It’s been awhile…

I’ve been in a creative slump.  I was thinking the other day that I haven’t written a decent song since last winter, when I had a two-month episode of inspiration.  As the cold is setting in again, though, I have had to drag out the smelly blue coat that I wore from September to March–and with it I have awoken a little bit of imagination.  This week I wrote a couple of songs that I actually kind of like, which hasn’t happened in a while.  I felt the need to continue the creative outburst by updating my blog.  Also, my mother told me to.

This month, we had some pretty hefty budget cutbacks and, since we now have fewer employees, I am working full-time on the Reception and Placement team.  This means I am one of three people doing intensive case management for the first three months that a client is in Anchorage.  Though I miss teaching in the classroom and working in the employment center, I really do love R&P.

I’ve been working a lot with a household of African men.  Four of the men are from Eritrea (a tiny country that used to be part of Ethiopia).  These four men lived in the refugee camp together.  Due to a last-minute housing crisis, we had to add one more roommate to the mix, a Sudanese man that none of them had ever met.  So here are these four guys that all speak the same language, practice the same religion, love each other like brothers…and here’s this guy from Sudan.

But walking into their home, you would have no idea that this man was an outsider.  In a lot of African cultures, men are affectionate with each other–to the point where it would be normal to see two male friends walking down the street holding hands.  When I have visited these guys, they are all sitting together on the couch with their arms on each others’ shoulders like a comfortable little family.  They speak English–to the best of their ability–so that no one is excluded from the conversation.  They go on walks together, they eat together, and they always make me coffee.

They are all so optimistic.  We were sitting in their living room one day and one of the Eritrean men said to me, “We are very lucky, I think, to come here.”  They have friends that were placed in other parts of the US where jobs are nearly impossible to find.  They are trying to find ways to get their friends to Anchorage, where the job market is not terrible.  When I drive them to medical appointments, they look around at downtown Anchorage and say, “Our city is very nice.”

This, of course, is the honeymoon phase.  Every American they encounter is a person hired to help them.  Everything is new and exciting–the washing machine is a bizarre contraption that magically fills itself with water.  This is why R&P work is great.  We get to know the clients while they still think America is an idyllic wonderland.

But as time goes on, they encounter racism and xenophobia.  The Anchorage Daily News featured an article about ESL students in summer school, many of whom are refugees.  The comments underneath the online article were so cruel that some of our clients were afraid to leave their homes.   And life in America is very expensive.  Some clients spend months and months getting rejected by employers, only to hear that their refugee cash assistance is going to run out soon and that there are no apartments in the city with cheaper rent.  Buried in bills in the midst of a foreign culture that is riddled with buraucracy and cold business practices, who wouldn’t miss their home country?  Right now, these Eritrean men consider themselves lucky.  They smile and shake my hand.  But they have been here for two weeks.  We have clients that have been here for six months that show up at their case manager’s door every single day, feeling helpless or afraid or upset.

It’s wonderful working with clients in the honeymoon phase.  They are so grateful and sweet.  But there is also a constant feeling of dread in my stomach.  What will these men be like in three months, in one year?  How will they react the first time some drunk person on the street tells them to go back to wherever the hell they came from?  How will they handle the upcoming winter?  How will they find jobs?

Though I fear for our clients, I know that they have to come out of the honeymoon phase at some point.  I have to trust that they’ll exceed my every expectation for them.  This group of men overcame cultural and religious differences, not to mention language barriers, to form a functioning and warm household.  And who knows what atrocities they’ve already lived through in their home countries and refugee camps.  Surely, they will make it through this next phase in life, just like they have always done.  And when they come out on the other side, they will probably still welcome me into their home with a smile and a cup of coffee.

New Alaskans: The Bhutanese

People always ask me where the refugees in Anchorage come from.  So I thought I’d share a little about the people we work with, starting with our largest group right now, the Bhutanese.

Bhutan is a tiny little country nestled in between India and China.  In the early 90′s the Bhutanese government deemed a portion of its own population–people of Nepali ethnicity–to be a national threat.  The Nepali-speaking people of Bhutan were relatively well-organized and politically opposed to the rigid monarchy, so they were kicked out and have been living in refugee camps in Nepal ever since.

I could describe for you what life in the Nepali camps is like, based on the little bit of research I’ve done and the tidbits of information clients share with me, but instead, you should check out this short video.  It’s really well-done and informative and there are colors and things that move and stuff. 

Some of the people living in the camps get resettled in “third countries” like the US, Great Britain, or the Netherlands.  When the resettlement agencies place people, they try very hard to keep families together.  Bhutanese culture is very family-oriented; even after children grow up and get married and have children of their own, they are still expected to live with their parents.  People stay very close.  Almost every Bhutanese family that is placed in Anchorage is being reunited with family members that came before them.

The Bhutanese people coming here also come from a long-standing agricultural tradition.  Among the people I work with, almost everyone over 40 was a farmer or a farmer’s wife, with no formal education.  It’s different for people in their twenties and younger, though.  They have spent the majority of their lives in the camps.  Some were even born in the camps.  They were able to go to school and start learning English.  A lot of the twenty-somethings in our program even taught in the schools.  So there is a definite generational gap in education level, variety of job experience, and general adaptability to life in the US.

The Bhutanese people I have met have been incredibly kind and good-natured people.  There are a couple of little old ladies that make my heart melt every time I see them.  One woman in particular–I believe she’s in her late sixties–always walks around with a giant grin on her face.  In the classroom, she’ll stumble over simple English words, but she never shows frustration.  She just laughs this wonderfully contagious belly laugh and grabs my hand like I’m another member of her family.

And actually, I’ve noticed that a lot of the Bhutanese women are very affectionate.  It’s not an overt affection, not big and boisterous and over-the-top.  It’s a quiet affection.  I’ll be walking down the street with a woman that I’ve just met and she’ll hold my hand as we walk or stand really close to me.  It’s almost childlike, and I don’t mean that to sound condescending.  It’s not that they are simple-minded or weak or immature.  It’s that they are incredibly trusting.  You can almost sense a fear in them, a fear of this bizarre world they’ve been thrown into, and they draw close to you as you walk down the street because you are from the resettlement agency, you are here to help them, you are someone to be trusted.  It’s very sweet and very comforting.

Proof that I never have been and never will be cool

It should be obvious by now that I love my job.  I get to spend time with really interesting people from all over the world, hear their stories and learn about their cultures.  I get to help people on a variety of levels, and helping people will make anyone feel good.  But in all honesty, one thing about my job that gives me utter and complete joy is making spreadsheets.  Excel spreadsheets.  They are my crack cocaine.

 

One of the first duties I was given was to take over our weekly “free case” meetings, when we all sit around and talk about clients and make sure every thing is happening that needs to be happening.  My job is to make the list of who needs to be discussed, based on this complicated timeline.  I was given a binder full of sticky notes and told that I could figure out my own way to organize it.  I love binders full of sticky notes.  I love taking each of those sticky notes, putting the information in my own system and throwing that damn sticky note away.  I love spreadsheets.

 

I made one to track school enrollments and one to organize my scattered work schedule.  I track my budget (and various other elements of my personal life) in a calendar that I designed for just that purpose.  When I was a little kid, I would sit in my room and think up all these far-fetched wild fantasies—like most little kids do—and then I’d make lists of every little detail I would have to do to make them happen.  I played school with my dolls and kept meticulous track of their test scores.  I was a weird kid.

 

I’m working in the employment center part-time these days and that place is a mess.  There are so many clients that need jobs and only two people to help them—two and a half counting me.  The people there work so hard and do a great job, but clients just aren’t getting hired anywhere.  It’s partly due to the lack of manpower, but it’s also because of a lack of focus and organization.  The employment center is one massive binder full of sticky notes.

 

We had a meeting today with our executive director to figure out how we can start getting people into jobs, and I was gifted the task of organizing all of our information.  I might have drooled a little I was so excited.

 

You see, lists and procedures and bureaucracy can sometimes impede progress and sometimes you can get so focused on following the rules and fitting within the lines of the system that you overlook the needs of the individual.  But then there’s the other end of the spectrum—mass chaos.  This is when there is no system, no communication between coworkers, no way to track what clients have already done or still need to do.  This is the employment center.  This isn’t any better than excessive bureaucracy, because it leads to the same outcome.  The individual gets lost in the mess.  It’s not just that the center is inefficient.  It’s completely ineffective.  It’s not doing what it’s meant to do.

 

I’m not going to completely transform the employment center by making a spreadsheet.  But we’re all so overwhelmed and paralyzed by the chaos that getting organized is the only thing we can do right now.

 

Not everything about my job is hands-on and thrilling, but luckily for me, I enjoy the boring stuff as much as the less boring stuff.  It’s just so satisfying to put everything in a neat little system over which I have total control.  I could sit at my desk, turn on some music, and enter information into a computer for hours.  I guess I’m still that weird little kid, grading my Molly doll’s math scores.  But at least this busy work has purpose.