July Fourth picnic with Atlanta's new Bhutanese neighbors

Celebrating our nation's independence:
4-year-old Ryan, first-generation
American son of Bhutanese-born parents

The CDC (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) Bhutanese Refugee Support Group honored our new Bhutanese neighbors as we celebrated our nation’s 233rd birthday together.

From the refugee community, Emory, CDC, the public schools and the Refugee Women's Network, folks came to Tobi-Grant Park loaded with cheer, American flags and decorations, and yummy food featuring vegetarian delights. My friend Craig, wearing his Abe Lincoln T-shirt, brought two dozen roasted ears of corn, home-grown organic cherry tomatoes, two benches, and ideas on sharing from the wisdom of George Washington's father, Frederick Douglass, and Uncle Abe, for whom the preamble to the Declaration of Independence represented a moral standard for the United States.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. — Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, 1863

Flag-waving sweet Ryan's daddy, Tulasi Ghimirey, shared his thoughts on this holiday and on "this great nation where until today, nobody asked me from where I came, and why I'm here... where human rights and democracy are respected."

Watch the video (1:33 minutes)



My related posts

Son of Bhutan: a Georgia first
July 4, 2008, celebrating in Tel Aviv
July 4, 2006, at Atlanta's Open Door picnic

Son of Bhutan: a Georgia first

"Every Bhutanese refugee is
hoping to become a U.S. citizen."

He was born 18 years ago to a Hindu family in the Kingdom of Bhutan where, in the 13th century, Tibet-origin people brought his Nepali-origin ancestors to work. Skilled in constructing beautiful buildings and monasteries, they also applied their know-how in growing oranges. Buddhism is the state religion, and a Tibet-origin monarch rules this South Asian land at the eastern end of the Himalayas mountain range and wedged between India and Chinese-ruled Tibet.

"We love our country a lot and we can even
die for our motherland. We are patriotic." (Kamal)
When Kamal was three months old, his family fled political, social, and religious persecution in a violent mass exodus to United Nations-run refugee camps in southeastern Nepal. Living in squalid makeshift huts of bamboo and plastic, the homeless, stateless victims endured 17 years' struggle and poverty with hundreds of thousands of other exiles. And, while they could not return to their beloved homeland, they dreamed of a new beginning, to live in freedom and dignity as productive members of a society.

The chance to seek resettlement to a third country under the United Nations Third-Country Resettlement Program for Refugees (UNHCR) reversed their fortunes. And so, eleven months ago, as part of one of the world's largest resettlement efforts, Kamal and his family — already traumatized by their decades-long ordeal, were relocated to Atlanta, Georgia.

From southeast Bhutan to southeast USA
While kerosene powered lights and cooking stoves in the refugee camps — where cell phones and personal computers were unheard of, Kamal has mastered these technologies in his first year here. This summer, in a coveted internship with Amnesty International (AI), he is helping to calculate budgets for human rights projects and to prepare presentations on AI activities in the U.S.

Kamal is a top-performing student, the first Bhutanese in a Georgia public high school. His gentle manner, self-reliance, initiative, and can-do approach have earned him high marks from teachers, classmates, and volunteer groups. (We met in a group spearheaded by a family I met in synagogue whose daughters attend high school with Kamal. The family has galvanized others and scores of their fellow-employees at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help support our new neighbors, doing what my tradition calls tikkun olam [Hebrew: "world repair"].)

Going from strength to strength,
rebuilding shattered lives
As a key go-to problem solver and troubleshooter — whether for his juniors, peers, or elders, Kamal often dedicates days and nights addressing, for example —

• Evictions on account of scarce jobs to earn rent and utilities costs
  
• Emergency medical crises unattended for lack of insurance
  
• One-bedroom apartments without electricity where newly-arrived large families were brought
• Lack of technical skills and training suitable to apply for work opportunities, and lack of exposure to jobs requiring existing skills
• Limited orientation to local customs and resources, promoting inactivity and isolation

"Agencies are overburdened, which pinches us, especially when we have emergencies or see trouble ahead," Kamal explains. During this worldwide economic downturn, national, state, and local governments and resettlement and social services agencies lack sufficient resources to carry out their missions properly during the long and stressful resettlement process.

"Treat foreign residents living among you as native-born. Love each one as yourself because you were foreigners in Egypt." (Leviticus 19:34)
The plight of refugees does not elude me, and my tradition teaches that we lift up our kin, especially strangers in our midst. My grandparents came to these shores, too, from Russia via Europe in the previous century. They, too, were escaping persecution, seeking refuge, bringing optimism and hope, and working nonstop to address the persistent challenges of being and belonging in a new land.

Earlier this spring, in a public park near the Central Bus Station in south Tel Aviv I participated in the Joint Passover Seder for Israelis and African Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Israel. The magnitude of the African communities' burdens and needs, which they shared in our conversations (in English or, through a quick-learning Hebrew-speaking child) nearly undid me. I still can't shake the voice of Johannes, my Eritrean witness, as he replied to my dumb question, "Why come here?" As I probed, with his permission, the narrative of his suffering unfolded. "I came through the way that Moses and his people, your people crossed. Help us, please help us get out of this suffering," he pleaded.

In Kamal, as in Johannes, I caught a glimpse of something I don't often see: the unabashed vigor of life, the courage and stamina to confront longing for home, loneliness, language barriers, fears, and the unknown. And I felt their drive to go forward, embracing all possibilities despite risking more danger or greater loss.

Encounters with such heroes pull me up out of the pettiness and stupidity of daily life. And I know that almost anyone can meet these kinds of heroes any day. Just pay attention and be present.

Love-Hate: Brits and E. Indian Patriots

We struggled to encapsulate the vast subject into a short, catchy, meaningful title suitable for searching key terms on You Tube, Vimeo, and Google. Not possible. So, Tel Aviv Cinemateque Librarian Dr. Dror Izhar and I titled this post and the embedded video hoping at least to suggest the core of his fascinating doctoral dissertation.

When Dror first rattled off his dissertation title to me a few years ago, I reeled(!) on this mouthful: "The Indian Patriot Image in British Commercial Film and TV (1956-1986)." Yet when we videoed his brief lecture on the subject last spring, the title immediately struck me as deceptively complex. Because while he covers a vast collection of related themes (as examples, British Post-Colonialism; India 1820 to 1947; and History, Film, and the UK), Dror's eloquent storytelling provides not just a synopsis but a context, and reasons why the subject is timely and important.

Watch the video (8:17 minutes).



While we hope Dror's lecture interests lay and professional film and history audiences, he also seeks publishers (and others who might suggest venues) to develop his dissertation into a book. Please write your suggestions and questions in the comments section here or to dro@netvision.net.il (Skype: Dror1954).

Q&A on U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor

But let justice well up as waters,

and righteousness as a mighty stream — Amos 5:24
וְיִגַּל כַּמַּיִם, מִשְׁפָּט; וּצְדָקָה, כְּנַחַל אֵיתָן — עמוס ה:כד

To whom do I turn for brilliant analysis of matters legal-political in the U.S. (and often beyond these topical and geographic borders)? My own private consultant who proudly claims her immigrant "fishmonger" roots has garnered a mile-long list of honors, including teaching the rule of law in China, serving as Director of the National Association of Women Judges, and holding memberships in numerous bar associations. My housemate during our twenties, she has been an Associate Justice in a state court system the past two decades. And, she cooks superb dishes featuring Kimchi, the national Korean pickled cabbage dish.

Me: Your opinion on the nominee are most welcome.

She: Hi, T. From all I read in the New York Times and hear on NPR [National Public Radio], it is a brilliant choice both legally and politically. Apparently she is not a flaming liberal who would rekindle the culture wars but she would clearly be a counterweight to Scalia/Roberts/Thomas/Alito. And to choose a Nuyorican is a political masterstroke. I had originally mistakenly thought that she was a decade older than she actually is and age is definitely a factor where it's a lifetime appointment and those geezers tend to hold on too long, but fifties is a good age to go on the Court. I hope her diabetes stays under management so that she will be with us for a long time. Hope you are well. Off to the legal salt mines. Love,

Do we find the cost of freedom/Buried in the ground?

Find the cost of freedom
Buried in the ground.
Mother Earth will swallow you;
Lay your body down.

It's the refrain of an old Crosby, Stills & Nash song by Steven Stills. I first heard it in the early 1970s, and most recently just now. Bob Edwards has been interviewing on XM radio several members of the Navy’s Third Medical Battalion, which served alongside the Third Marine Division during the Vietnam War.

For this is Memorial Day weekend, and tomorrow we pay tribute to our service men and women. Memorial Day. I never can say these two words, not even think them or type them, as I'm doing now, without a huge lump forming in my throat, my eyes quickly welling up.

Memorial Day calls us to address the forces that drive men to war in the first place, and to honor those who sacrificed their lives responding to their country's call to duty. Whether they died on native soil or overseas — in German forests or on British coasts, in the jungles of Vietnam or atop the mountains of Afghanistan, or in the sands and urban jungles of Iraq, today, we are called to remember them all.

And what was I doing during the Vietnam War?
With (today's) first Boston poet laureate, Sam Cornish, and other educational advisors, I worked in the poorest neighborhoods of Greater Boston and in newly desegregated schools of rural North Carolina and Delaware. There, with teachers, administrators, and policymakers we created learner-centered curriculum development initiatives as part of the federally-supported "Great Society" broad agenda to eliminate poverty and racial injustice. Four decades later, as I reflect on that era and the work I did then and since, this "war" was the single most meaningful, most useful, most important I fought (and partially won).

"Women Walk" (1974)
Sam's literary materials for classroom use included a broadside series that he wrote and I calligraphed. This poem in the series captures the cruel disconnect between what U.S. troops in Vietnam were doing while many of the rest of us ate our evening meals. With "... death.../ at the dinner table ..." we watched grainy black-and-white news footage of U.S. soldiers fighting and dying in foreign jungles, while Walter Cronkite intoned the collateral damage count (a bizarre term I learned then), the destruction, the horrors.

Women walk because
airplanes
drop engines
into playgrounds
sea gulls
fly into air
conditioners
meat in cans destroys the mind

Women walk because men with draft
cards are tired
of Canada and find
prison uncomfortable

Women walk because death can
be a guest at the dinner
table and clean his plate

Women walk because they
know words are never
enough when you want to touch

Reworking the Crosby, Stills & Nash antiwar anthem
A couple of years ago, deep in the southeastern U.S., a young man heard the Madrigal Choir of Oldham County, Kentucky singing the old Crosby, Stills & Nash song. And it so moved him to post to You Tube "This ... little tribute I made for America and her troops."

Watch the video (3:25 minutes).



Daylight again,
Following me to bed.
I think about a hundred years ago,
How my fathers bled...

I think I see a valley,
covered with bones in blue.
All the brave soldiers
That cannot get older 'been
Askin' after you.

Hear the past a callin',
From Armageddon's side.
When everyone's talkin'
And no one is listenin',
How can we decide?

Do we find the cost of freedom
Buried in the ground?
Mother Earth will swallow you;
Lay your body down.
(Repeat x2)

Lay your body down...
Lay your body down....