The sun was sinking, the day finally ending. I sat on the beach in Mazatlán, propped against my pack, swim trunks still damp under my jeans. At this hour, the beach was empty.
The night before I’d stopped in Mazatlán, a city on Mexico’s northwestern coast, to break up the long bus trip from Tijuana to Guadalajara. Back in Seattle, the Sunday travel section had made the place sound like paradise. All I’d found was a gloomy hotel room, an ocean too hot for swimming, Gila monsters splashing in an open sewer nearby, and a couple of scrawny teenagers humping alongside a broken concrete path near the beach.
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Best of In The Fray 2015. As they head into what should be their golden years, many older immigrants still work low-wage jobs and remain undocumented. Unable to save up or receive benefits for the elderly, they can do little but hope they stay healthy and employable. Part two of a two-part series.
“Nursing homes are sad places. People are abandoned there,” says Gloria Murray, sixty-six, a Jamaican immigrant who worked for more than two decades as a health aide at a nursing home. Over the course of her career, Murray became close to many of her clients. It was important to her that they be shown kindness and respect. In Jamaica, she says, “we take care of our old.”
Yet as Murray grew old herself, she quickly learned that no one was going to take care of her. In 2010, a fire destroyed her home in New York. Homeless for two years, she struggled to navigate the city’s shelter system. Life there was unbearable, she says: “It was drugs, pimps, the whole lot. I never knew it would come to this.”
Dana Ullman Dana Ullman is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. Her photography is focused on social engagement: chronicling everyday epics, investigating subjects crossculturally, and humanizing faceless statistics through storytelling. Site: ullmanphoto.com
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Best of In The Fray 2015. Embracing the last stage of life is a challenge for all, but especially so for those growing old outside their homeland. Part one of a two-part series.
Tucked away in Staten Island’s Clifton neighborhood is a fourth-floor apartment painted in drowsy greens and browns. A blend of savory aromas—fish gravies, okra, fufu, stewed bitterballs—fills the air as brightly dressed women chat over bowls of chicken stew with rice.
Monah Smith, a small, wizened woman with a quiet smile, has been cooking for them. Smith sells home-cooked meals from her apartment in Park Hill, a low-income housing complex. The place never seems to be empty. Staten Island is home to the largest Liberian community outside of Africa, and many of Smith’s fellow immigrants drop by—at almost any hour of day—for the traditional, slow-cooked dishes she makes.
Dana Ullman Dana Ullman is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. Her photography is focused on social engagement: chronicling everyday epics, investigating subjects crossculturally, and humanizing faceless statistics through storytelling. Site: ullmanphoto.com
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
The civil war in Syria forced her to leave her home for another in Armenia, her ancestral homeland. Three years later, the war rages on, and the situation in the refugee camps in Lebanon and elsewhere remains grim.
Four years of a raging civil war in Syria have displaced more than eleven million people, ushering in the largest exodus since World War II. Of those forced from their homes, four million have fled the country. While the crisis has now reached Europe in a very visible way, the majority of Syrian refugees are not (yet) risking the hazardous journey to its shores. Instead, they are staying in countries not far from Syria’s borders: Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and—most noticeably—Lebanon, where an estimated one in three people is now Syrian.
Anahid, an ethnic Armenian woman from Aleppo, escaped Syria in 2012, soon after the country was engulfed in fighting between President Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian regime and various rebel factions. She fled to Yerevan, the capital of her ancestral homeland, which borders Turkey. Later, Anahid moved to Lebanon, where she has relatives. There, she worked with Syrian refugees in their overcrowded camps. Last year, she traveled back to Syria with her British husband, Joseph Bailey, and witnessed the country’s presidential election. (Anahid is an alias. She has asked that her real name not be used because her father is still in Syria.)
The Highway of Death in Damascus, as viewed from the top floor of the house where Anahid and her husband Joseph Bailey stayed. “It’s the highway of the airport, but they call it the Highway of Death because one side is the rebel-held area and the other side is the government’s, so they keep shooting each other, especially when there are military buses or cars passing through.” The neighborhood on the left—the Free Syrian Army’s side—is completely destroyed; on the right is the government’s territory, where the buildings are still intact.
A vivacious woman in her late twenties, Anahid studied tourism in Aleppo but currently works as a freelance translator. When the war broke out, she and other Syrian Armenians were able to find refuge in Armenia because the government recognized them as citizens. Nevertheless, some of the Armenians already there did not welcome them at first, Anahid says. Culturally, the two groups are distinct. The modern Republic of Armenia, a Soviet state for eighty years, has developed a Russian-influenced dialect that is very different from the Armenian spoken in Syria. Most of those who are now “repatriating” to Armenia are descended from the Armenians who were relocated during the 1915 Armenian genocide, which took place in what is now modern Turkey and involved the killing, forced migration, and starvation of an estimated 1.5 million men, women, and children. (Anahid’s grandfather was one of the survivors: a young boy when he left Anatolia on his own, he was adopted by a Kurdish family in Aleppo and never learned what happened to his family back home.)
Aleppo until recently had an ethnic Armenian population of 60,000—one of the largest in the Middle East. Today, the city’s Armenian district is a fraction of its former size, with only a handful of hangers-on. Located inside a government-controlled area, it continues to be bombed by rebel forces.
Unlike Anahid, many ethnic Armenians and other Christian minorities in Syria supported the country’s secular socialist regime even before the conflict, believing that Assad offered them a degree of protection against Islamic extremism. Recently, Russia joined the conflict on the side of the government, providing air cover for a massive, ongoing push to retake rebel-held areas of Aleppo. While its actions have rankled Washington, Russia’s support of the Assad regime is seen more positively by some Syrian Armenians, who fear that the Islamic State, and not the US-backed rebels, will control the country once Assad falls. If that happens, there may not be a home for them to return to.
In The Fray contributing writer Jo Magpie interviewed Anahid about the events that drove her to leave Aleppo, her life as a “repatriate” in Armenia, and the refugee camps that she worked in while living in Lebanon—whose desperate conditions are pushing some Syrians to brave a perilous overseas journey to Europe.
Aerial shot of the Bekaa refugee camp.
When did you leave your home in Aleppo, and how easy was it to get out?
I left in 2012, in the last week of June. It wasn’t as bad as now, it was just the beginning of the problems in Aleppo. There had already been three big explosions before I left. The first one was on a Sunday. Me and my friend went to have breakfast near our house, and the minute we got out, there was this huge explosion. We didn’t know it was an explosion, so we started looking around. Then we saw that the building right in front of us was full of dust, and the glass was falling. People were running, and ambulances started to come.
A week later we were like, “Okay, everything looks safe, the city is calm, let’s go and have breakfast in front of the Citadel.” After fifteen minutes, while we were waiting for food, a protest started nearby in the Umayyad Mosque, and they [the government forces] started shooting at them. [The mosque’s famed minaret was destroyed in fighting in 2013. —ed.] We just had to run. My friend had to carry me because I was too scared to move. We just took the first bus that was getting out of there.
We didn’t plan to leave Aleppo. We were going to go back, but we heard that it was getting worse there.
How was your reception in Armenia? Was it easy to settle in?
It was more difficult for Syrians to be accepted here at that time. When I got a university scholarship, a group of kids would come to me at breaks and say, “You shouldn’t be studying here. Our parents save up money for years so that we can come to university, and you guys came like a month ago, and now you can come here for free.”
If you knew a local, people would accept you more. But if you were on your own, it was very hard. First the language barrier, and second that they were not feeling comfortable that people from another country were coming, and they thought their government was helping the Syrians—which was not true.
What’s your impression of how Yerevan has changed due to Syrian Armenians coming?
It’s helped the economy here a lot. They opened businesses that the locals weren’t able to, which means hiring more people. So the change is not bad, it’s mostly good—leaving aside the racism. A really small number of locals still consider us Arabs, or consider us to have betrayed the country—[we] left while the genocide happened and never came back. “You’re only here now that your country is in a war,” and stuff like that. But most people are very warm here now. They aren’t like they used to be three years ago.
You spent some time visiting refugee camps in Lebanon. What happened?
We moved from Armenia to Lebanon because my mum’s parents are there, and we thought we would have an easier life. It’s closer to Syria, a lot more aid organizations and the UN are there. I worked for a nongovernmental organization for three weeks as a volunteer. We would go to the camps and talk with women, to see how they were coping with life. When I stopped volunteering with the NGO, I decided that I wanted to go and visit with my friends sometimes. We would take candies or toys for the kids.
From the day we left Syria, me and a group of friends would always collect clothes and ship them to Syrian refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon, or Jordan. Some Syrian musician friends did a benefit concert, and they made $5,000. It was very cold in the camps, so the title was “A Bag of Wood.” The donations and the ticket money made enough for 300 families—for wood to burn in the winter—and we bought some extra stuff, like rain boots for the kids. Me and Joseph decided to do some crowdfunding to make more money for blankets, and collected almost the same amount.
The tents of Syrian refugees in the camp in Lebanon.
What was the situation like in the camps you visited?
Back then I would always get shocked, but now it’s normal for me. The tents are basically a few pieces of wood. Sticks. And then big plastic sheets that the UN gives to them. Some use paper sheets from the billboards. They basically steal them, so they can cover more, because the UN only gives them six or eight sticks and three or four pieces of plastic, which is not enough to make a tent big enough for a family. There was this one woman who has nine kids, without her husband, because he was killed. Then she has her mum, dad, brothers, sisters, their families—they live in one tent.
Some of [the refugees] have heaters inside. Some of them have water, some don’t. In every camp there is one person who has a car, and most of the time this person becomes the leader of the camp. He goes to get water, and they bring barrels and fill them. The water containers that the UN gives to them are very small. It’s not enough for a family.
[The UN] would give them $30 a month for bread. Then they made it $28. They give you some flour, some rice. They would tell them that their kids can go to schools, but the schools are very far away. Nobody can drive them, and they cannot afford to take them, so they stay there.
They don’t have bathrooms. Each camp has one or two bathroom spaces outside somewhere, where they have made tents with these plastic things. This one camp had 100 or 150 families, and I didn’t see more than six or seven bathrooms.
There are unrecognized [private] camps. The owners often make demands, like “I want rent for the floor that you’re putting in your tent.” You can register for a UN-recognized camp, but some of [the refugees] are scared to go there. Some of them want to be closer to the city or to places where they can have a chance to work in a factory—but for a quarter of the wages a local would get.
It’s hard in Lebanon. Syrians are not very accepted there. The last few months I was there it was even more difficult for Syrians to find a job. Even if you can afford to rent a flat, you can’t afford to go to school.
Do you think that’s because of the amount of people that are coming now?
That has a very big influence. A lot of people say, “When there was war in Lebanon, Lebanese people also came to Syria.” But Lebanon is like four million [people]. [Including refugees, Lebanon’s population is now estimated to be six million. —ed.] If half of them came to Syria, Syria is big and it’s not so noticeable. But now half of Syria came to Lebanon. Lebanon is like a quarter of Syria’s size. They don’t have space. Cities were already overcrowded. It was already difficult for Lebanese people to have a job. Now Syrians are also looking for jobs, so that makes them a bit defensive.
How is the situation out of the camps—like, in Beirut, the capital?
In the city center you see a lot of Syrians who regret leaving [the camps]. They leave with the hope of moving to the city to find jobs and have a better life, but they end up homeless there, and nobody helps them.
Most of them are kids. At the end of the day, when they finish what they’re doing on the street—begging, selling flowers, or whatever—they go and sleep in the buildings. I would see one of them every day. He would sleep in a cardboard box with his little brother. They’re not older than twelve years old. During the day they sell flowers, and they sleep in the same spot.
We would ask [the homeless] where they’re from in Syria, to make sure they’re Syrians, and we would give them some money. Some of them were so excited that they didn’t believe it. We were in the car because we didn’t want a pile of people climbing on us when we were giving money. One of them took the money and ran away, then started running back, saying “You gave me too much!” He expected us to take it back.
The view from the balcony of the house where Anahid and Joseph stayed in Damascus. “I thought it would be scary for Joseph, but he kept insisting to sleep on the balcony on the top floor. We would watch the rockets every night.” During their stay one of those rockets hit the building right across from their room.
You went back to back to Syria recently. How was that?
I didn’t go to Aleppo. It wasn’t safe, especially when I have my husband, a foreigner, in Syria.
We stayed in Damascus for a few weeks, and it was normal, but right in front of [the house] was the ruined neighborhood. And then you have the Highway of Death. It’s the highway of the airport, but they call it the Highway of Death because one side is the rebel-held area and the other side is the government’s, so they keep shooting each other, especially when there are military buses or cars passing through.
We got there on the day of the Syrian election results. [Assad was reelected by a wide margin in 2014, but the opposition and many Western leaders called the election a sham. —ed.] There were celebrations, because we were in a government-controlled area, but you could see rockets flying to the other side.
I was used to it. I thought it would be scary for Joseph, but he kept insisting to sleep on the balcony on the top floor. We would watch the rockets every night.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
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I wrote an essay that appeared in the Atlantic yesterday. Based on the research for my book on unemployment, the piece talks about the debate over Denmark in last week’s Democratic presidential debate—and how the real debate should be over Canada:
Clearly, America won’t expand its social safety net to anywhere near the scale of Denmark’s over the next president’s time in office. Judging from their rhetoric in the debate, though, Clinton and Sanders both agree that government can and should play an important role in extending economic opportunities more broadly. Canada’s approach to policy shows us some of the practical ways a country can do that—without having to go far from our roots as a New World society of dreamers and strivers.
Today’s federal election in Canada should be interesting: will Canada move in the direction of America, or vice versa? (That said, as my friend Barry Eidlin reminded me, the provinces have a lot of say in putting forward policies of their own—to help the employed and unemployed alike—and so some things probably won’t change, regardless of the outcome.)
Unfortunately, writing the headline for this post put the South Park song “Blame Canada” in my head. Here is the video, so that you can share in my pain (NSFW, obviously):
I participated in Marshal Zeringue’s Page 99 Test at the Campaign for the American Reader. The blog is based on a quote by the writer Ford Madox Ford: “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” New authors talk about the ninety-ninth page of their book and what it says about its larger themes. Here’s what I wrote about my book Cut Loose:
Page 99 talks about how the unemployed deal with the depression and anxiety that come from losing part of their identities. Work is central to our sense of self—it’s often the first question we ask someone we meet—and during the workday we build friendships that sustain us throughout our lives. Many of the people I interviewed felt isolated. Friends could no longer relate. Relationships with spouses and children became strained. Unable to provide the way they used to, they found themselves mired in blame and doubts.
One smart way to help the unemployed is used extensively in Canada: action centers. When a layoff hits, the government sets up a help center for the company’s workers and trains some of them to work there. Unlike strangers at a government agency, peer helpers can assist their former coworkers with a personal and personalized touch. Lynn Minick of the National Employment Law Project points out that America’s social safety net for the unemployed largely helps the assertive and self-reliant. For those who might otherwise fall through the cracks, it makes a big difference if they have someone willing to step up for them, he says.
While policies are important, they’re not enough. As I write on page 99:
Individuals internalize society’s belief that being unemployed is degrading, and their mental health and social ties suffer as a result. Regardless of how much they receive in benefits, the unemployed are less satisfied than those with jobs. Even in countries with generous unemployment insurance, the unemployed tend to die at a younger age.
Society treats the long-term unemployed—whose numbers have remained at unprecedented levels since the recession—as lazy and useless. My book focuses on unemployed autoworkers, many who had worked hard for decades and, thanks to good wages and benefits, achieved a middle-class lifestyle. Now, suddenly, they are failures. Some became suicidal because they felt they had let their families down.
Our society attacks the “takers” who live off government aid or the “pampered” union members who had the gall to attain a decent quality of life. It’s obsessed with performance and proficiency, self-improvement and success. But in a culture that values winning at all costs, the long-term unemployed are the ultimate losers. The solution, I argue, has to involve changing that culture.
Amid all the controversy over the recent push in New York and elsewhere for a $15 minimum wage, it’s important to remember the big picture.
In the decades after World War II, the United States had powerful policies and popular movements that lifted up working men and women. A third of employed Americans were members of unions, and a pro-worker lobby pushed Washington to raise the minimum wage to more than $10 in today’s dollars.
That culture has changed—so much so that today we’re even debating whether a worker should, at a minimum, earn enough to make ends meet.
I’ll also be doing a radio interview with Shep Cohen on The World of Work today at 4 p.m. ET. Listen live at WDVR (89.7 FM in Sergeantsville, NJ, and 96.9 FM in Trenton, NJ) or WPNJ 90.5 (Easton, PA).
Best of In The Fray 2015. In his first book, Philip Connors went to the woods to learn what it had to teach. In his latest work, he delves into the dark memories of his family’s past, rooting out the meaning of a tragedy.
Susan Dunlap
Earlier this year, forest-fire lookout and nonfiction writer Philip Connors came out with his second book, All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found. It’s a beautifully wrought memoir about his brother’s suicide, which happened when Connors was only twenty-three. In the Fray’s Susan Dunlap talked with Connors over email in the spring about the way his brother Dan’s death shaped the trajectory of his own life, the approach he took to writing about a taboo subject, and the comforts of solitude.
You started out as a journalist and avoided getting an MFA degree. Were you daunted when you first set out as a creative nonfiction writer?
I first started writing nonfiction because I tried and failed to write quality fiction. A good deal of my apprenticeship—aside from working for newspapers—involved writing terrible short stories that no one has ever read, nor ever will. I just couldn’t write a good one. I couldn’t seem to finish a story without getting bored with it. And I never had the desire to subject myself to the torture of the MFA workshop, which Louis Menand memorably described as “a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy.” At some point, having failed for years to write any decent fiction, I thought, “Why not try to write a true story? The thing happened; I know how the story begins, I know how it ends.” And my first attempt was decent enough to be published in a little magazine, the Georgia Review, which was, of course, encouraging. I haven’t written a word of fiction since.
All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found By Philip Connors
W. W. Norton & Company. 256 pages.
All the Wrong Places is a very personal book about a dark chapter in your family’s life. You say that you felt inspired to write about your brother Dan because your mother shared her diary with you. Was it hard for your family to see the entire story when it went to print?
Parts of it were very difficult for my parents to read, as they would have to be: I’m writing about their only other son, who chose to end his life with a bullet from an assault rifle. But they’ve been remarkably supportive of the book. My sister told me she loved it. That meant a lot. My mother told me she couldn’t put it down, even as she cried through the whole second half.
As you mentioned, it was her brave act of connection and sharing that originally unlocked the book for me. She’d been keeping a diary of her thoughts about Dan, and in one of our rare moments of conversation about him, she had the impulse to share what she’d written. I found it very moving that she would offer up something so intimate. By then I had come to understand how difficult it is to talk about suicide—so difficult that it’s among our last taboos. It was not something we talked about much in our family, even though it sat there like the elephant in the room. And after my mother shared what she’d written with me, I thought maybe I could also write something that chipped away at the taboo.
It feels like you are saying in the book that your brother’s suicide shaped your adult life, both in the mistakes you made but also in the fact that you became a nonfiction writer.
It happened when I was still in the process of crafting an adult self, so I think it’s only natural that it affected everything that came afterward in my life. And I do think it’s a major part of what made me the sort of writer I became. Because the subject of suicide is so taboo, I found that the only place I could talk about it was in my own private notebooks. For years and years I had a running conversation with myself about it; if I didn’t, I feared the fact of Dan’s death would eat me alive. In some perverse way, the fact of his death ordained my becoming a writer. In order to live, I had to write—and so I did.
The sense of lost connections, or a failure to connect, gives the book a sense of poignancy, without it ever becoming maudlin.
Yes, that was a trap I wanted to avoid. I didn’t feel a need to accentuate the tragic nature of suicide. The reader is going to get it. What I wanted to do was write a quest story—a quest for how to be in the world after something like that has happened in your family.
The suicide of a family member is like a bomb going off, and it leaves everyone left behind with a lot of shrapnel and a lot of questions. How could my brother have believed that a bullet in the brain was the answer to what troubled him? And what was the thing that troubled him? For years, I didn’t know. It took some searching to unearth a plausible story, and in the meantime the fact of his death was close to unbearable. I thought about it every day for years, and it made me what I suppose a doctor would call clinically depressed.
But finding a way to live with the unbearable can result in comedy, at least in retrospect. Making the unbearable bearable is a real-life run at improvisational burlesque, and often a massive exercise in self-deception. I made counterintuitive choices. My life became deeply weird, sometimes even farcical. I managed to work myself into the wrong situation—the wrong neighborhood, the wrong job—over and over again.
The details of that impulse allowed me to laugh at some of what I had made of my life in those years, and that was crucial in writing a readable book, one that didn’t take the reader by the scruff of the neck and rub her nose in endless misery. I like to think that parts of it are pretty funny, perhaps unexpectedly so.
Part of the book is also about clandestine phone sex, which adds a touch of ribald humor but also is closely tied to the theme of an inability to connect. Was it hard to write about something so personal?
Not really. Those parts of the book were among the first I wrote, and they came pretty easily, because the experience was so strange and vivid, and so rich in narrative potential. If you’re going to write a memoir, you’ve got to be willing to confess. Having grown up Catholic, I know a thing or two about confession.
I was especially riveted by the story of your friend who developed a phone relationship with a dying man. I think that could fall under the “you can’t make this stuff up” category of nonfiction. Yet with this book you managed to do what I think good fiction generally tries to do—capture an emotional truth through telling a story.
Life is almost always stranger than fiction. How to capture some of that strangeness in a true story—and how to impose a certain shapeliness and beauty on the chaos of lived experience—is a motivating challenge for me. In both of my first two books, I wanted to write nonfiction that had a depth of feeling and an emotional impact similar to the best fiction.
Was there another memoir writer you’ve met or read who inspired you to think about your own book the way you did?
[The semi-autobiographical novel] A River Runs Through It always spoke to me because it mingled the comic and the tragic so beautifully, and deftly managed big jumps in time. But as a memoirist I was dealing with the raw material of my own life, so the challenge was to sift through my experience to discover what about it had the shape of a story. I wanted the book to have a kind of relentless narrative drive. The goal was to create that unlikely thing: a page-turner about a suicide. Mostly that involved writing and rewriting, again and again, and stripping away anything extraneous so that all that was left was essential.
Your first book, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, could be called a modern-day Thoreauvian account of a solitary life in the wilderness. Solitariness is also a theme in All the Wrong Places. Do you think solitude is a necessary condition for you as a writer?
I’m not sure solitude is a necessary condition, but it is without question helpful. Back when I lived and worked in New York, I wrote in the mornings before setting off on my commute. I think what I’ve written since then is better, deeper, and more thoughtful for the time I’ve been given as a Forest Service fire lookout, living and working in solitude, with plenty of mental elbow room for thinking or not thinking, being creative, allowing things to bubble up unexpectedly. Part of writing, for me, is sitting and doing nothing. In order to write for an hour, I often find I have to sit doing nothing for three. Then a phrase comes, and I’m off.
What’s next for you?
Check back in six months and perhaps I’ll have an answer. This book left me feeling that I’d scraped from the bottom of the well. Now I need to allow the well to fill again. I hope to be pleasantly surprised.
You’re about to head back into the Gila National Forest to work as a fire lookout for another season. Are you looking forward to a respite from the pressures involved in being a public person?
Absolutely. I’m far more comfortable sitting alone in a lookout tower than I am speaking in front of strangers in bookstores. I’m very much looking forward to sitting quietly, communing with the birds, studying cloud shapes. It’s what I do best.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Susan Dunlap is the natural-resources reporter for the Montana Standard.
Correction, August 10: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story mistakenly said All the Wrong Places is Connors’ third book; it is the second he has written, though he edited and contributed an essay to a third book. The story also said the suicide of Connors’ brother occurred when he working as a reporter; he was actually a college student at the time. We regret the errors.
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Best of In The Fray 2015. The Troubles are gone, but the anger and suspicion remain in Northern Ireland—especially in working-class Protestant communities left behind by the peace process.
Chris Schumerth
Twelfth of July, Donegall Street, Belfast, 2013. Dominic Bryan, via Flickr
A few years ago, I found myself in a very Protestant part of Belfast trying to convince neighborhood kids that they should be nice to Catholics. I was working for a nonprofit, driving all over Northern Ireland to direct sports programs that bussed groups of children back and forth between Protestant and Catholic enclaves. Americans would probably describe the work we did as “peace-building,” but locals in Belfast called it “community relations.”
My colleague Joanne, a Catholic, had come with me to east Belfast to talk to kids who were part of a soccer program there. Programs like this are often funded by foundation grants that mandate a community-relations component. The danger is that the participants sometimes felt duped. They were there to play soccer but found out they had to listen to our spiel first. Challenging the convictions they’d grown up with invited resentment, too, especially when the hosting adults didn’t really buy in. And that’s the exact scenario Joanne and I ran into.
A sixtyish man named John (a pseudonym) greeted us. The conversation started out friendly enough, but then he informed us that our allotted time had been cut in half. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked. “The boys really just want to play football.”
To cut our time was a breach of contract, but I wasn’t about to bring that up. John wasn’t done talking, anyway. He had another request: could we please refrain from mentioning Gaelic football tonight? (In Northern Ireland, Protestants play rugby and Catholics play Gaelic football, but we made a point of talking to our kids about both sports.) Gaelic football is a sectarian game, John insisted. He doesn’t want to be friends with any of those Catholics anyway. Buncha terrorists. Besides, he knows some of them, and they wouldn’t go near a rugby pitch. And don’t even get him started on those Lithuanians who keep coming in and stealing his people’s jobs.
Neither Joanne nor I really knew what to say. To be honest, I just wanted to get the hell out of there. There were other adults from the soccer club around, and they seemed embarrassed. They awkwardly pulled us away and led us to a room with window views of the pitch. For the rest of the evening, teenagers circulated through the room to participate in our activities. We talked about Gaelic football. We said that anybody should be able to play sports because they’re fun and a good way to bring people from different backgrounds together.
One boy was not so sure. “I know one person around here who would disagree with all that,” he said.
The boys sat up straight when John entered the room and sat ominously at the end of the table. I let Joanne do as much of the talking as possible, and she handled it like a pro. She’d been working in community relations for years. To my surprise, John stayed quiet, and I wondered if someone had told him to ease up on us for the rest of the evening.
Northern Ireland may have originated as a legal entity in 1921, when the British Parliament split Ireland in two, but its history of nationalist conflict stretches back to when King Henry II of England first landed in 1171 and took control of the island. Much later, from 1919 to 1921, the Irish Republican Army fought British forces in a war for Ireland’s independence. It was during those years of conflict that the infamous episode known as “Bloody Sunday” occurred. On November 21, 1920, the IRA assassinated fourteen British operatives in Dublin. Later that day, an occupational police force known as the Royal Irish Constabulary retaliated at a football match, killing fourteen civilians.
After Ireland was partitioned, the southern part of the island became independent. A sizable Irish Catholic community lived in Northern Ireland as well, and the Irish nationalists, or republicans, wanted to join the new nation. But Northern Ireland’s population was mostly unionists, or loyalists, who wanted to stay a part of Great Britain. The tensions between the two sides culminated in the Troubles, a conflict from 1968 to 1998 that led to more than 3,600 deaths. As many as 50,000 were injured, sometimes from gruesome practices like kneecapping.
When I arrived in Belfast for my job, I barely knew the distinction between Northern Ireland and its tourist-friendly neighbor to the south. Back in the United States, my father’s family are practicing Catholics, and my mother comes from a family of Protestants. I thought this background would help me understand Northern Ireland, but I was completely wrong. To call the dispute there a religious conflict is almost a misnomer. Sure, there are Protestant and Catholic churches that subscribe—with differing levels of rigidity—to conflicting beliefs about God. But the most salient identities in Northern Ireland nowadays seem to have little to do with disagreements about, say, transubstantiation. Instead, they have to do with culture—and also, to some degree, class.
Furthermore, the conflict today is played out in often hidden ways. As my coworkers warned me, questions about which school you attended or what part of the city you live in or what sport you play are often subtle attempts to peg allegiances. They are about figuring out what side you are on—what flag you fly in a war over national pride and cultural dignity that has never really ended.
A few weeks after my encounter with John, I was near the city center, driving home from work. I stopped at a red light. Before the light changed, a mob of people holding British flags rushed into the intersection. They planted themselves there, chanting. I tried to slide over to the right lane to make a turn. Several protesters anticipated my move and ran over to block the way. I wanted to keep driving, but I didn’t need any legal troubles, especially as a foreigner. So I stopped and waited. The demonstration backed up more and more traffic behind me, but the crowd was in no hurry.
This was my first experience with the demonstrations that were happening all over the city, every night for weeks, in response to a Belfast city council decision that the Union Jack would only be flown at city hall on specific holidays rather than every day. On a few occasions, Protestant disgust with the decision had turned violent, with young men burning cars and throwing bricks and petrol bombs at police officers, and explosive devices winding up in cars and in the mail.
My coworkers and friends in Belfast—many of them educated, liberal, and middle-class—were impatient with the protesters. “It’s just a flag,” they would say. Or, “It’s just a few crazies. I don’t understand how people can be so ignorant.”
As I sat in my car waiting for the protesters to disperse, it was easy to sympathize with that attitude. But the more time I spent in Northern Ireland, the more that I realized that things were complicated. For instance, there was a socioeconomic component that hardly anyone mentioned. Many of the protesters came from the neighborhoods where I worked. I knew what the housing looked like there, what the children wore. They were working class. The most embittered among them seemed to be men with few prospects, whose best option to make money was either applying for welfare or joining the military. I could understand the appeal of simply drinking one’s life away in a pub with other rowdy and angry men, instead of dealing with a hopeless future. On top of all the pressures these working-class men and women faced in their day-to-day lives, now politicians were stripping away their very identity: first their political power, and now their national dignity.
Through work, I met Will Maloney, a documentary filmmaker who had worked extensively with low-income Protestants in Belfast. He was well-connected and had even gotten to know a few men with paramilitary backgrounds, guys with terrifying pasts. “Most unionist parties didn’t come from the working class,” he told me. “They were considered parties of the State. So some Protestants in Northern Ireland have a history of underrepresentation.”
After I got trapped in that street demonstration, I wanted to learn more about what Protestants thought about the flag. I attended a panel discussion with representatives from all of the country’s major political parties save Sinn Féin (the highly nationalistic Irish Catholic party). As an American, it was interesting to watch a real multiparty debate. In addition to the Protestant/Catholic split, there were varying conservative and liberal perspectives under those two broad religious banners. I trusted one panelist in particular: Trevor Ringland, a former rugby star with a Protestant background. Sometime after his playing days ended, he had transitioned into politics. He seemed to genuinely want what was good for all sides.
Northern Ireland, Ringland said, had moved from violent conflict to a cold war—and now, to a “cold peace.” The next step, he argued, had to be a “constructive peace,” which would require more from the Northern Irish than living in separate neighborhoods and attending separate schools. It would require integration. It would require feeling, seeing, and healing old wounds.
I was moved by his speech, but I also could not help but notice that Ringland’s political moderation came from a privileged perspective. Yes, he had lived through the Troubles, but he had also been a professional athlete—and not just any rugby player, but the player on Ireland’s team who had scored the “Try of the Century” against the Scots to win them the Five Nations Championship in 1985. He was a local hero who had lived a good life, and so it was possible for him to believe in a good life.
Not everyone in the room had that luxury. Although the Good Friday Agreement, the 1998 peace accord brokered by US president Bill Clinton, had aimed to bring about a more equal and just society in Northern Ireland, one Protestant panelist called the peace process “incomplete.” Among those left behind were certain Protestant communities—specifically, the least educated, least employed ones.
The conversation got tense during the audience Q&A. Someone asked why, if the nationalist community was really interested in a “shared future,” did a park in Newry get named after a “terrorist”? Others accused loyalist protests of hurting the Northern Irish economy and its international reputation. Tempers flared, audience members interrupted speakers, and tears flowed.
I went home thinking about how the Northern Irish weren’t really that different from Americans. They chose segregation not because it’s better, but because it’s easier.
I had been hearing about the Twelfth of July ever since I arrived in Northern Ireland. The holiday commemorates the Battle of the Boyne. In that decisive encounter in 1690, Protestant forces led by King William defeated King James’s Catholics near the Boyne River, some thirty miles from Dublin. Many Protestants practically live for the day, while some Catholics hate it so much they leave town. The Twelfth has become so fraught with emotion that there is a government agency—the Parades Commission—charged with keeping the celebration safe. That year, a controversial ruling by the commission prohibited marchers from taking a return route through Ardoyne, a feisty Catholic area in north Belfast.
I was determined to experience at least part of the holiday, so I headed downtown to the celebrations. After parking my car, I walked in the direction of piping flutes and banging drums. A crowd of thousands stood on each side of the street, watching band after band march through. I saw blue football jerseys for the Glasgow Rangers in every direction, and the Union Jack used in all sorts of creative ways: as a shirt, skirt, even a hat.
Before, a friend had told me that what is so disturbing about the Twelfth is that its uniting force—what is actually celebrated—is hatred of a particular demographic. Watching the parade, I detected a certain triumphalism in the way some people were celebrating. But it seemed to be only part of the story. I mostly saw smiles. There were angry men there, but there were also old ladies, mothers, and children. People shared their food. Musicians played their tunes. Marchers tossed their poles. I felt myself getting in step with the martial beat of the drums, just like I’d done years ago as a cadet in military school.
My own best guess is that any real shared future in Northern Ireland will find a place for the Twelfth of July commemoration. I don’t think working-class Protestants—or any of us, for that matter—can entirely shed such a potent part of their identity, even in pursuit of peace. By the same token, extinguishing the hatreds and distrust that give that celebration a bad name will require taking seriously the sometimes inconvenient voices of this sizable group.
The more disconcerting part of the Twelfth of July celebration took place the night before. Protestants all over the city gathered around bonfires after dark. A few of my friends took me around to see them, though my friend Paddy warned me—or maybe “begged” is more accurate—not to call out his name. When I heard “bonfires,” I thought of quaint little gatherings: roasting marshmallows, singing Kumbaya. Not so. In Protestant neighborhoods the partygoers lit pallets stacked with wood, their flames reaching as high as three stories. The heat was so intense that we had to stand hundreds of feet away. I was surprised the practice was legal.
Children ran around, while parents danced to blaring music. The beer flowed, and some people were clearly drunk. The police presence seemed minimal and indifferent.
Just off Shankill Road in north Belfast, I spotted a tent where a woman was selling cheap beer out of a cooler. I walked over and ordered a drink. A man behind me heard my American accent.
“Where ya from?” he asked.
“I’m from the States,” I said, uneasily. Other people were turning to listen to us. “I’ve been here for almost a year.”
“What are you here for?” he asked.
“My job,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask what my job was.
“What part of town do you live in?”
“Lower Ormeau Road,” I said, thankful that I lived in a neighborhood that wasn’t predominantly Catholic.
“Who are they?” he asked, pointing at my friends.
Maybe I was paranoid, but by then, I was almost certain this man was really only interested in one thing: Was I Catholic?Did I have Catholic sympathies? Was this all a big joke to me, peeking in on the Protestants?
I doubted that continuing the conversation would lead to anything good. It was time to end this little dance. “It was nice to meet you,” I said, excusing myself.
I chugged my beer and tossed the bottle in a trashcan. Then my friends and I got back in our car and drove away.
Chris Schumerth is a writer who lives in Indianapolis. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of South Carolina. His writing has appeared in Salon, the Miami Herald, Relevant Magazine, and Punchnel’s, among other publications. Twitter: @ChrisSchumerth | Blog: chrisschumerth.com
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Chicago Board of Trade corn pit, 1993. Jeremy Kemp, via Wikimedia
This week, after 167 years, the futures trading pits in Chicago closed down. Computers now handle the work that shouting traders flashing hand signals used to do. I was struck by this part of the story:
What’s also disappearing is a rich culture of brazen bets, flashy trading jackets and kids just out of high school getting a shot at making it big. The pits were a ruthless place, but they were also a proving ground where education and connections counted for nothing next to drive and, occasionally, muscle.…
Grant, the runner turned clerk who now oversees his own trading firm, says he has embraced change, too. But he mourns the loss of the kind of entry-level positions that gave kids without much education a chance to prove themselves, just as he did.
“The customer doesn’t have to call anyone to execute a trade,” he says.
Sullivan, the broker, puts it bleakly.
“It’s kind of a slow death for people,” he says. “Maybe I am holding on to something that needs to go.”
In my latest book, I talk about the dwindling away of these sorts of high-paying jobs for people with less education. In many ways, this is a positive development. The futures market is undoubtedly faster and more efficient now that computers are running the show. It’s good for people to get more education and find better-paid, more personally gratifying work—for instance, jobs running and fixing the machines.
But it’s important to remember how critical these sorts of jobs are in halting a widening gap between the rich and poor. After all, unionized factory jobs helped build a strong and broad middle class in this country in the decades after the Second World War. And as much as we tout education as a cure-all for all the problems that arise from these sorts of economic transitions, the fact remains that educational opportunities are wildly unequal. People largely get the quantity and quality of education that their parents did, and the academic gap is growing between the children of more and less privileged families.
Technological change always creates more good jobs, but for whom exactly? Greater efficiency makes our lives easier as consumers, but what are its consequences for us as members of families and communities? The middle-class jobs that sustained many households and neighborhoods and cities are being automated and outsourced away. In our vast economy the loss of these sorts of jobs barely makes the daily headlines, but in the long run it matters. Perhaps it’s the slow death of something important.
Paris, 2011: We saw him in different areas of the city with his two dogs. He kept a big water bowl for the dogs, and lots of water on hand. If he was awake, he gave us a big smile. Here, he and his dogs lie on the grounds of Notre Dame, cuddling in their sleep.
I saw them everywhere in Europe: street people traveling with their dogs. How can a homeless person who can barely take care of himself take decent care of an animal? With love.
Jim Ross
I first noticed them in Paris: dogs accompanying homeless street people. I saw a man in a heavy winter coat sitting on the stone ground of a bridge while his dog—a rust-colored lab puppy—rested, curled up, on a blanket beside him. A sign said the dog was for sale. It hit me hard: he was obviously caring for this animal, but it was mid-October, and there was a chill in the air. Surviving the winter can be a challenge for human beings, let alone animals.
A year later, I visited Europe again with my wife and our two adult children. My daughter said she wanted to create a calendar of dogs, so I fell into the pattern of taking photos of street dogs. Occasionally, dogs traveled with human companions, and I photographed them, too. Usually, the street people were alone with their dogs, or with one other street person. Occasionally, we saw them gathered in large numbers. One image that has stayed with me is the thick crowd of street people and their dogs that formed in front of the Matabiau train station in Toulouse at sunset, waiting for a van that delivered blankets and provided health care after dark.
I made several more trips to Europe over the next few years. Everywhere, I kept seeing street people and their dogs—more, it seemed, with each trip. The photos for this essay were taken between 2010 and 2013 in a variety of cities: Paris, Toulouse, and Lille, France; Brussels, Belgium; and, Edinburgh, Scotland.
To my knowledge, no one keeps a formal tally of the number of street people who travel with animal companions. Anecdotally, the number appears to have gone up in many parts of France over the last two decades, says Charlotte Nivelet, a French ethologist with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). The young, she adds, are more likely to be what the French call “travelers”—the untranslated English word used in that country to describe street people accompanied by animals, usually dogs.
In France, being a traveler has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, an emergency shelter will not admit a homeless person who has an animal. On the other hand, traveling with that animal provides a measure of protection—and not just the security of a watchdog to scare off attackers or wake you up when there’s trouble. If the police happen to arrest the human companion, they cannot jail the animal one, nor can they just abandon it on the streets. “Instead, they must house the dog in a special dog hotel,” says Sandrine Guilhem, a community activist in Toulouse. “For most offenses, that’s too much trouble and costs too much money, so the police simply do not prosecute travelers for minor offenses such as riding on a train without a ticket.” (The same goes for psychiatric hospitals, Guilhem notes: they can’t forcibly institutionalize a homeless person without providing separate lodging for the animal.)
Coming across so many of these travelers during my trips to Europe made me think about the relationships they have with their animals. Many people might ask, for instance, how a homeless person who can barely take care of himself can take decent care of an animal. The more cynical might even accuse the homeless of using their animals to milk the sympathies of passersby. What I observed was something different. The homeless people I met were with their animals day and night, looking out for their welfare at all times. They didn’t leave their dogs in cages all day—the way some people do when they leave for work. The man with the sign in Paris was the only street person I ever saw who was selling an animal.
The loyalty the homeless people showed their dogs, in turn, seemed to be avidly reciprocated. The dogs protected their owners against attacks at night. They served as peacekeepers when large numbers of street people gathered at sunset, as in front of the train station, and tensions rose. The dogs, who knew each other well, would walk in intersecting circles, helping maintain a safe distance between their respective masters until tempers calmed.
Whether the homeless have the financial wherewithal to adequately care for their animals is another matter—and one that some advocacy groups are trying to address. In France, the IFAW has been developing ways to assist homeless animals (usually dogs) and humans in tandem, so that the animal is cared for while the homeless person is taking steps toward reintegration into society: attending training, going to job interviews, seeing a doctor, and so on.
In the United States, Pets of the Homeless operates a nationwide network to help street people and their animals stay together. Among other things, the nonprofit organization provides the homeless with free veterinary care and food for their animals. “We get lots of calls from people who are about to become, or just became, homeless,” says Genevieve Frederick, the organization’s founder. “They’ll ask, ‘What am I going to do about my dog?’ They don’t want to be separated.” As Frederick notes, homelessness is usually a temporary condition, which means there is little reason for street people and their animals to be permanently split up.
Legend has it that street people first traveled with dogs in large numbers in the French town of Montpellier. If this way of life really began in Montpellier, there’s something curiously wonderful about that. Montpellier is the birthplace of St. Roch, a fourteenth-century mendicant pilgrim and ascetic, the patron saint of dogs and dog lovers.
According to accounts of Roch’s life, the governor of Montpellier—Roch’s father—decreed on his deathbed that his son would succeed him. Roch would have none of that. Instead, he gave away his wealth to the poor. When he fell victim to the plague, Roch hid in the forest, expecting to die there. As the story goes, a dog began to visit him every day, bringing him stolen food and licking his wounds. (For that reason, depictions of Roch usually show his left hand lifting his tunic to reveal a wound on his thigh, while his right hand accepts stolen food from an attentive dog.) After the dog nursed him back to health, Roch traveled throughout Italy healing others.
In a sense, today’s travelers are much like Roch: outcasts nursing wounds. For them, says the IFAW’s Nivelet, animals are “a lifeline, a family, a safeguard, an antidepressant”—a way to cope with an intensely precarious and disheartening state of being. “At times it is this bond,” Nivelet adds, “that represents the final safety net before a total break from society.”
University of Colorado sociologist Leslie Irvine has conducted interviews with people who live on the streets with their animals. In her 2013 book My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People and Their Animals, these individuals describe their animal companions as life changers and lifesavers—sources of unconditional love who encourage them to be more responsible caretakers, silent witnesses who keep them from falling back into risky behaviors.
In turn, animals can help the homeless stay connected to the rest of humanity. As Frederick points out, people who normally never approach a homeless person living on the street react to them differently when they see them with an animal. They will first interact with the animal, petting it or talking to it, and then, once they feel more comfortable, they will begin to chat with the animal’s human companion. “Having an animal helps homeless people open up communication with non-homeless humans, who see them as caring,” Frederick says.
I like to believe that having an animal companion deepens the compassion of homeless people, who often live relatively solitary lives. And perhaps seeing these travelers with their dogs also deepens the compassion of those of us just walking by. If at first we’re drawn to the dog, with any luck we get to know its human companion, too. We recognize and relate to that age-old bond between human and animal. And maybe we walk away changed, having known the homeless not as panhandlers or social burdens, but as other caring human beings.
A health researcher by profession, Jim Ross has published stories and photos in the Atlantic, Friends Journal, Pif Magazine, and Lunch Ticket, among other publications. He resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. He can be reached at jamesross355@gmail.com.
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
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Amid all the controversy over the recent push in New York and elsewhere for a $15 minimum wage, it’s important to remember the big picture.
