Hello everyone! I did the thing that I promised myself that I wouldn’t do but that I deep down probably knew was inevitable….I got caught up in life and forgot to post for a couple of months. Oops.
In truth, the YAV year is hard. It’s incredibly rewarding and life-giving, and it also sometimes feels like beating your head against a wall. You work to really become invested in your community and service, and then you lose the thread on blogging and fundraising. (When I say “you” I really mean “me,” it's just easier to face it when the idea is generalized.) I did really well at building connections within and outside of my workplace, but I did not do as great in maintaining my connections from home. (Sorry.) It’s kind of a nice reminder for what life is--constantly walking that tightrope tension of where to devote energy, who to spend time with. It unfortunately can’t be everyone but it certainly can be some people. In this case, we must treat those people well, to the best of our ability.
Am I rambling? Yes. I am exhausted. This year has taken a lot out of me mentally, emotionally, and physically. Do I regret it? Not at all. The work I have been able to participate in and the people I have been able to do it alongside have been some of the best experiences of my life. I wouldn’t change that for the world. Would I do another year? Absolutely not, get out of here with that insanity. The lessons I have learned from this year are going to stick with me for a long time, but that type of challenging growth needs to settle before I can really start to understand what it’s telling me. Shaking it up with another YAV year would simply put me over the edge.
That being said, life does not stop because I’m a little overwhelmed by it, and there are some next steps. I am currently planning on staying in Albuquerque and (hopefully) continuing my work at Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountains. I have really fallen in love with the mountains of New Mexico and the challenge of supporting new arrivals to this country. I am not entirely sure what path is starting to lay out before me, and I still hope to one day go to seminary and pursue chaplaincy. However, for now, here in the wild Southwest, I feel that this is right and good. I think that’s all we can ever ask for.
Thanks for following along the journey. While YAV’s part is over, my part is not. Maybe I’ll continue to think (and write!) about it. Maybe not. Either way, if you need more of a YAV fix, check out the video of my story about working with Cuban asylum seekers below:
Also, if you’re willing and able, Emma and I are still looking for some donations to our group fundraising which help support the vitality of the Albuquerque program’s future. Those donations can either be made by scanning the QR code in the video or at this link here:
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Transcript for the Storytelling Video:
“What are you doing?” Emma asked me.
I looked up at her, squinting in the bright sunlight with the plastic debris of our vacuum cleaner spread two feet out from me in either direction on our front walkway. “I’m fixing the vacuum,” I said, thinking it was obvious and motioning to the clumps of fur and dust and string that had been clogging it for months.
“Today? Shouldn’t you rest?” She asked with a pointed look. My family had just been in town for a few days and we had traversed all over New Mexico - visiting Taos, Abiquiu, Madrid, Santa Fe, and Valles. It had been a long week of up at dawn and out til dark and hours in a car and explaining history and dealing with the emotional and mental toll of introducing concerned family members to the weird normality of Albuquerque. I was exhausted. But I couldn’t sit still.
I’ve always struggled to sit still. I fill the silence like my mother or tinker with things like my brother, find projects around the house like my dad or my grandfather. (All of these are commonalities I apparently share with my family as Emma pointed out to me after their visit.) In the one quiet afternoon they spent at our house, my brother re-hung our clothesline, my dad cleaned the aerator on the kitchen sink and taught me how to replace it, my grandad supervised the installment of our porch swing, and my aunt and mother investigated our garden and chickens. I don’t think any of us sat still for more than 15 minutes.
Doing simply runs in my family.
This is what makes my work at Lutheran Family Services in downtown Albuquerque challenging. I was so excited to be placed at LFS and to serve people face-to-face, really working towards meeting the diverse needs of our refugee population. Little did I know then that my being was much more important than my doing.
Most of my job at LFS has been working with our Cuban asylum seekers - people fleeing political persecution, police brutality, and terrorism in their home country. They come to us looking for English classes, help finding work, family reunification applications, rental assistance, and various legal services. Of all of those needs, we can really meet only one - we can get them in a 3 hour per week online ESL class. To do that, they have to go on a waitlist for two months before they can get an intake because we have hundreds of other refugee clients and more arriving every week. There is simply not a lot that we as an organization can do.
Part of it is federal and state funding, part of it is staffing, but most of it is that we all exist in a system that makes coming to this country a nightmarish maze of bad endings. When Cubans arrive seeking asylum, they are not allowed to work. It takes almost a year for them to receive their work authorization so that they can legally support themselves and their families in this country. They must survive on food stamps and cash assistance and somehow scrape together enough to rent a place in a city that is in the middle of a housing crisis. They struggle to apply for State IDs, bank accounts, and other services, because ICE is holding their passports and birth certificates at the border. On their own, they navigate the bureaucracy of legal paperwork that isn’t in their native language, and on which, a mistake can destroy an asylum case before they even get to see a judge. Not to mention, there is no immigration court in New Mexico, so they must travel multiple times to El Paso for their case (4 hours one way from Albuquerque), which might be only a fifteen minute meeting, or face deportation. Oh and ninety percent of asylum cases in Texas are denied. Also, unless they somehow have money to hire a lawyer (which they don’t, because they are not allowed to work), they have to argue their case in court alone or, if they’re lucky, with the advice of a pro-bono lawyer from NMILC, who still can’t represent them due to the overwhelming amount of people who need that same small help.
These are all the things I have had to look people in the eyes and explain. They tell me their stories - of families left behind, children struggling to adjust, hard journeys, and harder pasts. Laborers, business owners, and doctors - all fleeing because they once knew or worked with or helped someone who protested the government and were punished for it. Maybe by jail time or starvation or vandalism or stalking or beatings. They saw or they experienced horrors, and they come here looking for a better life and every single odd is stacked against them. But Cubans are lucky. At least we can get them in English classes, whereas we can’t even serve other communities from Latin America who are fleeing equal or worse fates.
For someone who is a doer, I spend a lot of my time being. I weather people’s disappointment, their anger, their grief, and their terrors. I try not to look away from their gaze as they speak to me in a language I barely understand, and I wait for the interpreter to translate the blow. My uncle was killed, my granddaughter’s still there, I was beaten in the street.
Not every story is like this but many of them are. And those are the ones that people decided to share with me.
In this story, I am not the hero. I can’t change anything about where the people I serve come from, and alone, I can’t change anything about the system they are in. There are just some things that can’t be fixed at the individual level. But I can be there in that intake room. I can meet their eyes. And I can listen.
Sometimes, the most human thing we can do, the only thing we can do, is sit among the plastic and parts and dust bunnies and debris and see each other.
I think it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
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Well then, thanks for hanging out, and I will catch you on the flip. ;)
- Allison
P.S. I was unfortunately unable to upload pictures with this blog post as Wix updated their storage policy for site media. I would have to purchase a yearly plan to add photos to this post. Stay tuned to my socials to see which photos I was going to have tagged here. Thx.