The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom
Helen Thorpe
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Meeting people whose life trajectories were so different from my own enlarged my way of thinking. Outside the school, arguments over refugees were raging, but the time I had spent inside the building showed me that those conversations were based on phantasms. People were debating their own fears. What I had witnessed taking place inside this school every day revealed the rhetoric for what it was: more propaganda than fact. Donald Trump appeared to believe his own assertions, but I hoped that in the years to come, more people would be able to recognize refugees for who they really were--simply the most vulnerable people on earth.”
“If there was any part of the global crisis that the United States owned, it was the chaos that was unfolding in the Middle East. The United States had not played a direct role in the ethnic cleansing that had taken place in Southeast Asia, or the wars that had broken out across Africa. But the United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led up to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria. If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in the ban.”
“I would even say that spending a year in Room 142 had allowed me to witness something as close to holy as I’ve seen take place between human beings. I could only wish that in time, more people would be able to look past their fear of the stranger and experience the wonder of getting to know people from other parts of the globe. For as far as I could tell, the world was not going to stop producing refugees. The plain, irreducible fact of good people being made nomad by the millions through all the kinds of horror this world could produce seemed likely to prove the central moral challenge of our times. How did we want to meet that challenge? We could fill our hearts with fear or with hope. And the choice would affect more than just our own dispositions, for in choosing which seeds to sow, we would dictate the type of harvest. Surely the only harvest worth cultivating was the one Mr. Williams had been seeking: greater fluency, better understanding.”
“Where others might see students with limitations, or students who were lagging behind their peers, Mr. Williams saw a room filled with kids who had lived through titanic experiences, teenagers who could do anything at all, once they accepted whatever sort of history they had brought with them and grasped the full extent of the opportunity lying ahead. He often told me that he felt lucky to work in a room like this one— a room that spoke of just how big the world was, and how mysterious. Meanwhile, I started visiting some of his students at home, and that was when I began to appreciate more fully how illuminating Room 142 was going to be, for the room quickly began to serve as an almost perfect microcosm of the global refugee crisis as a whole. Once I began meeting with particular families, I started hearing about every kind of journey a refugee family could survive. The stories that intersected in this one classroom brought to life the global crisis in a way that I never saw represented in the daily papers. The kids were at South to learn English, but in the process they were sharing with me and with the school’s staff and with their American- born peers all kinds of lessons— about fortitude, about resilience, about holding on to one’s humanity through experiences nobody should have to witness. About starting over, and about transformation.”
“What are we supposed to do about the terrible innocence of Americans?”
“Troy liked to describe himself as “the realist.” Refugee resettlement work attracted idealists who wanted to make the world a better place, but the job of a case manager was to be unabashedly pragmatic, as Troy saw it. You had to make a refugee’s dreams conform to the day- to- day reality of living in the United States, at the bottommost rung of the socioeconomic ladder. Prospective employers might be reluctant to hire people who spoke foreign languages, and the skills that refugees arrived with sometimes had no utility in the developed world. The streets of America were paved, but just with tarmac. You had to break it to the refugees gently, but they had to get the point, fast: They must surrender the vain illusion that from this point forward everything would be easy. Not at all. Everything was going to be brutally hard. It would be tough to find a decent place to live that they could afford; it would be difficult to find any kind of job, let alone one they might enjoy; learning English would be mind- bogglingly frustrating. Plus, nobody in this country would understand their story. They would feel so unrecognized, they might as well have become ghosts.”
“The world was offering us its refugees, due to wars we started ourselves, conflicts we helped to fund, violence we had tacitly condoned, or fights in which we had played no part. Did we want to say a casual no thanks? Was that how we wanted to live, while we had our spate of time on this earth? And if we did choose to live that way, closed- minded and hard- hearted, then what was going on with our qalb (heart)?”
“She said she had been teaching them the art of reframing: thinking their way toward victory instead of toward defeat. She had been teaching them about the effect that anxiety had on their performance. Diaphragmatic breathing and positive self-talk were two tools the sports psychologist had given the runners to control their anxiety. “If they are saying to themselves, ‘I won’t get a good time,’ I try to teach them to say, ‘Oh, those are just thoughts, it doesn’t mean it will happen,’ ” she explained. “Or if it’s windy, like today, and they are worried about that, they should remind themselves that the wind will help on one side of the track, even as it will hurt on the other side, so the net effect might be inconsequential.” I could see how those tools might”
“Meeting people whose life trajectories were so different from my own enlarged my way of thinking. Outside the school, arguments over refugees were raging, but the time I had spent inside this building showed me that those conversations were based on phantasms. People were debating their own fears. What I had witnessed taking place inside this school every day revealed the rhetoric for what it was: more propaganda than fact. Donald Trump appeared to believe his own assertions, but I hoped that in the years to come, more people would be able to recognize refugees for who they really were: simply the most vulnerable people on earth. Inside this school, where the reality of refugee resettlement was enacted every day, it was plain to see that seeking a new home took tremendous courage. And receiving those who had been displaced involved tremendous generosity. That’s what refugee resettlement was, I decided. Acts of courage met by acts of generosity. Despite how fear-based the national conversation had turned, there was nothing scary about what was happening at South. Getting to know the newcomer students had deepened my own life, and watching Mr. Williams work with all twenty-two of them at once with so much grace, dexterity, sensitivity, and affection had provided me with daily inspiration. I would even say that spending a year in room 142 had allowed me to witness something as close to holy as I’ve seen take place between human beings. I could only wish that in time, more people would be able to look past their fear of the stranger and experience the wonder of getting to know people from other parts of the globe. For as far as I could tell, the world was not going to stop producing refugees. The plain, irreducible fact of good people being made nomad by the millions through all the kinds of horror this world could produce seemed likely to prove the central moral challenge of our times. How did we want to meet that challenge? We could fill our hearts with fear or with hope. And the choice would affect more than just our own dispositions, for in choosing which seeds to sow, we would dictate the type of harvest. Surely the only harvest worth cultivating was the one Mr. Williams had been seeking: greater fluency, better understanding.”
“Just the daily experience of walking down the halls proved liberating. Young women from Africa came to school wearing floor- length skirts in bright orange or hot pink, with contrasting head scarves in electric blue. Their counterparts from Southeast Asia showed up wearing hijabs adorned with sequins. Young men from Southeast Asia sometimes wore stripes of yellow paint on their cheeks as a form of blessing. Female students from the Middle East did their hair in elaborate updos and then draped wool scarves over their big coiffures, but wore jeans and American T- shirts. One day, I saw an Iraqi student wearing a black head scarf and a gray T- shirt that said I KNOW THAT GUAC IS EXTRA. You could be anything at all and register as gorgeous— you knew this, if you walked the hallways of this school. It was a place that eroded prejudices and expanded ideas of beauty.”
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Book Keywords:
generosity, education, empathy, languages-and-culture, language-learning, refugees, understanding, fear, donald-trump, learning, courage, propaganda
