I did not intend for this to be the first post on the blog, but a recent event has caused me to think long and hard on what I study and how I interact with others. That’s what this is for.
I am currently studying in Egypt. Yesterday, I went with a friend who studies refugee studies to a center run by his department. He teaches English there every Tuesday. After my experience during those three hours, I’ve decided that I'll be going to help him for the rest of the semester. I had a lot of fun.
But it also made me think. A lot.
The people at the class were a great bunch. However, structure is difficult. The refugee center is in a poor part of town. Only a few students consistently come to the lesson, though the room is nearly always full of those that want to watch. When few of the regulars make it, moving forward in the lesson only to repeat it later makes little sense. Yesterday was one of those days, and the instructors encouraged the attendees to ask questions of us to practice conversational English.
My friend ran for political office and I study political science. More people abroad understand what political science is than at home. It was one of the first words I learned in Arabic. When the refugees learned these facts, the floodgates opened.
We talked about families, living arrangements, what a forest is, the history and geography of the U.S., whether the U.S. had rivers, how states differed from each other, how to become a U.S. citizen, how many people live in the U.S., and the structure of the U.S. government. The questions grew more political after most of the audience was satiated and some wanted us to compare/contrast governments of different countries. As students in a country experiencing a level of uncertainty, we were uncomfortable speaking our minds. I drew vague diagrams of government structure for a couple countries that seemed to satisfy the audience without saying anything that could be considered criticism.
There were a few questions that really had an impact on me.
One question made me very proud:
"If America has more than 300 million people, why do more people want to go there? Isn't it crowded?”
My friend explained how the U.S. is a chance to begin anew, and how our whole history has been founded, in a way, on immigration.
I got to say "My mother was a refugee."
I don't know what these people have been through. We aren't allowed to ask where they're from; it invokes powerful emotions. The program works with people from Somalia, Eritrea, the Ivory Coast, and Iraq, among others. Looking at the audience, when I said my mother was a refugee, the expressions on some of their faces, I don't even know how to describe it. For them to see me, an American who goes to university, who travels, who studies what he wants, and who loves the United States, be the son of a refugee, I think they read a lot into that about how America is, in a very positive way. I don't know how else to describe it.
Another question made me profoundly sad:
This was during a break, so only a few of the refugees were in the room. One man in the back of the room, dressed in a galibayya with a white traditional cap, was very intelligent and informed about the world. He began talking about stability and how governments change in bad ways. I asked him whether he meant like what happened in Mali this week and he nodded. I wrote “coup d'etat” on the board, and the room got quiet. The man asked,
"Why do coups happen in Africa, but not in the U.S.?"
How can you possibly answer that in simple English to someone whose whole life has been shaken to pieces? How do you look someone in the eye, who has experienced more than you can imagine, and explain why the powerful act as they do? I tried to give him an answer one-on-one because I wasn't comfortable talking about it with everyone. I told him that in the U.S., the law is stronger than man and the military upholds the law. In other places, men are stronger than the law and the military supports them. It didn't feel right, and he looked sad. Later, I remembered the Greek philosopher-historian Thucydides, who unwittingly founded the realist school of International Relations Theory by boiling politics down to "the powerful do what they can." That's the truth, but does knowing that make pointless suffering hurt any less?
Though I study politics, the actions of people are often difficult to understand. I will never understand politics completely. In hindsight, I feel the answer I gave the man was not very good, and even if I wrote many pages on it, the answer would not be a better one. Experts try to explain why things happen, but often explanations do not bring meaning to events that have taken personal tolls. The question highlighted the difference between meanings and explanations. A meaning takes on feeling, while an explanation is often limited to words.
A coup could be interpreted as one group of people overthrowing another group of people to gain control of something. In Mali’s case, this was a country. But what a coup means is displacement, terror and sorrow.
I feel that was an important distinction to learn.
