Refugee

We closed on the sale of our St. Louis home on Thursday. Aside from a few remaining odds and ends we have now severed our material ties to the place that was our midwestern home for a happy year and a half. As the sale approached and ever since I've experienced a flood of images of St. Louis and McKinley Heights, the neighborhood where we lived. Merry is feeling much the same sense of loss. We miss our house and the garden we built from scratch. We miss the neighbors who live in the house next door and have lived there almost all their long lives. We miss the places we grew to love: the Arch, the River, the Botanical Garden, City Garden, the incredible parks, our favorite restaurants and their friendly owners. We miss the wonderful people, including those I worked with at ODAR and especially our niece, Megan.

The fact that we're very happy to be back in Syracuse does not diminish the sense of loss a bit. I suspect only time will do that.

Earlier this week I had a brief conversation with a Bosnian translator who had just helped with a hearing in Utica. I asked her when she immigrated to the U.S. She told me she came with her son after the war in 1999.

“I kept thinking that if we waited and survived the war that things would get better in Bosnia, but I was wrong, things didn't improve, so we had to leave.”

They first moved to Columbia, MD where she found work. She became a US citizen but Maryland didn't suit her.

“It's so busy, so many people. Life moves fast there. It's flat and humid. I would drive around in the country but no place reminded me of home. Then a friend invited me to visit Utica. I'm from central Bosnia. It's very hilly and rural there. When I got here, the land reminded me of home. I decided I needed to move here.”

I asked her how she liked it in Central New York now that she's lived here for a while.

“Well, many Bosnians here say that the Americans are prejudiced against us. I tell them, “How can you expect the Americans to understand us? The Americans have not been in a war or had to flee their homeland. How do you expect them to know what life is for us?”

She told me she urges the other Bosnians she meets at the Refugee Center to talk to their American neighbors and try to tell them what it's like to be an immigrant forced from a way of life and a home where their family has lived for generations.

“I'm an American now, but I'll never stop being a refugee.”

I pondered this conversation as I drove the 50 miles back to Syracuse. I have never been forced from my home. I have never lived in a war-torn country. How can I hope to understand the life of someone who will live the rest of her life as a refugee?

My only thought is to rely in part on our experience of moving to St. Louis. We moved there because the government decided that was where they would place me. We had to move in a hurry, with only a little more than two months to try to settle our lives in Central New York. It was chaotic. Decisions needed to be made without the luxury of time. When we left we didn't know whether we would ever be able to move back. We didn't know a soul in St. Louis and very little about the midwest. We had to rely on our own wits and the kindness of strangers.

We were not refugees. We got to take all our household goods and our beloved dog with us. We had decent financial resources. We speak the language [although not the midwest dialect].

Even with all our advantages we experienced a profound sense of dislocation. I felt a pervasive numbness for the first three or four months. It was the anesthetic I needed to deal with the stresses of the new. Gradually this numbness wore off to be replaced by the excitement of discovering a wonderful new place and getting to know a whole cast of new people. Who knows how long this numb feeling would last if I didn't have all my advantages? I can easily imagine it could last years or even never completely go away.

To even begin to understand Bosnian-Americans you then have to add the grief resulting from a horrible civil war with the express purpose of committing genocide, time spent in refugee camps and often the inability to resume any known occupation once resettled. Using all my experience I can catch only the most fleeting sense of the refugee experience, the reality defies my imagination.