ALTONA, CANADA – Today I had a two-hour conversation with a Venezuelan man over a Syrian lunch in the middle of rural Canada. In Spanish.
Which is humorous because, for the record, I don’t really speak Spanish. In fact, it’s been four years since high school Spanish, so the conversation was a bit rough-going.
Jesús is a refugee claimant and newcomer to Canada. A skilled worker and intelligent man, Jesús was a hydroelectric engineer/manager in Venezuela, which he left with his wife a year or so ago in the midst of a crumbling economy and growing gang violence. Together, they traveled from Caracas to Maracaibo (an eight-hour drive) before flying to Mexico City and finally Canada.
At some point, we were talking about un camión – a truck (or as Jack, a fellow classmate from Britain, would say, a lorry). Jesús says he likes Canada – it’s tranquilo, peaceful. Jesús now prays his refugee claim will be accepted, which he optimistically says has an 80% chance of success. Jesús has got family here – of three daughters, at least one lives in the area, along with a couple of nietos, grandchildren. Jesús looks younger than his seventy-plus years. He shows off a photo of his 11-year-old granddaughter hanging upside-down from a tree limb. His voice is strained, tired, and a bit insistent as he remembers his life in Venezuela.
I think pain is something that comes across without words; some stories and some emotions transcend the technical syntax used to formally convey details. That’s not to say I don’t regret my lack of understanding. I wish I’d caught the details of Jesús’s story, and I hope his efforts weren’t lost on me. I think Jesús felt withdrawn amongst a sea of Arabic- and English-speaking lunch mates and may have appreciated having someone to converse with, and I appreciate his openness with me. But I worry that I’m not worthy of his story.
The thing is, Jesús has probably had to tell his story and relive his traumas dozens of times just to get into and stay in Canada, and he’s probably going to have to tell it a dozen times more before his refugee status is determined next May. And going into this conversation, I knew I wouldn’t understand enough to incorporate his story into my own writing. In a case like this (or ever, really), what gives a person the right to ask for anther’s story? Have I disrespected his story? How much do the details matter, or is the pain conveyed enough?
Yesterday we spoke to Summer, a transgender Syrian refugee at the Hospitality House in Winnipeg. Summer asked if and how we were there to help her. The truth is, we can’t help Summer, not even in the way that a trained journalist with a platform may have been able to lend her a voice. And yet she insisted on giving the name of the man who tortured her in prison and watched us write down that man’s name. But where will that information go? Surely these stories cannot be lost.
On a brighter note, here’s an unusually animated game of “sticks:”
