with love, understanding, laughter, smiles, hugs, patience and shared tears;  not because we are experiencing the same thing, but because we are connected enough to understand each other. And that brings me back to the end of my journey as their social worker.  We cried over the end of our social work journey because of our impact on each other. I had  inundated their life with the hope that they had made the correct decision to come to America. They returned the favor by teaching me that compassion through actions is a universally understood language. We didn’t have to communicate in words. We both understood enough to know we were connected.

It was a long drive home that night, thinking about this family from the first moment I saw them to the last moment I just had shared with them as their social worker. Our professional journey was over. I smiled at one point during our conversation, and the mom stated, this is not good news. But I replied, know that my family and your family can now stay connected forever, that’s if you’ll have us as friends. She said, “Not friends John, as family.” The teenage daughter said, "I would go to college wherever you move." And, we just might let her live with us during that time.

So I say to my refugee family, “En attendant de retrouver ma famille” (Until we meet again, my family) .