living light

(Where in the world is Callie? There was a slight change of plans: it has now been nearly two weeks since we arrived in Rome, Italy, where Mariah and I are volunteering full-time at the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center and at Centro Baobab, two organizations that welcome, support, and care for refugees, migrants, asylum-seeker, humans as they arrive to, journey through, live, or otherwise make their way, in this city and country. At Joel Nafuma, a day center that serves humans who are seeking or have sought asylum in Italy by providing language, career, psycho-social, and legal support, Mariah and I offer English literacy tutoring for a few hours every day. At Centro Baobab, a short-term residential camp and basic needs drop-in center that serves humans who have just arrived in Italy and who are in transit to other European countries where they hope to seek asylum, we spend afternoons sorting, organizing, and distributing donated clothes. 

In one week, we will be on the move again, traveling around Italy and Greece for two weeks before going to the Greek island of Lesbos, where we will volunteer for 10 days with Lighthouse, one of the small organizations providing emergency relief to humans as their boats arrive on the island’s beaches from Turkey. From there, I’ll return to Indianapolis on the 21st.)

I’ve been looking for some sort of poignancy to fill the page, searching for a way to summarize, articulate, make sense of the lessons I am learning, the questions I am living, the wonderings that accompany my witnessing. But I have no clear conclusions, no linear train of thought, no ‘should’s’ to state with supporting evidence.
I have only these, the words that have arisen within me, surrounded me, been entrusted to me in the last two weeks as I have fumbled, stumbled, tumbled through experiences of courage, challenge, confusion, clarity, compassion…often all in constant coexistence:

“They think I have no heart. These governments, they don’t see that I’m just trying to work, to have a small home, to have enough to eat. They think I’m making trouble, they don’t see that I’m just trying to live. They are blind, they don’t see us as humans.”
Shams, a twenty-two year old from Afghanistan, and I are going over verb tenses in English when he begins to tell me portions of the story of his life’s journey that led him to be one of many refugees in Rome in search of work, housing, safety, peace. As is true of almost all of the individual ‘lessons’ we give to the 25 or so humans who have walked into our classroom for English help over the last two weeks, some only once and some every day, the space between Shams and I quickly shifts away from one where I was any sort of ‘teacher’ to one where I am, simply and ever so un-simply, a listener.
—
There’s a memory that’s been floating around mind over the past few weeks:
During my time in Kalamazoo, I occasionally went to the Quaker Friends Meeting near campus. It is a small, cozy, and warm place, made so by a community that displays their fierce compassion and drive for social justice through their quiet, simple kindness. One Sunday morning, I attended meeting, a member of the community, who had recently become a widower, stood up to voice his thoughts during the silent, unprogrammed hour of communal reflection. It was during a time in the last few years when the world seemed to be overflowing with sorrow, when every day brought a new tragedy, when open wounds seemed to cover the world-over; it was a time not unlike the time through which we are currently living, not unlike the time through which some of our fellow humans live constantly.
The man shared that a friend of his had just built a log cabin. When he went to visit the new home, he saw that there were gaps between the logs. Assuming his friend did not want for these to exist, the man asked when the cracks would be filled in. His friend said: they won’t be, the spaces are intentional; if they weren’t there, it would be dark…the cracks are where the light gets in.
—
What a thing: to hold to conversation, to slowly draw letters, to choose a well-fitting pair of pants and to question throughout, to feel yourself constantly challenged to live the answer: am I seeing, validating, upholding, respecting, honoring your humanity? Does my presence make you feel human, as you are? If the answer is no, why not, and how can that become? If it is yes, how can that expand?
—
“Stupid life!” The words come out in English almost as a plea, a laugh, and a sob all at once.
He drags his hand, in heavy exhaustion, over his eyes, rubbing away the moisture of emotion that forms in the corners.
I respond in French: “I know. I hear you. I know it is so hard. And I’m so sorry.”
His hand comes over his eyes again, briefly holding the weight of his bent head as his shoulders slump in a resignation that recedes not five seconds after it appears; he recomposes his body, straightens again in his chair, brings his hands back to the pen and paper on the table, takes a single deep breath and says, in French: “okay, teach me how to write the alphabet, il n’y a rien de plus.”
I had been working with Hamid on learning to read and write, teaching him in French, the one language we both speak with relatively-equal comfort, when he stopped tracing the letters and suddenly commenced a twenty-minute flurry of truth- and story-telling, a protective dam broken as waves of hurt, desperation, fear, and grief spill out in a broken mix of the many tongues he has had to learn to speak during his ten-year journey around Europe in search of survival.
I pick up my pen, point to the page of letters: “d’accord, let’s begin where we left off. You have written ‘I am from’…now what letter does ‘Afghanistan’ begin with? What sound do you hear?”
—
There are 11 year old girls with bombs strapped underneath their dresses forced to walk into markets to end the lives of others through the ending of their own.
There are young men being shot in the back by the people meant to protect, in no kind of ‘isolated incident’ but over and over and over again.
There are families climbing into rafts, paying a discount to travel the seas in storms, because crashing waves and the unkindness of our welcome are still safer than what they leave behind.
There are…There are…There are…There are…There are…
The violence of the world is cracking our souls, tearing the fabric of our hearts into fragments, leaving holes in our humanity. We are living through a time when open wounds cover the world-over.
But some of us are letting fear fuel angry retribution as we try to patch over this pain with hateful discrimination, to close up the gaps by closing up ourselves, to return to some semblance of wholeness by being wholly unkind.
But what if we intentionally left spaces where so many of our fellow humans’ lives used to be? What if we let ourselves crack with compassion? What if we didn’t fill in between the logs of the cabin, creating darkness? What if we let the light get in?
What if we were that light?
—
“But why are you here, why would you come?” Shams asks me.
Rarely through this experience have I known what to say, seldom have I felt any sort of confidence that my words were enough; but of the truth in my reply to Shams, I am sure: “because I see that you are human.”