When my oldest daughter and my son were away at school and I was alone at home with my youngest, the house felt very empty all of a sudden. At the same time, I was on the Board of the House of Peace, a Peace Chaplain at the Peace Abbey and a Waldorf teacher. Life just wasn't full enough.
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At the House of Peace, Ipswich, MA John and Carrie Schuchardt made a home for some handicapped adults and Unaccompanied Minor Political Asylum youth. Basically they were kids who's parents had been killed or were in prison for their political views in other countries. The House of Peace was a fine old 1700s (I think) mansion in an old New England town.
I had the bright idea that in my empty, but small house in Marblehead, MA, USA, I could take some overflow refugee kids. I had to become a certified foster parent, and have my house approved, and then we were in business. The HOP was a non-profit and had a board of directors and fund raisers and all that. I was a struggling single parent teaching school and doing free lance editing into the wee hours of the morning. As usual, I leaped before I looked. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. I think my kids would have traded it and gotten rid of me at about any point. They would come home from school to find strangers in their rooms, wearing their clothes, riding their bikes and not speaking English. Usual practice in most US homes.
Emir came first. We went to the airport to meet his plane and he we saw him immediately. He had a shaved head, was about 16 years old, had a tee shirt on and a big chest xray around his skinny neck. He was originally from Albania. I never did get the story right, but during the troubles there, his parents were either both killed or one died from disease and the other from the war. Emir had escaped from some massacre as a 14 year old. He had somehow gotten to Yugoslavia and ended up in a prison camp. He was rescued from there and went to Italy to a refugee camp where he was found by the Lutheran Family Services who had been in the business of saving kids for over 100 years.
He had nothing else with him. He only spoke Albanian and the translator never arrived at the airport. We took him home. He was, we discovered, so severely malnourished that for the first few weeks he could only eat rice gruel. Anything else was too rich. His mouth was filled with loose teeth, bleeding gums, abscesses. That night my daughter helped him brush his teeth. The sink was filled with blood. She also showed him how to flush the toilet. He was very frightened when we showed him his little room. Later we learned that he thought it was a punishment to have to sleep alone. He had only ever slept with the whole family in one room.
He slept the night on the floor outside my bedroom door. The next day I had to get him a social security card so he could get to the doctor and dentist on Medicaid. Still no translator. I took him in the car to the social security office in Lynne, MA. We waited a long time in a sad line of sad people. When we walked to the window to get his card, we had our own private Ellis Island experience.
The form was huge; many, many questions. So, we did this charade of the clerk asking me the questions, "Where was your mother born?" and I would turn to Emir and say in really loud English, "Where was your mother born?" He would look at me like I was fully crazy and say something back to me in Albanian. Probably "What the fuck are you talking about?" And I would turn to the clerk and say any random thing that would come to mind. "Aspirina, Albania". She dutifully filled out the paperwork. We got the magic card.
The day the translator finally showed up, he came with about ten Albanian men. I made a little barbecue in the yard and then they all took off. Emir was so happy to be able to speak. We got almost no translating done because they all just wanted to talk with countrymen. I was cleaning up from the barbecue when the police arrived. Little did I know that this was going to become a very frequent occurrence, each time for a creatively new and different offense.
We lived right by the scenic and filled with expensive yachts, Marblehead, Harbor. Emir and the boys had gone to the harbor and removed their clothes except for their little European briefs and dived into the water and each had picked a different 50 or more foot sailboat to use as their diving platform. Yup. Some different. They actually were so outrageous that they didn't get arrested. The police got the translator to give a talk about private property and KEEP OFF and that's why we have a public beach and you have to get a bathing suit.
Many more Emir stories to come, climaxing with how I came home on Mothers Day to find helicopters overhead and the block cut off by police cars. Emir had stolen a police car (with all the guns in it) to bring me flowers, after he moved out. He never did figure out what all the fuss was. Over time, 31 such kids passed through my house until I cried "uncle".
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