What Tomorrow Brings is an intimate portrait of a girls’ school in rural Afghanistan and the challenges its students face in trying to get an education.
In an early scene of What Tomorrow Brings, Pashtana, a seventh-grader at a girls’ school in rural Afghanistan, describes just how much her education means to her. “My biggest hope is to finish school,” she says, smiling brightly. “That’s how my life will turn the corner, and I’ll be on my way.”
Her smile fades. “But I’m worried there are people around me who will try to stop me.”
Chelsea Rudman Chelsea Rudman is an international development professional and freelance writer who lives in Washington, DC. Her writing has previously been published in the NY Press and Matador Travel.
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Being a Peace Corps volunteer is about cultural exchange, but you don’t always get to decide what culture gets exchanged.
Hannah Jiang
“H
ey, Ching-Chong. Bus fee.”
The driver’s words slapped me across the face. I handed him some money and waited for my change. Everyone on the bus was silent, watching. “Here you go, Chong-Chong,” he quipped while handing me a coin in return. My face turned red.
“Please don’t call me that. I really don’t appreciate it.” I felt my voice quivering but hoped that it sounded steady.
He laughed. “Okay, darling. What’s your name?”
“I’m Hannah.”
“Okay, Hannah.” He walked around the bus to collect the other passengers’ fares and muttered something in Kweyol, the local dialect. A few people chuckled. Then he climbed into the driver’s seat and we took off on the winding road toward my village. I put my headphones on and tried to calm my pounding heart.
I am a Peace Corps volunteer in St. Lucia, a small Caribbean island country north of Venezuela. Not many Americans know much about the island beyond the fact that the season finale of ABC’s The Bachelor was filmed at a resort here a couple years ago. Likewise, not many locals from my community know much about America aside from what they’ve seen on television.
One of the stated goals of the Peace Corps is to fill these sorts of gaps in cultural awareness. As volunteers, we explain what it means to be American to the people we meet here, and we share our experiences abroad with those back home. Instead of trading goods, we are trading cultures.
I teach English to schoolchildren in Canaries, a rural fishing village with a population under 2,000. It is one of St. Lucia’s poorest and most underdeveloped areas. Although luxurious hotels and resorts dot the island, jobs within tourism remain largely inaccessible to the people in my community. There are no attractions, restaurants, or gas stations in Canaries, so even when visitors do drive by they have no reason to stop.
Cut off from the tourist world, most villagers have never been exposed to the idea that America is ethnically diverse. Canaries has had Peace Corps volunteers in the past, but as far as anyone can remember, all of them have been white. As a result, confusion about me—the first Chinese American to live in the community—has been inevitable.
There was a teenage girl, fourteen or so years old, who approached me urgently as I walked to an evening aerobics class. “Miss, I just have to ask,” she said. “Are you from China or Japan?”
“I’m actually from America, but my family is from China.”
She said, “Oh,” and ran on.
There was an older man who gave me a ride to the grocery store and told me he was “also” a Buddhist. “If you don’t believe me, I have Buddha statues all over my home. Want to stop by to see?”
“No thank you, I’m actually not Buddhist.”
There was an elderly lady on the bus who mistook me for a member of a Japanese volunteer group visiting the island. “You did such a lovely job at the choir performance last weekend!”
I thanked her for the compliment.
In my application to join the Peace Corps, I wrote that one of the challenges I expected to face during my time abroad was having to answer the question, “If you’re from America, how come you look Chinese?” The possibility hadn’t discouraged me, though. In fact, before I left for St. Lucia, I was excited about sharing what I knew about America’s racial diversity with the locals I would meet. I assumed they would be open-minded and just as interested in American culture as I was in theirs.
Getting called “Ching-Chong” made me think I had been too idealistic.
One day, I was riding in a large food-supplier truck heading to Castries, the island’s capital, where I had a meeting scheduled that afternoon. It was a forty-five minute drive to town, and to pass the time I chatted with the two men in the truck. They soon discovered that I was a Peace Corps volunteer from the States. Kenny and Shem had heard of the Peace Corps before, but they weren’t at all interested in learning about anything related to America. They wanted Mandarin lessons.
“Teach us some bad words in Chinese!” they prodded me. Kenny, a friendly man with cornrows, took out a pen and paper to jot down the phrases phonetically. “We’re going to say these to our boss next time he makes us angry!”
“Is your boss Chinese?” I asked, nervous that this would eventually be traced back to me.
“Nope. He’s Lucian. He won’t have any idea what we’re saying!”
When we reached Castries, I got out of the truck and waved goodbye. After Kenny and Shem drove off, I found myself thinking about our conversation. Thanks to me, the two of them had learned enough Mandarin phrases to get themselves fired. But they hadn’t learned anything about America, the country I was supposed to be representing. I began to realize that even though I’m here in St. Lucia to exchange cultures, I don’t necessarily get to decide which culture I exchange. Kenny and Shem had heard my story about being Chinese American, yet Chinese culture was what they had insisted on trading with me.
Perhaps this wasn’t a bad thing. Recently a local friend asked me, “You don’t know karate, do you?”
I told him no, not at all.
“Well, you know, people here watch a lot of kung fu movies and that’s the main thing they know about Chinese people. They probably all assume you know karate.” He paused. I wasn’t sure how to fill the silence. “You should let them think that,” he continued. “It might keep you safe here because nobody’s going to want to harm you.”
I smiled. His words were unexpectedly reassuring. Maybe, I thought, it was okay to leave the choice in their hands.
One of my favorite things about St. Lucians is their love of sharing food—something they have in common with the Chinese, as my own family’s experiences have taught me. For people here, sharing food establishes trust and a sense of community. My school principal will buy fish from our village, clean it, cook it with local seasoning, and give it to me in a Tupperware container to take home. A teacher will surreptitiously hand me mangos in the middle of class while the children are doing their work, whispering, “These are from our tree.” Students will come to school with a small bag of love apples, present one to me and say, “Teacher Hannah, look.” “For me?” “For you.”
The first time I brought food for the school staff, I chose something quintessentially American: toasted blueberry bagels with Philadelphia cream cheese. None of them had ever eaten bagels before, and they all wanted seconds to take home. At the end of the school year (some trays of brownies and Christmas sugar cookies later), I decided to share something completely different: mantou, a steamed bun that my grandfather would make for us every time our family visited him in China.
I remembered how he would spend all day making the mantou. Carefully mixing the flour with water, yeast, and a little bit of sugar. Kneading the dough meticulously with his hands. Rolling, cutting, and forming it into the bun-shape so familiar to us. We would eat his mantou every day for breakfast until the batch was gone, and then he would happily make more.
I told the teachers that the mantou was Chinese bread that they could either eat plain or with any kind of butter, jam, or sauce. They were amazed that the bread didn’t need to bake in the oven, and that it was so powdery white, without a trace of brown. They loved it. Most of them ate it with local cheese.
Though none of them knew it, bringing my grandfather’s mantou to my school was an important moment for me. It was the first time I chose to share my Chinese culture with the people here. This time, they hadn’t needed to prompt me with their questions. This time, I hadn’t agonized over whether I, their cultural ambassador from America, was exchanging something “un-American.”
I was two years old when my parents and I immigrated to the States. Growing up, I felt as if we were all learning what it meant to be American together. The ways of my parents were often at odds with the ways of my classmates’ parents. My classmates went to church on Sundays; I went to Chinese language school to learn Mandarin. My classmates brought PB&J sandwiches for lunch; I brought rice and vegetables, with a pair of chopsticks. My classmates had turkey, stuffing, and pie for Thanksgiving; I had Chinese hot pot.
As my brothers and I got older, our family started traveling to China during the summers to visit relatives. For Mom and Dad, these trips were like going home. Everything in China was familiar to them. I could tell that a sense of peace washed over them when we were there—they became less anxious, laughed more easily, and seemed to know everything intuitively. For me, though, these trips were the opposite of peaceful. They made me feel even more displaced, even more conscious of the fact that as a Chinese American, neither culture was truly mine.
When I started living on my own, I decided that being in this sort of limbo wasn’t healthy—I needed to commit to one culture. Because I felt that Chinese culture had isolated me from my peers when I was younger, as soon as I had the choice to turn away from it, I did. Aside from the occasional Mandarin conversation with a cab driver, late-night order of Chinese takeout, or short trip to visit my family, nothing about my adult life was culturally Chinese. The lunches I brought to work, the holidays I celebrated, the movies, books, and music I consumed—all of it was American.
By the time I arrived in St. Lucia, I had developed a tense, almost in-denial relationship with my Chinese heritage. I had put so much effort into belonging to something else that when people here reminded me of my ethnicity—when they asked about Chinese culture and insisted on exchanging it with me—I felt like they were challenging my fundamental sense of self.
Sharing my grandfather’s mantou was the moment I made peace with my identity. I realized that my culture isn’t confined to a particular country—not America, not China. It’s the blend of values, customs, and traditions that I’ve absorbed throughout my life, from all of my surroundings.
For other volunteers—those who conform to what people in more remote parts of the world imagine Americans to look and behave like—maybe the act of cultural exchange is straightforward. But for me, it cannot happen so simply. And just because my experience is different, I’ve learned, doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.
The bus driver and I have never spoken about our “Ching-Chong” encounter, and we probably never will. But I still ride his bus all the time. He knows the exact curve of the hill where I call out, “Stopping, please,” and will drop me right in front of my house. On my way home the other day, he glanced up at me in the rearview mirror before that turn in the road, and I nodded at him. Without my saying a word, he pulled over. “Thank you,” I said to him as I climbed out. “Take care, darling,” he said back.
Hannah Jiang is currently a Peace Corps volunteer in St. Lucia, where she teaches at a school and contributes to the national news station. A Yale graduate, she previously worked in Manhattan for an executive search firm.
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Sub-Saharan Africans started sleeping in these concrete pipes after they were forcibly evicted from their homes in Tangier’s Boukhalef neighborhood (visible in the background of the photo). Many of them had their belongings thrown out or burned by police, according to local activists. Some were carried off to other cities in Morocco.
Before they manage to reach Spain or Italy or Greece, people fleeing poverty and war in Sub-Saharan Africa head to port cities like Tangier. There, they face the risk of beatings and repression at the hands of authorities—or dying on the crossing to Europe.
A man carries his food and water for the day back to a makeshift campsite on the outskirts of Tangier. From the film Hijra–Dead End: Morocco
“This is a picture of the forests,” Michael says, flicking through the photos on his laptop. “At night they will struggle. I mean, how can a plastic bag save you from the cold? If it’s cold, it will be cold on you. If it rains, it will rain on you. If the police come there, they will burn down all this.”
Michael, a twenty-something man from Gambia, is showing me photos that he has collected during his year and five months in Morocco: some taken by him, others by journalists that he has met and befriended, others by friends who are migrants like himself. At great personal risk, he has been documenting human rights abuses and the daily struggles that migrants undergo in Morocco. (Some of the photos from his collection are interspersed throughout this story.) The images are unsettling. Young children sleeping in the cold. Men who have been beaten half to death. Families living in squalor in the forests.
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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After the birth of his daughter Adeline, Dustin Davis became a “work-at-home dad”—picking up his design career after a layoff by doing freelance work, but making his daughter his chief priority.
Today’s stay-at-home dads have little in common with Mr. Mom. Responsible, nurturing, and home by choice, they are eager to prove that—aside from the breastfeeding—they can do whatever a woman can.
Like many of today’s loud-and-proud stay-at-home dads, R.C. Liley has no qualms about saying he is good at running a household—something he’s done since the beginning of his marriage to his wife Kelley. After their daughter Avery was born, Liley chose to put a hold on his career as an accountant in order to care for her.
“W
e’re gonna be on this airplane,” R. C. Liley says, showing his two-year-old daughter a pink, two-seater toy plane. Twenty-nine, Liley is tall and fit and towers over Avery, a toddler in a light-green T-shirt with the words “Never Mess.” “We’re gonna start from the ground, and w-o-o-o-o-sh!” he says, mimicking the sound of the jet engines as he lifts the plane higher and higher.
Liley ends his demonstration. “Okay, Avery, that’s an airplane,” he says. “We’re gonna fly on it—are we gonna be good?”
“Yes,” Avery says, a bit hesitant, her dimples sinking into her cheeks as she smiles.
Liley is a stay-at-home dad. He looks after Avery when his wife Kelley, Avery’s mother, is working at the finance department of a large corporation. Unlike some stay-at-home dads, who feel awkward about taking on a role that many people still consider feminine, Liley is open about being the primary caretaker for his child—so open, in fact, that he regularly shares his experiences on his blog.
Since 1989, the number of stay-at-home dads, or SAHDs, has nearly doubled, according to the Pew Research Center. About two million fathers in America now care for children younger than eighteen while not working outside the home. They account for 16 percent of at-home parents. Likewise, across Europe and even in more traditional cultures around the world, men who take on this role are increasingly visible.
After the birth of his daughter Adeline, Dustin Davis became a “work-at-home dad”—picking up his design career after a layoff by doing freelance work, but making his daughter his chief priority.
In the United States, many men who lost their jobs during the recession wound up staying at home with their kids, at least temporarily. For a growing number of men, however, their choice to become stay-at-home dads is actually that—a choice. Surveys support this view that fathers’ attitudes are changing. For example, just 5 percent of stay-at-home dads in 1989 said that the main reason they were home was to care for their home or family; today, 21 percent do.
These fathers have little in common with Jack Butler, the hapless stay-at-home dad played by Michael Keaton in the 1983 comedy Mr. Mom—still the cultural reference many people turn to when thinking of men at work at home. Forced to care for his kids after being sacked, Butler seemed bent on wreaking havoc in the house.
Today’s more gender-equal generation of stay-at-home dads shoulder domestic tasks more responsibly. For his part, Liley grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Texas. He studied finance and got a well-paying job as an accountant at a mutual fund. But in 2013, he decided to quit his job and care for Avery. “My wife always made more,” he says. “I was already the one doing the cooking and the rest of the household.” Staying home with Avery wasn’t something Liley felt forced into. Quite the contrary, he says—“I was counting down the days till I became a SAHD.”
But as much as attitudes about parenting have changed, stay-at-home dads still find themselves facing skepticism and derision, often subtle in form—the ways that stay-at-home moms steer clear of them at the playground, or the media portrays them as clueless and dumb, or friends and family drop hints that what they’re doing is strange.
“Being the man, it sounded crazy for me to quit my job,” says Matt Dudzinski, thirty-six, a former interior designer for an architectural firm in Detroit who now cares for his two daughters, six and three. He and his wife Aya, a trim engineer for an automotive company, had each thought—to themselves—that having Dad at home would work best for them as a couple. But they avoided talking about it. “We were both worried about being judged—her, for wanting to keep her career while being a mother, and me, for not being a breadwinning man.”
Then Dudzinski was laid off. “The arrangement we both knew we wanted, but were afraid to voice, was decided for us.”
“My daughter will get more physical growing up with me,” Liley says. “She will get more practical, more assertive.”
In certain parts of the world, men (and women) have an easier time staying at home with their kids. For more than two decades, Canada has granted paid leave to fathers who want to be the primary caretakers of their children. In Japan, a country known for its stark gender divide, the law nonetheless requires employers to give their workers—men and women—time off after the birth of a child. In Sweden, one of the most SAHD-friendly countries, both moms and dads can receive government benefits for up to 480 days if they choose to care for their kids at home.
In America and Australia, there is much less in the way of support. Stay-at-home dads have fewer role models or resources to help them, and when government policies do exist to assist families with young children, they tend to treat these men as second-class parents.
Regardless of what their governments do, however, broad economic and cultural shifts seem to be pushing new dads in all these countries to consider what their own fathers would not.
In the United States, the number of stay-at-home dads peaked at 2.2 million in 2010, but then fell slightly once the economy picked up. Clearly, household decisions about who does what have much to do with the state of a family’s finances: in an uncertain economy, men who wouldn’t otherwise stay home are willing to do so when it seems practical. The massive unemployment of the economic downturn is only part of this story, though. Years after the official end of the recession, the typical American household makes less income, adjusted for inflation, than it did in 2007. Having a parent stay at home sometimes makes more sense than paying for a nanny or daycare—and now that women often make more than their partners, the sensible choice in some cases is for the dad, not the mom, to stay home.
Changing values may also be drawing men out of the workplace and into the home. Today, parenting is seen as both the cause and solution to a wide variety of social ills, says writer and sociologist Tiffany Jenkins, while “work is not as important as it used to be for one’s identity and purpose.” As work inside the home becomes, as Jenkins puts it, “professionalized,” more men may think of it a worthy life calling.
In turn, some of today’s new fathers may be reacting to what they think their own dads got wrong. GenXers and millennials, who grew up at a time when dual-income families were the norm, are already more comfortable with the idea of a woman breadwinner. Like every generation before them, they are finding their own ways to rebel—and in the case of the stay-at-home dads among them, this may involve rejecting their fathers’ workaholic schedules, which left little time for children. “I think a lot of people from my generation grew up without dads, or without good dads, and we are trying to change that—showing that we can be great dads,” says Josh Hardt, twenty-eight, a stay-at-home dad in Durham, North Carolina.
For his part, Hardt never felt close to his biological father, he says. After he moved away from home, he did find a fatherly role model in his stepdad, who was a more hands-on parent. Now that he’s a father himself, Hardt works on a freelance basis as a filmmaker but focuses on caring for his two-year-old daughter. His wife works as a retail store manager and provides most of the family’s income.
Hardt enjoys his role at home. The idea of a woman supporting a man financially isn’t that far a cultural leap for someone young like him, but Hardt knows that others—especially the older generation—think otherwise. “They come from a different time, so I understand why it’s hard to understand,” he says.
Stay-at-home dad Paul Schwartz with his wife Amy Wilson and son Malcolm. “I felt like a social movement of my own when I quit my lawyer’s job to stay at home with my son,” he says. Photo by Catherine O’Hara
If capable stay-at-home dads like Hardt are growing in numbers, though, you wouldn’t know it by watching TV. From Fred Flintstone to Homer Simpson, from Al Bundy to Alan Harper, the most popular on-screen dads of the past several decades have been roundly portrayed as doofuses. And the stay-at-home dads among them have not been spared the low expectations that both men and women have concerning male parenting skills. Even when TV dads are praised for being practically minded problem solvers in the home, the compliments are woefully backhanded—in a controversial 2011 detergent commercial, for instance, the savvy stay-at-home dad has to qualify his competence by calling himself a “dad-mom.”
Paul Schwartz knows the stereotype of the bumbling dad well: he was asked to play one on TV. Schwartz, a forty-two-year-old former labor lawyer, has gained a large following on his blog, which chronicles his adventures as a stay-at-home dad in Paris. A few months ago, a cable channel asked him if he wanted to be in a reality show they were developing about stay-at-home dads. The idea was interesting, but in the end Schwartz backed out. “They insisted that we act like morons,” he says.
Perhaps the negative portrayals of stay-at-home dads in the media aren’t so surprising, though, given how prevalent these stereotypes are in the public at large. It needs to be stressed that perceptions of stay-at-home dads tend to be much more hostile outside of America and Europe: in China, SAHDs often hide their status, fearing humiliation, and in many Muslim nations, such a role for men is considered religiously subversive. Nevertheless, large numbers of people in rich Western countries continue to have a lopsided view of who should be taking care of the kids. In a 2013 Pew survey, for instance, 51 percent of Americans said that children are better off if their mothers are home, while only 8 percent said the same of fathers.
Stay-at-home dads are regularly reminded that other people see them as, at best, an oddity. “I usually get one of two responses when people ask what I do for a living,” Dudzinski, the stay-at-home dad from Detroit, writes in an email. “‘Oh, that’s great’ (with a straight face, changes subject and stops talking to me). Or: ‘That’s awesome! If I didn’t have to work, I’d totally stay home all day!’ (assuming I watch TV and order pizza every day).”
Schwartz has stayed at home with his son Malcolm for a decade, but he still gets his share of clueless and patronizing questions from people he meets—inquiries along the lines of, “How does it work? Do you do laundry, too?” “Most are a bit shocked to learn that I have been a stay-at-home parent for all of Malcolm’s life,” Schwartz says. At PTA events, parent gatherings, and playdates, Schwartz is still frequently the only man in the room. “I don’t have a problem with it, although it occasionally means that my sense of humor doesn’t go over well.”
Liley with his wife Kelley and daughter Avery. “My wife always made more,” says Liley. “I was already the one doing the cooking and the rest of the household.” But staying home with Avery wasn’t something Liley felt forced into. Quite the contrary, he says—“I was counting down the days till I became a SAHD.”
Schwartz and his family used to live in San Francisco. After Malcolm was born, he quit his job as a lawyer to take care of him. Then, in 2013, an international software company offered his wife Amy an executive position in Paris. She decided to take the job, and the family relocated overseas. Once in Paris, Schwartz immediately set to work establishing a new support network for Malcolm. He reached out to a local moms’ group about joining—only to learn that he, as a man, wasn’t invited.
When he did meet other stay-at-home parents, their interactions were “a bit weird,” he says. At a coffee for parents new to Paris, the group talked for half an hour about breast feeding, vaginal births versus C-sections, and similar topics. “You’d think that sitting around with a bunch of women talking about their intimate body parts would be terribly exciting, but to tell you the truth, I was bored.” To find more parents he could relate to, Schwartz eventually turned to the SAHD networks that have sprouted up around the globe in recent years. The people he’s met in this virtually connected community have been an important source of support, he says.
There is some irony to the fact that stay-at-home-moms can be some of the least understanding people whom SAHDs encounter. One obvious reason for the distance these women keep is apprehensiveness about sexual tensions—fears, for instance, that SAHDs must get lonely and want to hit on them. “Women are afraid they are forming a relationship that’s more [than] a friendship, so they don’t want any part of that,’” says Michelle P. Maidenberg, president and clinical director of Westchester Group Works, a community center in New York focused on group therapy.
The awkwardness, however, may have to do with more than just unwanted sexual attention. Women may see stay-at-home dads as threats—interlopers in a domestic sphere they thought was theirs alone, Maidenberg says. Or, they may see the SAHD as a sign of their own inferiority. The modern woman faces a daunting work-life balancing act: the need to juggle a thriving career and a thriving family. Meeting a stay-at-home dad, then, might raise some unsettling questions about how others have succeeded where she has failed—questions like, “Who is the high-powered female married to this man? How incredibly successful and rich is she that she has her husband at home?”
There is a joke going around his circles, Schwartz says. “The new status symbols for women are driving a hybrid car, and having a stay-at-home-dad for a spouse.”
During the day, Davis cares for Adeline in their St. Louis home while his wife Jessica works as a designer at a marketing agency.
Among other things, skepticism about stay-at-home dads is rooted in the widespread view that women are just more caring and empathetic than men, and thus better suited to be caregivers. Science backs that view up—though the degree to which it does, and the degree to which any gender difference is due to nature or nurture, are hotly contested.
Women tend to have higher levels of activity in their mirror neurons, brain cells linked to the workings of empathy. But scientists disagree whether empathy is determined by mirror neurons alone. Furthermore, research finds that these mirrors neurons can be altered through simple and brief training tasks. This suggests that empathy is not impervious to the power of culture, and that the gender differences we see may be due, at least in part, to the way children are socialized, not their innate traits. Indeed, studies of infant boys and girls find that boys are equally sensitive and attentive to other people at this early stage in their development.
What happens, then, when men care for their kids at home? Not surprisingly, studies find that it is a good idea for fathers to get involved, generally speaking, in their children’s lives. For example, one British study gathered a sample of 11,000 adults and asked their mothers how often the children’s fathers had read to them, gone out with them, and otherwise spent time with them during their childhoods. The researchers found that, on average, adults whose fathers had been more involved when they were growing up had higher IQs, were more sociable, and enjoyed a healthier sense of self. Perhaps being raised by the most involved kind of father—a stay-at-home dad—can lead to even more benefits for children’s sense of self-worth.
That is a hypothesis that researchers are evaluating, says Dr. Michael B. Donner, president of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Another is that men who care for their kids have personality traits that distinguish them from other men. For instance, there is anecdotal evidence that stay-at-home dads are more connected to, and comfortable with, their feminine side, Donner says. (For their part, many stay-at-home dads delight in the idea they are different: they want to show other people—especially their own children—that masculinity is also about compassion and nurturing, they told me.)
As interesting as this research can be, Donner is quick to add that the debate over gender differences can obscure the larger point: children just need supportive parents. “It’s not about gender or testosterone levels, or who nurtures or challenges. It is about feeling safe and secure in your parents’ hands, and these properties have no gender.” The bottom line is that children raised in nurturing environments exude confidence when they become adults, he says. “Two can play at that game, moms or dads.”
Don’t worry, she’s not actually driving the car.
Dustin Davis has spent the last few years proving just how nurturing a dad can be. In 2013, Davis was laid off from his job as a designer. When his daughter Adeline was born two years ago, he decided he would use the opportunity to become—as he puts it on his personal blog—a “work-from-home dad.” During the day, his wife Jessica works as a designer at a marketing agency, while Davis cares for Adeline in their St. Louis home.
Davis, thirty-three, is as manly as you can get, as evidenced by his impressive ZZ Top beard. But like any stay-at-home parent, he revels in the milestones he’s been able to see first-hand—the other day, it was the five steps Adeline took, in a moment of particularly good coordination. Like many stay-at-home dads (and for that matter, like many stay-at-home moms), he has a career he continues to pursue. But now he is a freelancer working part-time from home, and his chief priority, he says, is Adeline.
“While I cannot breastfeed a child, I can do everything else a woman does. I can be nurturing and loving. I can raise a child.”
Stav Dimitrοpoulos Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since.
Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav
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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
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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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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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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.
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Daniel Okator lives on the streets of Athens. Fearful of Boko Haram, he left Nigeria in 2013 and crossed the Mediterranean on a rickety boat. Two of his fellow migrants drowned when the boat capsized.
In recent months, hundreds of migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean and slip into Europe. Even Greece, a country locked in a worsening financial crisis, is now drawing record numbers of desperate travelers from Africa and elsewhere. Once their journey is over, what happens next?
Daniel Okator lives on the streets of Athens. Fearful of Boko Haram, he left Nigeria in 2013 and crossed the Mediterranean on a rickety boat. Two of his fellow migrants drowned when the boat capsized.
Me? No, I have papers!” the man yells when I ask him his name.
He is young, tall, and stout, dressed in a worn black bomber jacket and a pair of baggy corduroys, his hands covered by the scruffy grey gloves he uses to root through garbage bags.
I have run into him in Plato’s Academy, the vicinity of the philosopher’s storied school, now an Athens district filled with working-class flats and African migrants pushing carts full of trash. Probing his pockets to find papers he does not eventually produce, the man tells me only his first name: Blaise. Forty-three, he is an immigrant from Côte d’Ivoire—an illegal immigrant, it seems, given how he protests too much. “Me, Christian! Samaris good! I love Greece! Samaris good!”
I was talking to Blaise right before Greek prime minister Antonis Samaras was booted out of office in January. The national elections brought to power a leftist government, which immediately began demanding a new deal for Greece in repaying its international loans. Since the global financial crisis struck in 2008, Greece has been beset with double-digit unemployment and shriveling industry, a downturn deepened by tough loan terms that have required painful and abrupt economic reforms. The drama has heightened in recent weeks: Greece is currently negotiating with the International Monetary Fund and European creditors over the payment arrangements for its loans, which the new government claims needs to be relaxed in order for Greece to avoid defaulting on those loans and abandoning the Euro for its old drachma currency—an increasingly likely scenario. If this were to happen, rampant inflation and a banking crisis would ensue, experts say.
Throughout the ongoing financial turmoil, however, migrants have continued to come to Greece. Indeed, the EU’s border management agency says that Europe-bound migrants are increasingly choosing to go through Turkey and Greece rather than embarking from various northern African nations, which nowadays are seen as riskier launching points. According to the United Nations, so far this year 48,000 refugees and migrants have entered Greece—almost half of those who have come to Europe—a running total that already far outstrips the national figure for the entire previous year. Over the past several months, record numbers have landed on the shores of the country’s Aegean islands in rubber dinghies and wooden boats: half of the six hundred migrants who now arrive in Greece every day come to the island of Lesvos alone.
While the bulk of Greece’s immigrants in the nineties and aughts came from the Balkans, today they increasingly hail from countries outside Europe. A fifth now come from Africa, and more than half from Asia—mainly from war zones like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. These latest waves of new arrivals have stoked xenophobic attitudes among native Greeks already anxious about the economy. Meanwhile, those migrants lucky to survive the often treacherous overseas journey to Greece find themselves struggling once here. African migrants like Blaise—whose continent is associated with poverty, war, and disease in the minds of many Greeks—encounter an economy and society that continually tells them it doesn’t much care for them.
Compared to some other countries in Europe—for example, Denmark, Switzerland, and Slovakia—Greece is less strict in accepting immigrants and asylum seekers from overseas. But clearly the supply of legal opportunities to move to Europe cannot match the demand, because every year an estimated 55,000 African migrants are smuggled in. Transnational criminal syndicates often get them here, shipping human beings across borders just like they do weapons and drugs.
Smuggling Africans is big business—estimated at $150 million a year—and poor immigrants seeking better economic opportunities or escaping violence or repression at home are willing to pay a great deal for a one-way ticket to Europe. For Blaise, the trip from his Ivorian hometown of Duékoué to Athens cost him 7,000 euros. In his case, the smugglers upheld their end of the bargain; other would-be immigrants wind up as sexual slaves or forced laborers, stealthily shunted through the same global networks by profit-hungry human traffickers.
The journey poses great risks, too. According to a report by the International Organization for Migration, over 22,000 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean since 2000. Last year set a record for the number of deaths, which exceeded 3,000. This year’s tally will handily surpass it: in just the first four months of 2015, an estimated 1,770 migrants died. In April, at least five boats carrying migrants sank during the Mediterranean crossing, killing 1,200. The shocking death toll prompted a European Union summit later that month, where the continent’s leaders resolved to increase the number of ships patrolling the sea, ramp up law-enforcement efforts to quash human trafficking, and assist developing countries in tightening their borders.
As great as the risks are, the pressures pushing African migrants to cross over to Europe appear to be greater. While countries like China and India build a vibrant new middle class, almost half of Africans continue to live on less than a $1.25 a day, the World Bank’s threshold for extreme poverty. Although the continent possesses a wealth of oil, minerals, and other natural resources, corrupt government officials and unchecked multinational corporations have hoarded that wealth and left the populations of many African countries unemployed and desperate. And even as economic forecasts predict continued economic growth in Africa as a whole in the years ahead, water and food shortages, infectious diseases, climate change, and violent extremism pose existential threats to numerous communities.
Fearful of deportation, Blaise, an immigrant from Côte d’Ivoire, hides his face from a camera.
I ask Blaise about what brought him to Greece. Blaise can’t speak much Greek, so we chat in French, and eventually I persuade him to offer up some details about his personal background. Visibly nervous, he tells me he left behind his fourteen-year-old daughter in Côte d’Ivoire. He feels he had no choice. A disputed presidential election in his country sparked a civil war in 2010 pitting the soldiers of Alassane Ouattara, the election’s internationally recognized victor, against those of Laurent Gbagbo, the incumbent president. During the conflict, military forces on both sides allegedly killed and raped hundreds of civilians. When we start talking about the violence that brought him to Greece, Blaise becomes increasingly agitated. “Ouattara killed my father and mother!” he finally blurts out, raising his gloved hands to the sky.
The war ended just a year later—with Gbagbo defeated, captured, and brought before the Hague’s International Criminal Court to stand trial for crimes against humanity—but Blaise remains in Greece, hustling to survive on the streets. Like other African migrants, he sells the tin and plastic he picks out of trash cans to scrapyards. He eats at Catholic soup kitchens during the day, sleeping in parks or vacant buildings at night. And he watches, ever vigilantly, for the police. When I pull out a camera to snap his picture, Blaise lowers his cap and poses from behind—no face, please. He can’t take any chances.
Many African migrants are smuggled into Greece from Turkey, crossing the Mediterranean by boat. The thousands of tiny islands sprinkled throughout the waters near the Greek mainland make it easy for smugglers to evade authorities. Their efforts to sneak migrants in by boat greatly intensified in the 1990s. Nowadays, Turkish organized crime runs a brisk business shuttling people across the sea.
Daniel Okator, a twenty-five-year-old Nigerian migrant, made this crossing to Greece in 2013. Tall and gregarious, he chats to me after parking a cart chock full of scrap on the curb. He earns two or three euros a day, he says, scavenging steel from whatever discarded items he can find—TV sets, tables, sewing needles, metal roofing. His line of work has become big business in Greece: a recent documentary reports that half of the country’s annual steel production comes from these sorts of salvaged materials. Scrapyard operators pay scavengers like Daniel for their metal harvest and then drive it to the foundries to be melted down again.
At a nearby chapel, about twenty Catholic nuns—themselves transplants from Switzerland, Rwanda, India, and elsewhere—give the migrants clothes and serve them breakfast and lunch. Daniel typically spends half his day there, helping the nuns with their chores. The nuns have chosen him and several other migrants to serve as guards at the chapel, providing security whenever an occasional fist or knife fight breaks out among the migrants. At midday, however, the chapel closes, and Daniel is left to roam central Athens by himself, pushing his cart down the street in search of scrap metal—or, in the winter, riding buses to keep warm.
Daniel used to be a music student in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, but then Boko Haram struck the city. (Over the last several years, the jihadist group has killed and kidnapped thousands in its drive to establish an Islamic state within Nigeria, whose population is split almost evenly between Muslims and Christians.) In 2011, a suicide bomber drove a car rigged with explosives into a United Nations building in Abuja, killing twenty-three people. Boko Haram claimed responsibility. That brazen attack convinced Daniel—a Muslim himself—to leave the country.
Daniel got in touch with a member of a smuggling network. His connection was a “recruiter,” what law enforcement calls a network’s low-level operatives, who answer to its manager, or “coordinator.” Recruiters usually come from the same country as the people they seek to recruit. They talk up life in Europe to potential migrants, sign them up, and then collect the fees. In Daniel’s case, the price of a one-way covert trip to Greece was 1,800 euros.
The recruiter obtained a visa for Daniel from the local Turkish consulate. (In some African countries, it is easy to find corrupt public officials—border police, immigration officials, consulate employees—who will issue visas in exchange for bribes.) Daniel’s ultimate destination was Greece, but first he flew to Istanbul. He continued by land to Izmir, where he and twenty other migrants boarded a rust-covered boat. The voyage was short, only an hour, but the sea was rough and the boat engines rattled. Near the shores of the Greek island of Chios, the boat tipped over. Most of the passengers managed to swim to the shore. Two did not. “Swim!” the smuggler yelled at the group. No one went back to help the man and woman left behind.
Years later, Daniel still thinks about them. He will picture them in his mind, two human beings drowning slowly in the roiling waters, groping desperately for someone to latch onto.
For the most part, Greece has not welcomed the African masses that have come to its shores, yearning to breathe free. More than half of Africans migrants questioned in a 2013 survey conducted by Harokopio University said that there is widespread racism in Greek society. (Only a third of them, however, said that there is widespread racism within their own neighborhoods.) Stereotypes about immigrants abound here, as in many countries, and African migrants from poor or war-torn lands endure much of the more invidious prejudices. Recent fears about the spread of Ebola—crudely identified with the continent—have not helped matters. But the lousy economy seems to be a key driver of the nativist rage directed at this group. Anti-immigrant parties like Golden Dawn have been doing better at the polls ever since the economic crisis struck.
Landry Mbida is a thirty-six-year-old migrant from Cameroon. He has been in Greece a little over a year. Even though Landry, like most Cameroonians, is a Christian, he feels intensely isolated from Greek society. “When I get on the bus, people turn the other way round,” he says. “Some hold their noses, others change seats.”
Landry is a big man with dreadlocked hair, a broad nose, and a slightly protruding jaw—someone whose fierce facial features might easily intimidate—and it’s not always clear what role his race plays in the way he’s treated from day to day. That said, it is abundantly clear to him that he’s not welcome, for whatever reason, wherever he goes. When he left his home country, he first went to Istanbul. He quickly learned that Turkey was not the country for him. “They wouldn’t give me a job once they learned I am Christian,” he says. So Landry took a boat to Greece. When he reached the shores of the island of Chios, he was arrested and put in a detention center. After a month, he was transferred to another camp in Komotini, where he spent three more months.
Greece’s detention centers are notorious. Migrants are routinely crammed into shipping containers, living among rats and receiving scant medical care while they wait—sometimes for more than a year—to be deported. “I fell sick every day there,” Landry says. “They only gave us bread, lots of bread.” The lack of nourishment gave Landry chronic stomach cramps, and he had to be rushed to an outside hospital three times. “I asked for medicine, but they wouldn’t give it to me.”
Syriza, the left-wing Greek political party that won power in the January election, has started emptying the detention centers. It has promised to speed up the process for deciding asylum requests. And it has called for a new framework for granting legal status to migrants. Even if Syriza is successful in reforming the nation’s immigration policy, however, global problems of poverty and war will continue to lead desperate African migrants to Greece’s shores. And there is little in the way of a plan to deal with those who have been evacuated from the government’s detention centers. (Asked where the released migrants go, Tasia Christodoulopoulou, Syriza’s minister of immigration policy, said nonchalantly that they head to other European countries.)
For his part, Landry applied for asylum six months ago. He dreams of the day he will be able to share a house again with the wife and two young kids he left behind in Cameroon. Right now, he lives in a two-room shack inhabited by ten men. “No, six now,” he says, correcting himself. “Four left for Northern Europe on foot.” They are now in Serbia.
“But I really want a chance here!” Landry exclaims, suddenly perking up. “Not with this …” He points at the pile of scrap he has collected. “This isn’t a job.” At the end of the day he will cart the bounty to his Lebanese buyer, who pays just eighteen cents for a kilo of tin. “Eighteen cents! Eighteen cents!” he says, practically shouting.
The anger passes. Landry glances at his clothes: scruffy jeans and muddy athletic shoes, treasures from a dustbin and handouts from a charity.
“I want to be clean,” he says, smiling sheepishly.
Kevin came to Greece with the hope he could start a business and send money back to his wife and children in Nigeria. Instead, he barely survives on his own, living in a garage and rummaging through trash bins for metal to sell at scrapyards.
A homeless man has to have a code. On the streets, African migrants take turns rummaging through the same garbage cans. Blaise knows the rules. He steps away from his bin when he spots another migrant approaching with a cart. Recognizing the man, Blaise beckons him over.
Kevin—who refuses to give his full name for fear of deportation—is a Nigerian migrant in his early forties. Short and compact, he has a warm smile and, unlike Blaise, an apparent affinity for cameras. In the winter chill, he wears a flimsy beige jacket over a bright blue T-shirt, along with a pair of woolen gloves. They are gifts, he says, from “my Catholic sisters”—the nuns at the nearby chapel.
Three years ago, when he was living in Nigeria, Kevin came up with a business idea: buy clothes at a low price in Europe and resell them in his home country. The overseas venture meant that Kevin had to leave behind his wife and two children. Nevertheless, his father gave Kevin his blessing to go. The family needed money.
Soon after he made it to Europe, Kevin’s dream fell apart. He had hoped to get to Italy, where he has relatives, but his recruiter sent him to Greece. (Recruiters will often not tell migrants the route that they will take, or the country where they will land.) Today, Kevin lives in a dilapidated garage. He makes his living not by reselling clothes, but by scavenging for scrap. It’s a tough way to survive, and yet some native Greeks, he says, won’t even give him credit for his hard work.
“Why do Nigerians sell drugs?” a police officer once asked him.
“I don’t sell drugs,” Kevin replied, offended. “All fingers are not the same.”
It is usually the older Greeks who will insult migrants on the street; according to Kevin, the young tend to be more “relaxed.” (That said, Kevin’s fellow scavenger Daniel claims to have received five stitches to his leg after a gang of young men—interestingly, second-generation Albanian immigrants—harassed him and then set their dog on him.)
Kevin holds up a picture of one of the nuns at the nearby chapel, one of the few sources of assistance the migrants trust.
From Kevin’s point of view, the only people who actually go out of their way to help migrants like him are the nuns. When there isn’t enough scrap to fill their carts, he and his fellow scavengers turn to the nuns for food, water, clothes, and even cell-phone charging (on the street, finding an electrical outlet they can use is a special challenge). “If it weren’t for the Catholic sisters, we would have died,” says Kevin, a Catholic. Government-run food banks will offer them food, and hospitals will treat them for emergencies, but the migrants I spoke to felt closest to the nuns, who knew them personally.
The mother superior, who will only identify herself as “Sister Maria,” is a native of Switzerland. She is devoted to her work in the community, to the point that she becomes anxious when migrants (Algerian drug addicts, in one case) go without socks. People in Europe cannot understand what these people have been through, she says. She cringes when she describes the overcrowded conditions at the Amygdaleza detention center, which she and the other nuns visit every week. (Under the new government’s orders, Amygdaleza was recently evacuated.) The nuns bring the migrants not only food and sweets but also markers and notebooks. Some of them are so depressed by their confinement, she says, that they need a chance to work with their hands and find a creative outlet for their stress.
Of all his countrymen and women who have left their homeland in recent years, Kevin is one of the lucky ones. Hundreds have died at sea, but he survived. Many have traded poverty in Africa for poverty elsewhere, but he made it to Europe, a land of peace and prosperity. Nonetheless, things have not gone the way Kevin once hoped they would. These days, his bitterness threatens to overwhelm his good nature.
“Stay where you are,” he says when asked to give a word of advice to his fellow Africans on the other end of the ocean. “You don’t know what you’re getting into. You’re going to suffer.”
Postscript: A few months later, I learned that Kevin had been arrested and taken to the Petrou Ralli detention center. The nuns have visited him several times. As of April, he was still there.
Stav Dimitrοpoulos Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since.
Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav
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Best of In The Fray 2015. We had come to the Syrian border to help refugees from Kobani, a Kurdish city besieged by the Islamic State. In this corner of the country's unending civil war, another kind of conflict was being waged—for a city, a people, and a young democratic movement.
A camp in Suruç for refugees fleeing Kobani, a nearby Kurdish city under assault from the Islamic State.
We stand on an empty highway in South Turkey, twenty kilometers from the Syrian border. The dusty road leads to the city of Suruç. My husband and I are hitchhiking into a war zone, or at least the fringes of one. My heart thumps in my chest.
A yellow truck appears like a mirage in the distance. I stick out my thumb and the driver stops abruptly, kicking up a cloud of grey dust.
“Suruç?” he asks.
“Evet—yes,” I agree.
“Yardım?—to help?”
“Evet.”
The driver hands me his business card. He is none other than Suruç’s mayor, driving aid and supplies into the city himself. This is the first of many clues: everyone here is involved in the war effort.
It’s December 26, Boxing Day. Activists and volunteers have descended on Suruç to support Kurdish forces across the border in their fight against the Islamic State, a Sunni extremist group also known as ISIS. In the parts of Syria and Iraq that it now controls, ISIS has persecuted and displaced minorities. The victims of its highly publicized atrocities—rapes, forced marriages, beheadings, crucifixions—have included the Yezidis, a Kurdish religious group.
Through the truck window, a compound with rows of identical green-grey semicircle tents comes into view. “Çadır kent—tent city,” the Mayor tells me, pointing. We pass a second camp shortly afterward. A sign announces our arrival: “Suruç: Population 101,000.”
The population is now more than twice what it says on the sign. An estimated 150,000 people—mostly Kurds—have fled to Suruç from Kobani, another Kurdish city that is inside Syria. ISIS has taken over part of Kobani, trapping those civilians who remain between its militants and the closed Turkish border.
The Mayor asks where we want to go. I have scribbled instructions from a friend of a friend I met in Diyarbakir. It says we should report to Suruç’s city hall.
In the aftermath of World War I, the French and British divvied up a large swath of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, splitting up the Kurdish people across the region’s redrawn national boundaries. Since then, the Kurds have found themselves unwelcome throughout the Middle East, the targets of massacres, chemical attacks, and state-perpetrated “disappearances,” along with political repression and discrimination.
The ongoing rebellion against the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, however, has loosened the hold that Damascus had on the country’s Kurdish minority. In 2012, the Kurdish inhabitants of northern Syria took advantage of Assad’s retreating forces, declaring their region autonomous and naming it Rojava—Kurdish for “western.” (Rojava is the western part of what many Kurds consider to be Kurdistan, a culturally defined region that also includes large parts of southeastern Turkey, western Iran, and northern Iraq.)
The war has also brought the Kurds unprecedented news coverage. After the Islamic State began its siege of Kobani, the media called attention to not only the waves of Kurdish refugees but also the strength of Kurdish fighters—especially the women fighters—and the progressive stances that Kurdish political parties have taken on issues such as feminism and minority rights.
A few of the more astute commentators also mentioned the innovative system of governance—democratic self-management—being tested in Rojava. Equal rights are enshrined in the Rojava system. There are three official languages. Every canton is administered by three leaders—in theory, a Kurd, an Arab, and a Christian—with at least one of the three a woman. In practice, of course, most of these ideas have not filtered all the way down. Many Kurds still fight for a country of their own. But many others just want to coexist peacefully with other Syrians.
It strikes me how very normal Suruç looks, despite the war being only ten kilometers away. Shops, restaurants, and teahouses are open. People bustle about the streets. Men wearing red and white kaffiyeh on their heads loiter around the main square, chatting, smoking, and haggling with the merchants.
We saunter into the city hall shouldering our huge backpacks, tired and smelly after days spent hitchhiking around the frozen edges of Anatolia. The few men who stroll past us in the narrow corridors greet us formally despite our disheveled appearance.
I explain to one of them that we have come to help. Some of our friends have been here before, and they advised us to come to the city hall when we arrived, I say.
A man with a characteristically Turkish mustache points to some benches in the hallway. We sit. Soon tea arrives. Another man ushers us into a small office, where I repeat the same halting explanation to yet another man behind a desk. He nods politely, thanks us for coming, and directs us to the city’s cultural center, now a base of operations for the constant stream of activists and volunteers coming through the town. There, a girl who speaks good English points us to the distribution center down the road. She says they need help there now.
The distribution center is a converted wedding salon, filled with stacks of aid packages from around the globe. Groups of volunteers scoop the contents of big sacks into small clear bags, which are then flung onto growing mountains of red lentils, rice, sugar, and chickpeas.
At Suruç’s distribution center, volunteers prepare packages of food for the Kobani refugees.
We are warmly greeted by people who speak to us in Turkish, English, and German. Someone hands me a melting plastic cup of tea. “Parti mi?” a girl asks in Turkish. She wants to know if I’m here with a “party,” meaning any of the Kurdish political parties. “No,” I tell her, “just with my husband. You?”
“Evet, parti,” she nods, smiling. She demonstrates how one of us should hold the bags open while the other shovels lentils from the big sack into the smaller one—“not too much, like this, see?”—and then ties it and tosses it onto the stack.
This food, I am told, will go to refugees from Kobane who are living in residential buildings around the city.
The activity here is both methodical and chaotic. Nothing seems to run on a timetable, and people work when they feel like it. Nobody is visibly keeping track of who’s doing what or when. But somehow, everything just gets done.
Every ten minutes, someone asks if I want tea. One man in particular seems very concerned that I drink enough of it. He brings a steaming thermos and small stack of plastic cups around regularly.
Around 7 p.m. a bell rings. We follow the people wandering outside to a van that has just arrived. Two men in the back scoop lentil stew from an enormous metal pot onto flimsy plastic plates.
That night we drive out to Mahser, the last village before the Syrian border—and the raging war beyond it.
A sign says “Çaykara.” The village’s local name is Mahser, but officially it is Çaykara—like all Kurdish settlements in Turkey, it had its name changed during the previous century as part of the government-enforced Turkification process.
We are now a mere kilometer from Syria. In the village, I spot a friend. She is perched on a block of concrete where someone has painted the word “Kobani” in the Kurdish colors of green, red, and yellow. My friend, like myself, is something of a nomad. She has a long-held interest in Kurdistan and the wider Middle East, and has been writing a blog about the region for some years under the pseudonym “Iris.”
Iris is watching the Kobani skyline, just visible in the distance. “We always meet in interesting places,” I tell her, just as a fiery mushroom cloud sprouts from the horizon, accompanied by a mighty boom. My heart drops through the floor.
When they hear us speaking English, a crowd of men gather and begin firing questions. Iris speaks Turkish more or less fluently and has a working knowledge of Kurdish. I let her do the talking.
We’re invited to drink tea by some of the men. We follow them through the village and enter a small room where about fifteen men sit on the floor. They each stand to greet us, and motion for us to sit.
“Parti mi?” Iris asks.
All the men around us nod slowly. Iris points to a sign on the wall advertising the HDP—the Peoples’ Democratic Party, a Kurdish left-wing political party in Turkey. “HDP?”
The man closest to us looks at her. “Actually, we are all PKK,” he says.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, is a notorious Kurdish political organization. From 1984 to 1999, the party fought an armed struggle to establish an independent Kurdistan within Turkish territory. Since the capture of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999, and his subsequent shift in political views, the organization has moved away from its Marxist-Leninist roots and recast itself as a nonhierarchical social movement working on behalf of autonomy and rights for all minorities. Despite its more moderate approach in recent years, the PKK remains on the Turkish, EU, and US terrorist lists.
Iris decides this is a fantastic time to quiz the men about Ocalan, who is still the party’s leader—and still inside a Turkish island prison somewhere in the Sea of Marmara. In recent years Ocalan has come out in favor of environmental protection, gender equality, and rights for LGBT and ethnic minorities. So what explains the discrepancy, Iris asks, between those progressive views and what she’s seeing on the ground—nonrecyclable plastic dishes, women doing most of the housework, entrenched patriarchal views?
The man nearest us nods slowly, politely considering this criticism. “You know,” he says, “these things take time.”
It’s 10 a.m. sharp. Men, women, and children gather by the line of red tape that separates the village from a field—the only thing between them and the Kalashnikov fire echoing in the distance.
A semicircle forms and quickly expands. This is the daily demonstration, a show of solidarity with the PKK and YPG (Syrian Kurdish militia) forces fighting right across the border. “Freedom to Kurdistan! Freedom to Kobani!” the crowd shouts in unison. “We are PKK, PKK is us! We are YPG, YPG is us!”
In Mahser, a crowd gathers near Turkey’s border with Syria, rallying in support of Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State a short distance away.
The crowd goes on to recite a string of other well-rehearsed slogans that I can neither understand nor follow. After they’ve run out of chants, they extend their well-wishes to the fighters and, at the very end, to Apo—their affectionate nickname for Ocalan.
I hear gunfire ricochet through the streets beyond the field. What can it be like over there? I’ve heard that around 7,000 civilians chose to stay in the city when the Islamic State began its assault.
I meet a woman just before leaving Mahser. She’s from Kobani and doesn’t speak Turkish, but somehow we’re able to communicate through basic words and gestures. The woman tells me she has three sons fighting in Kobani. Her eyes remain fixed on the hazy outline of the city, as if she hopes to catch sight of them.
While I watched the war from across the field, Italian journalist Francesca Borri was trying to escape it.
Several days earlier, Francesca had been smuggled over the Syrian border into Kobani. She had left after coming under mortar fire from the Islamic State. “The point is not getting in, as usual,” Francesca tells me when we meet up in Suruç. “The point is getting out.” She says she was refused reentry into Turkey by Turkish border guards, who told her, “No, no, you went to Kobani. You have Kurdish friends, stay with them!”
I ask her about the civilians inside the city she just left. So far, they’re doing alright, she says: the Kurdish fighters look after them, and they are staying in their own homes on one side of the city. Around half are children. “I mean, of course, it’s a war,” Francesca says. “Kobani isn’t Paris. But I would say that compared to other wars, it’s a good situation for civilians.”
Francesca describes three levels of fighting inside Kobani—Kalashnikov fire exchanged on the frontline, heavy artillery shells lobbed into the city by the Peshmerga (Kurdish Iraqi forces who have entered Syria to assist in the fight against the Islamic State), and aerial bombardment by the US-led coalition. “The battle is mortar fire and rocket fire from one extreme to the other of the city, so you just stay in the middle—and if you’re lucky, nothing is dropped on your head.”
Francesca is a seasoned war correspondent, having spent much of the last two and a half years reporting on Syria. To her, the war raging in Kobani is “a war within a war”—a war for the future Kurdistan wedged into the sprawling and endless conflict in Syria.
In Mahser, the sound of gunfire was constant. Back in Suruç, I feel safe and far from the fighting. Inside the cultural center, people sit in small groups and converse in a mélange of languages: Kurmanji, Turkish, Arabic, Italian, English. Many are Kurds from other parts of Turkey. Some are members of the diaspora who grew up in European countries such as Germany or Switzerland.
Then there is Darlene. Originally from Ireland, Darlene O’Carroll is currently studying in Copenhagen. She has come to Suruç for her Christmas holiday.
Darlene tells me she decided to make the trip after watching news footage of the devastation in Kobani. “When I should have been working, I was looking at all the images. There were a few that just kind of pulled at my heartstrings.”
On Darlene’s first day in the city, a Kurdish man from Iran showed her around. “This was my first shock,” she says. “He’s Mormon. His family were executed by the Iranian government. His uncle sent him to India to study IT, and when he came back, he worked for a cable company, and he had his own store….” Darlene pauses for a moment. “His plan is to finish up here … and then go to Kobani to fight. I asked him, ‘How long are you staying?’ And he just said, ‘Until I die.’ It was like … ‘Until I finish this cup of tea …’” Darlene shakes her head. “It probably won’t hit me fully until I go back to Denmark.”
Since she arrived, Darlene has been helping with wiring electricity in the camps. She also works with a Kurdish theater group from Istanbul that gives refugee children here a creative outlet to express themselves through improvisation and roleplaying.
Today, Darlene has been invited to join a daf workshop in a camp at the edge of the city. (A daf is a large frame drum, popular throughout the Middle East.) I tag along.
A group of children, mostly young teenage and preteen girls, fill one of the tents. The walls are decorated with pictures of Kurdish musicians, drawings of animals, and the word “Kobani” drawn neatly in pastel colors.
One of the youngest girls can say a few words of English. When we answer her questions, the other children’s eyes grow wide. They prod her to ask us more.
Initially camera shy, the children slowly get used to our presence. One of the two boys is a master daf player and models for my camera. Before long, some of the younger girls are posing too and taking pictures of each other.
A daf drum workshop at a refugee camp in Suruç.
Later, I will read that there are 1.7 million Syrian refugees and asylum-seekers in Turkey—half of them children.
Later that night, Iris and I are walking the dark and dusty streets of Suruç when we hear the murmurs of a thumping rhythm carried on the wind. Iris knows exactly what it is—”A wedding!”
We follow the beat, which soon becomes a cacophony of drums and whoops. We turn a corner and find a hundred people dancing in a winding circle across the street. Young boys dash between legs. A man fires a shotgun repeatedly into the air, while another holds fireworks in his bare hands and shoots them into the sky. A small circle within the larger circle of dancers carries a man aloft on a chair. It is the groom. His shirt is in disarray, his face smeared with paint. He wears an exhausted grin—Kurdish weddings last three days and nights.
We stand and watch the spectacle until we are noticed. A man who speaks English brings two chairs and sits down to chat with us. A woman serves us tea. Some of the young girls shyly sneak glances at the two foreigners.
I tell Darlene about our adventure later that night. She smiles. “They love seeing people from other countries here—I can really feel that. In the camps, they invite you in for dinner, and they say to you in the shops, ‘You know, if you don’t have a bed to sleep in tonight, you can stay here with us.’ There’s always somebody handing you food, there’s always someone handing you a cup of tea. At nighttime, if you’re cold, they’re always pulling blankets up over you. They really try and look after you.”
It’s our final night in Suruç. My husband and I lie in our tent in a small garden behind the cultural center. It’s the weekend, and dozens of new volunteers have arrived. Both of the center’s visitor rooms and the two heated tents behind us are full, and a group of young Kurdish men are sleeping in the main room.
The ground shakes every so often throughout the night, as the US-led coalition forces drop bombs on Islamic State targets in Kobani. The blasts are not so loud from here, and they would be indistinguishable from the growl of truck motors on the road outside were it not for the quaking earth.
A rumor, reportedly from one of the YPG fighters, says Kobani will be freed in the next two or three days. The prediction turns out to be wrong—about the date, that is. A few weeks later, a man I met in the distribution center sends me pictures of the liberation of Kobani. They show a Kurdish red, green, and yellow flag being raised over a hill overlooking the city, replacing the black Islamic State flag that previously flew there.
Today, the residents of Kobani are slowly beginning to return to their homes. Much of the city remains uninhabitable after months of fighting and destruction. The long rebuilding process is now underway.
Meanwhile, Kurdish forces continue to fight in neighboring areas. Many other communities across Syria and Iraq are still occupied by ISIS.
But Kobani is free. When I saw the photos of its liberation, I imagined the celebrations in the cultural center, and the wild all-night dancing around fires in Mahser. I wish I could have stayed to see it, and I wonder what the future will bring.
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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