Late Fragment

I stole this title from one of my favorite Raymond Carver poems. It reads:

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

I thought of this poem often as I wrapped up my short month here. Although Carver wrote this towards the end of his life, and I'd always read the last two lines as speaking to a personal, rather than universal feeling of being beloved, lately I've been considering the last two lines in a more universal sense. I've been thinking of this idea of seeking a sense of belovedness both from within and from those around us as it relates the work I've been up to here. I've had a couple projects/activities going: spending days with 8th graders in classrooms, and lately, since they've been in testing, doing some teaching in the adult ESL program they call Spoken English. I've also been writing and revising a teacher guide.

(And, as an aside, I've continued to enjoy Bananagram nights with the Sisters. Sister Lourdes's new favorite variation, which she plays after we are all done playing and have left, is to dump out all the tiles, create as many compound words as she can, link them, and then see if she can manage to use all the tiles. She's completely addicted. I may need to suggest a 12 step program.)

It's the teacher guide that I think about when I think of these lines. The purpose of this teacher guide is to give teachers in the US background information on the Bhutanese refugee community and the schools here. This community is unique among other immigrant and/or refugee communities, as far as I know, because they've experienced a single school system, and so this kind of guide is possible. I will be sending out this teacher guide through various paths when I return back to the US in a few weeks. I'll also publish it on the blog.

Before I continue, I want to acknowledge that this is a very grand statement for me to make, that I've written a guide that faithfully describes, even in a limited way, the experience of Bhutanese refugees and their school system. It has taken me six or so drafts with revisions from teachers, counselors, and administrators. I've had drafts greeted, and understandably so, by grumbles of "Well, if you come in for one month you have a very limited knowledge," which has led to meetings of several hours, with sentence-by-sentence revisions made with people who have been here for twenty years. In my final meeting, when I was finalizing the historical background section, I sat across from one of the men who had established the schools in the 1990s. I felt quite nervous as I looked him in the eye and recited from memory the history of the community's journey from Bhutan to Nepal and the establishment of the schools, as I had heard and understood it. I felt relieved when he mostly nodded, and jumped in to clarify details I was missing and show me where I needed to add context. At this point, I hope my description reflects the view and experience of a teacher who has been here for a month, one who has also had the benefit of getting revision help from people who know better than I do.

My hope is that if teachers read this guide they will feel a deeper sense of connection to these students, the kind that is possible when you have a better understanding of where your students are from and the schools they studied in before they came to the US. I am hoping that if Bhutanese students know that their teachers know more about why they are here and where they come from, they can feel a stronger sense of belonging here. How does this relate to Raymond Carver? It seems to me that feeling understood is the first step to feeling a sense of belonging, and that you must first feel that you belong before you can feel that more sought-after experience of feeling beloved.

Clearly, the students here, like people everywhere, crave a sense of belonging. For example, when the students asked me if they could stop being refugees when they come to the US, I thought of it as a procedural question. I spoke to them of having a year before applying for permanent residency, and then five years for citizenship application. They listened and then asked again, if they would still be refugees. I explained that if they had US citizenship, then they'd be citizens. Some of them smiled. We don't have to be refugees forever? one asked again. What is this question about, if not belonging?

Of course, that sense of belonging will come not just from schools, but from all parts of life. And, I hope that once that sense of belonging comes, that it will be possible, in the future, to feel beloved in the communities they find and make for themselves. That may seem like a strange thing to write, but look at the fears behind the rumors that come up in the pre-migration IOM cultural trainings.

If people with disabilities and elderly cannot work they will be given injection for death or they will be thrown on the ocean.

If some one passes away, we cannot cremate just one dead body, but need to wait for many days so that there are more dead bodies collected to be cremated in a group.

Black people will take away unmarried daughters even if they are walking on the street during the day time.

African-Americans slap Bhutanese for no reason.

It might be okay to look at a white person in the eye, but if you look at a black guy in the eye, he won't like it and will probably beat you up.

Husbands and wives cannot see or meet each other.

In the picture painted by these fears, the US is a place where black people seek to harm you, husbands and wives are split, cremation rites must be observed differently, and the elderly and infirm are put to death. All of these fears speak to, among many other things, a sense of not belonging in the US.

One of the Sisters told me a story that helped me understand this in yet another way. She was working at a college in India where there were a group of Bhutanese refugees studying. She suggested to a group of the young Bhutanese refugee women there that they "be more like the Tibetans." The Tibetans organized cultural and educational programs. They informed people about their cause, and shared their culture. What a model for refugees everywhere! Later, another teacher told the Sister that her words had made the young women cry. The Sister was baffled and went to speak with the students and explained that it wasn't her intention to make them upset. She also wanted to know why her words had been so upsetting. The Bhutanese students explained that they hadn't wanted the students from Nepal at the college to know that they were Bhutanese refugees, because then they might look down on them. The Bhutanese had been "passing" as Nepalis. The Sister had outed them in a way they hadn't wanted to be outed.

I state the obvious when I write that feelings of belonging and belovedness take time, and perhaps it is too much to ask for, to seek to feel beloved in a new country. Many groups in the US certainly don't feel beloved here, or feel that they are loved in a very conditional way. Yet it still strikes me as a worthy thing to strive for, to create an environment that invites each of us to call ourselves beloved, and feel ourselves beloved on the earth.