The Middle of Everywhere (36 page)

Almost all who become wiser and stronger after trauma do so because they develop a sense of purpose that transcends their immediate survival needs and allows them to focus on the future. They survive so that their children can become citizens and go to college, or so that they can become doctors or teachers and help others from their country, or so that they can bring their grandparents to America or write the truth about a bloody regime. This sense of purpose, as necessary to life as oxygen, propels refugees into the future

A woman from Colombia saw her husband shot by drug dealers. He was an honest judge who was unlucky enough to live in the wrong place and time. She was an educated woman who wrote books and worked all over the world. Afterward she spent her life writing and speaking about the problems of her country. She said, "I honor his memory by fighting for justice."

Healing stories might be about courage or generosity under fire, wresting victory from the jaws of defeat, or hard lessons learned. Stories should focus on what can be remembered with pride. Healing stories help people cast their lives in epic terms. Often just a slight spin can turn a story of misery into an epic of danger, heroism, sacrifice, and reward. Joseph's story can be told as one of victimization or as one in which he is a hero who saves his younger siblings. All of us need to see our lives as a quest for something more enticing then mere survival. All of us need to be a superhero to someone. The best question to elicit healing stories is, "What did you learn from your experience?"

Talking to the Sudanese and Kosovar refugees, I found that no matter what they had suffered they all said they had gained from their experiences. Many mentioned increased self-awareness, stronger love for family, closeness to other refugees, and witnessing acts of heroism or great generosity. One woman, who had been about to be shot, told of a stranger who placed his body between her body and the executioners. Another woman talked of people who gave away their only food.

Suffering is redemptive when it leads us to a deeper, more nuanced understanding of ourselves and other humans. For countless generations humans have used their pain to grow souls. Through tragedy many people realize they are capable of much better behavior than they thought possible. Or perhaps they realize how much they are loved. After she had broken her ankle, a woman from Azerbaijan was carried across a war zone by her husband. She said, "I never realized how much he cared for me." A Croatian boy said of his sister, "She was starving, but she handed me her last piece of bread."

Perhaps refugees have been heroes, much braver, more competent, or kinder than they ever suspected they could be. Through suffering, people learn the importance of kindness. They learn that love is all that matters. They develop a sense of perspective and scale. They learn tolerance and empathy. After much is lost, they learn appreciation for what remains.

I spoke to my aunt Grace the day she lost her only son. He had lived nearby all sixty years of his life and died of a heart attack mowing Grace's lawn. My aunt sounded old and tired on the phone. At the end of the call, she told me, "We'll just have to love and take care of the ones who are left."

My aunt was very wise. Her simple statement of purpose really sums up the nature of healing. After great loss, we must find who is left to love and resolve to care for them. That is all we can do. In most cases, the great miracle is that it is enough.

Samuel Beckett wrote, "Ever tried, Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." We tend to underestimate our own resilience. Striving and overcoming obstacles can bring joy and focus to life. One of the great ironies is that stressful lives often provoke positive emotions, while easier lives can induce laziness and apathy. Who is happier, a mountain climber or a person who sits around and watches television all weekend?

The psychologist who has most understood healing and the relationship between pain and meaning is Viktor Frankl. In
Man's Search for Meaning,
he wrote that while he was in a concentration camp, he discovered that everything can be taken from a person but one thing—the ability to choose one's attitude to any given set of circumstances.

Nelson Mandela discovered the same great truth. He was locked up for twenty-seven years. At a certain point, he realized that, "My enemies could take it all, everything but my mind and heart. I decided not to give them away." This insight helped him reestablish his dignity and personal integrity.

Human life is not freedom from conditions, but freedom to take a stand on conditions. To live is to suffer. To survive is to find meaning in suffering. Working for the welfare of others is the best antidote to despair. Working to help extended family left in the old country, testifying about human rights abuses, working for democracy—all these activities give life meaning and help refugees heal. No one comes out of a holocaust to sell sausages. To truly recover, one must find a deep sense of purpose and meaning.

Americans who have suffered find similar ways to cope. They work for worthy causes, reconnect with friends, recommit themselves to their religious faith. They decide to spend more time with family, to read all of Shakespeare, or to visit the national parks they always wanted to see. They give their money to the needy.

Resilient people tell themselves a story that gives their lives meaning and purpose. The African American and Native American communities are especially good at using proverbs and stories to build meaning. Throughout their histories, these cultures have created stories that allowed them to laugh, to learn, and to find dignity in situations of oppression and despair.

In an ideal world we would learn about healing from one another. We would draw on the wisdom from all times and places. We would be intentional in our healing. That is, we would select from all cultures that which might work for us. In
an ideal world we would all be able to pray, to dance and to feast, to watch sunsets and moonrises, and to talk to each other about our pain. We would use both laughter and tears and that great antidote to despair, being useful.

We would create healing ceremonies. We would find symbols that gave meaning to our grief. We would teach each other to endure, that greatest of human strengths. I remember an old saying my mother taught me: There are three cures for all human pain and all involve salt—the salt of tears, the salt of sweat from hard work, and the salt of the great open seas. Years ago when my mother told me this, I was a teenager and I believed the reference to open seas was about the escape one could make on the open seas, the escape from family or memory. Now I believe it is about die healing power of the natural world. After my time with refugees, I appreciate even more the truth of this saying about salt.

On the eve of January 1, 2000, National Public Radio commentator Daniel Schorr named Anne Frank Person of the Century. He praised her for keeping her humanity and faith in humankind in the face of all the horrors of the Nazi experience. I was touched and pleased by his choice. Ever since I read Anne's journal when I was thirteen years old, she has been a moral beacon for me.

She had all the attributes of resilience. However, she wasn't a disembodied saint, but a real person, capable of anger, self-doubt, tears, and joy. All through her last years, up until the end, she managed to remain awake, aware, and profoundly human. Even at the end of her life, in the concentration camp she was capable of grief when the gypsy girls were led to their deaths. Patricia Hampl wrote of our yearning for this girl who embodies resilience, "We seek her still, this sane person that we long for at the end of our terrible century that tried so desperately to erase her."

We find ourselves, I believe, in the midst of the most massive shift in perspective that humankind has ever known. We are living in a time—and I see this all over the world—in which our very nature is in transition.

—J
EAN
H
OUSTON

We need a psychology of place. As Einstein once said, "Everything has changed except our thinking." Right now we barely have the words to discuss what is happening to the human race. Our economy and our technology have changed much more rapidly than our conceptions about what it means to be human. In our rapidly changing world, we need research about the effects of global meld on people.

We are living in a world that is falling apart and coming together at the same time. It is both Babel and EuroDisney. All the world is becoming more like America at the same time that America is becoming more diverse. The sun never sets on MTV or Coca-Cola, and Nebraskans can shop for jicama and kimchi, listen to music from Eastern Europe, or pray in a Buddhist temple with people from Laos and Vietnam. Global citizens know Michael Jordon, Julia Roberts, and Tiger Woods.

New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have always had global moments, incongruous scenes of cultures colliding, but now we are having those moments in Nebraska. Increasingly, our lives are filled with moments that reveal how mixed together our world is becoming. Nebraskans now travel to Machu Picchu and Nepal. At the Fourth of July parade, Latino and Vietnamese children fly the biggest flags. Everyone eats onion blossoms and corn dogs.

The changes have come upon us quickly. We are reeling from culture shock. Yet, we are only dimly aware of how different our world has become. We are now living in a universe of infinite choices. Every act requires an existential decision. Are we Buddhist, Christian, or Jewish? Do we serve bread, tortillas, or naan? Do we use chopsticks or a fork? Do we listen to Los Lobos, the Chieftains, or Didi Kembola? Do we shake hands or bow? Do we watch the Superbowl or World Cup soccer?

In this changing universe of home, we all need a global positioning system for identity. At one time, to be born a Cuban, Japanese, or Inuit was to live a certain kind of life. Identity was totally determined by gender, clan, birth order, and place. There was very little choice involved. Today, identity from sense of place is no longer a given. Demographic clusters have replaced national identity as the great definers. People in these clusters share the same habits, activities, opinions, and tastes, whether they live in London, Milan, Hong Kong, or Lincoln. "Soon the question where do you come from will be as antiquated as what regiment do you belong to?" wrote Pico Iyer. Or, as British sociologist Michael Featherstone put it, "We are all living in each others' backyards."

We need to take care with our words, as they shape our perceptions and experience. We are not living in a global village; rather we're quartered in a chain hotel in a global strip mall. In global shopping malls, the stories and metaphors are not our own, but rather are designed to sell us stuff. Everything is about money. Globalization means the world is for sale and that there is no place left where we can hide.

In our increasingly fragmented "hotel society," we have more freedom and more possibilities of making serious mistakes. All of us must construct our own identities and become experts at cultural switching. Sometimes that leaves us feeling like we are motherless children, or as one friend said, "We need a tribe."

Refugees have much to teach us about staying connected to a "tribe" while moving in many cultural contexts. One of the greatest challenges for refugees is to create a niche that allows them to maintain their ethnic identity and become American. This shouldn't be an either/or, but rather, a both/and situation. Pride in ethnic background shouldn't preclude acquiring a national identity. But as African Americans have long acknowledged, it's difficult to balance racial and ethnic identity with national identity. In 1903 in
The Souls of Black Folk,
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, "The American Negro longs to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging, he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America. ... He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism. ... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American."

Maintaining a both/and identity is complex. As a Mexican American teenager said, "I have to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans. It's exhausting."

However, by now all of us struggle to maintain multiple identities. We exhibit multiple personalities, not the disorder, but the coping strategy. We do a lot of cultural switching, and we also do an awful lot of making things new. We all have "designer lives," creating our own ecological niches from our collective identities.

We have a great deal of psychological research that shows the adaptiveness of what social scientists call "bicultural or multicultural identity." Bicultural or multicultural people who identify with both their own groups and with America tend to feel the best. People who identity with neither their country of origin nor their new country have the hardest time.

The following story is of a refugee who falls in this last category. My work with Chia was to help her build attributes of resilience and to find a moral center. I helped her setde in our town and make connections with both her ethnic community and our American one. Over the course of our relationship, Chia developed a stronger identity and skills for coping with our complicated country.

Chia, a sixteen-year-old Laotian girl, was sent to me by her high school nurse because she was not sleeping well and seemed depressed. She'd been coming into the nurse's office and talking for hours and the nurse felt Chia needed an adult who had time and attention just for her.

Chia was pretty in the way most Laotian girls are pretty—small and slim with shiny hair and delicate features. At first, she was shy with me, but once she relaxed, she was a nonstop talker. She had a thick accent and sometimes I had to slow her down and ask her to repeat.

Chia began our first session by complaining about lower back pain. I suggested swimming, but she said, "Laotian people don't swim." I suggested she ask a friend for a back rub, but she said, "I have no friends, Miss."