German: What I was surprised to see about America was how many poor people there were. There were poor people everywhere.
Italienne: Really? More than Paris? There are so many in Paris.
German: No, there were way more. I think in America, when you are poor you are raised poor and then everyone knows you will stay poor always.
Me: I don't know about that... that's like the opposite of the entire idea of America, actually.
German: But all the people in America are so poor.
Me: Let me guess-- you took the bus.
German: Yes! How did you know?
Me: In Europe, everyone takes the bus, so you see all of the poor people and rich people and middle class people all mixed up together. In America, only poor people take the bus.
German: Oh really? Because there were just poor people and immigrants and me in the bus.
Me: Don't ask me why, that's just the way it is.
German: So rich people always take taxis?
Me: No, they drive cars.
German: But what if they go to cities that they don't know?
Me: They rent a car.
German: ::mind blown::

---

Everyone x11: Oh, you're American? But Americans are usually so bad at languages and they have terrible accents.
Me: Well, maybe if your countries made good TV shows, we would learn your languages so that we could watch them in the original versions. But they don't, so we don't.
Everyone: Hmmmmmm.... you do have a point.....

---

"What language are you speaking?" he asked. "We were speaking English, but we can speak French if you want." He doesn't know English. "What languages do you speak?" All of the rest of us had our languages stuck to our shirts on our name tags, but his shirt was blank. "French," he said, "two Pakistani languages, and two Afghan languages." Our languages were more prosaic. Italian. German. Spanish. He said he doesn't run into a lot of people who speak Pashtun. I've heard of Pashtun, I say. He says that it's sad because people only hear about countries if there are wars in them. He's from Afghanistan.

Where am I from? I'm from the United States.

Nice to meet you. What else is there to say?

He's a carpenter. He works for a company, their most recent project was a garage. It was for an important Afghan minister. But our carpenter considers him a friend. He's been in France for almost three years now. He has a carte de sejour. He says that with his new company he gets vacation. People here get vacations, he says. It doesn't sound like he's ever had a vacation. He doesn't know where to go.

After he left Afghanistan over three years ago, it took him nine months to travel to France. He passed through Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, France. Which border was the most difficult to cross? All of them were difficult, he says, all in different ways. When he entered Italy it was by clinging to the bottom of a truck that was driving along the highway. The driver didn't know he was there. You just clung to the bottom of a truck and held on until the driver stopped. Sometimes it was six hours. You could only hold on and hope that you were headed in the right direction.
My Italian friend is nodding her head. "A lot of immigrants die that way," she says. So he came, sometimes by train, sometimes by truck, but mostly on foot.

His brother left Afghanistan with him but stayed behind in Iran, content to try his chances there. Now he's in jail for working illegally. He has to raise 3000 dollars to pay the fine that will let him out of jail, and another 600 to pay for his passage back to Afghanistan.

"It would have been better for him to come with you," I say. He says he's thought about that many times.

When he got to France, he didn't know a single person. He told a taxi driver to take him to Gare de Lyon, but he didn't know how to pronounce it. Garedelyon, he said at the time. When he got there he saw an Afghan. They could recognize each other by face, he said. This person introduced him to a group of Afghans who were sleeping in a park. His first friends. He is a master carpenter. He knows everything about every kind of wood. They gave him whatever illegal work they could. He got a bank account, but he couldn't put too much money in it. Bankers watch your account, he says, and if you keep putting in cash and you don't declare that you're working they start to ask questions. So you keep your cash on you, the only place you have, and you spend it. You have to spend it or it will disappear. Eventually he submitted a dossier to the foreign office to gain refugee status. You fill in some forms and then you fill in a paper describing your story. They call you back after a couple months, or six, or two years, to tell you whether or not your story was good enough, or if you'll have to go back. For him it was 18 months. They called him back and they asked him hundreds of questions over two hours. They wrote up his answers. His story, a page and a half originally, bloomed to 21 pages. Two months later they called him back again. Two hours of the exact same questions as before. Why did they want to know everything again? Everything was written in his dossier, every question had been asked the first time around! And then he figured it out---- it was a test. They wanted to make sure that your story was real, and by having you repeat your story several times over the course of many months, every answer carefully transcribed in your dossier, they could catch you in anything that wasn't the absolute truth. His story was good enough. They let him in. He's not allowed to go back to Afghanistan. Not for ten years-- maybe never. Declaring refugee status is making a clean break with the past and the parents and two sisters and a brother he left behind.

"Why did you choose France in particular?" I ask.
"When I was a child, there was a French army that occupied our town. The soldiers were so kind, and always helping the children. For me every country outside my country is the same. I decided to go to the place where I had the barest idea about the people. And I don't regret it--- France! Paris! A secular society! Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité ! "

"I had some friends who were refugees," chimes in a guy standing next to me.
"Where are you from?" I ask.
"Vietnam," he answers.

Oh, great.

Reading accounts like this often makes me feel bad for having grown up in a comfortable and sheltered environment. But then it's like, well, I couldn't really help that, I was just born into it, so it's not productive to feel guilty for circumstances beyond my control, is it? I don't know though. There's nothing I know of that really tells you what to do in these situations.
» randomjunk on 2013-07-18 08:55:31

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