REFUGEE STORIES--I Am For Life

#write4good #iam4

Have you ever heard of Mickey? How he heard a noise in the middle of the night and woke to see the tip of a gun pointed between his eyes? I met him today at 9:15, after reading e-mails. He told me he was dragged to prison and tortured every day for three months. But he couldn’t describe his prison cell or explain exactly how he escaped. Perhaps he was nervous, or suffers from traumatic stress disorder. Maybe he was lying. I decided not to give him the little white card of freedom, the one with my initials on it. The one that says “Asylum Granted Indefinitely Pursuant to Section 208 of the INA”.

I met Mickey today, Pema yesterday and Amadou the day before. In between were Xiu, Hanna, Michael and Olga. They come from Kazakhstan and Tibet. From Congo and Zaire. From El Salvador. From Egypt. Indonesia. Azerbaijian. They come from every third world country in this great world of ours filled mostly with the third world and I muse as to how I know the capital of any refugee producing country that can be named.

Have you ever been responsible for someone’s fate? I leave my apartment like any other mother, kiss my baby, whisper that I adore him, give the babysitter instructions. I drive to work and listen to the weather. I turn on my computer, drink a cup of coffee and open my first file. It could be Dolma, raped and imprisoned in Tibet, or Chen, forced to abort a fetus because the Chinese government has predetermined the size of her family, or even Amadou, walked by armed soldiers to the river, told he was not a citizen of the only country in which he had ever lived and ordered to cross. I decide if the torture is or was “persecution”; I decide if the persecution fits into the legal definition that will enable me to grant asylum. Not in some grandiose courtroom behind a gavel and black robe, but in an office in an obscure part of Queens as part of a small, little known body of the Federal government called the Asylum Corps. Less than 300 of us exist in eight offices throughout the U.S.—the only people who can affirmatively grant asylum, allowing a person to remain in the U.S. “Indefinitely Pursuant to Section 208 of the INA.” Meaningless to those of us safely and permanently in the U.S. But have you ever asked your Polish neighbors what entitles them to live here? Have you ever seen the fear in your Salvadoran maid’s eyes when she overhears the words “la migra?” Have the Albanians across the street told you what they were doing twelve years ago? Do any of them remember a light haired woman who granted them freedom? One Nigerian did, sent me a lovely card of thanks. Yanya is a homosexual who had been beaten over and over in Nigeria, a “macho” country as many in the world are. Yanya was also HIV positive and undergoing triple cocktail therapy in the U.S.—then unavailable in Nigeria. So was Pablo, from Venezuela, and Jose from Peru. Sending them back to “macho” countries that choose to spend little or no money ensuring that HIV/AIDS patients get necessary medications would be sentencing them to death.

They come to my office alone or in pairs, with children, interpreters, lawyers, Priests. Friends. They beg me to help them and tell me they’d rather die in the U.S. then return to their country. They leave uncertain, relieved, drained. They walk out or are carried out by EMS. In between they captivate me or frustrate me as I follow their stories. Sometimes my mind wanders to my children or to lunch and I’m reminded of my own limitations, my own humanity, and to this awesome responsibility. Sometimes I’m just dumbfounded at man’s ability to destroy—and it’s almost without exception a man who is the destroyer. The persecutors with guns, with machetes, with knives, the ones who put bamboo under fingernails or a block of ice under a naked body.

I am for respect and dignity. I am for the right to live safely in the country of your birth, despite the happenstance of where you were born. I am for the right for women to live safely in male-dominated societies and for children to grow up without forceful conscription of rebel forces. I am for Karens in Burma, Tibetans in Tibet, Chinese in Indonesia and Russians in Azerbaijain. I am for life.