In the news lately, I've been struck by the growing number of children who are with parents fleeing their home countries, who wish they could escape their home countries, who attend schools in a different country, or who just seek foreign adventures.
Brazil's super model, Gisele Bundchen, left her country and married the U.S. New England Patriots quarterback, Tom Brady. Nowadays, nearly two-thirds of those in Brazil's 16-34 year old age population also want to leave the country, even if they aren't leaving to marry a foreign celebrity. Their motivation: escape from a slumping economy, from corruption, and from a lack of police security.
In the recent migration from Mexico and Central America, parents brought as many as 3000 children to the United States also to escape violence, gangs, and rape and to find economic opportunities.
Children among the six million refugees fleeing Syria try to escape the bombs, poisoned gas, and starvation inflicted on their families by the dictator, Bashar al-Assad.
Children also are among the Muslim Rohingya refugees who have fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh to avoid violence in their home country or from Yemen to get away from air attacks.
In Nigeria, terrorists chase women and children from their villages to rape and attack them with knives.
Latest numbers show more than 600,000 students left China last year to study in the West. Many were avoiding, not violence, but the gaokao, a test that values memorization and determines who enters China's top universities.
Was it a youthful quest for adventure that caused 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach to ignore flood warnings and endanger their lives and those of their potential rescuers when they became trapped in a cave between Thailand and Myanmar? One of the boys showed he was a good student when he understood a British rescuer's question about how many were trapped and responded, "13," in English. Two were the first to make it out undertaking a dangerous, submerged two-mile route.
Displaced populations pose a host of problems.They might indicate destabilization in the countries they are fleeing, and they place a burden on the services provided by host countries. Unless new arrivals are accepted and integrated into the host country's population, rising nationalism leads to protests against the government and the immigrants, especially if refugees look different, profess a different religion, and have a different ethnic heritage.
Nuns who work with refugees in the U.S. expect to see victims of violence and those who have suffered the trauma of long journeys, often on foot, who need counseling. Some new arrivals are afraid to go out alone because they are not used to being able to trust anyone. They are amazed when they receive donations of clothing, toys, diapers, and even furniture, such as cribs, from strangers.
Shelters know they need to provide legal services for asylum seekers and bond for detained refugees navigating foreign court systems, where their next court dates might be three years away. When cases are not settled in 180 days in the U.S., attorneys know immigrants are entitled to work permits that enable them to find jobs to support themselves and their families. Asylum used to be granted in the U.S., if someone were escaping domestic or gang violence, but only persecution because of race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or membership in certain groups applies now.
Besides legal aid, families need help learning the local language. Nuns in a U.S. shelter try to make a new language fun by letting children write English words with their fingers in shaving cream. Then, there is the help needed to enroll children in schools, to apply for health services, and to become a member of a religious congregation.
In shelters, nuns see people begin to develop confidence about living among those who speak different languages and have different cultural practices. I remember reading about displaced families from Syria who left where they had been settled in rural Baltic States that provided creature comforts to slip into Germany, where they could join the others who had been settled there and shared their Muslim Arabic culture.
Practices that would seem OK in a home country might be objectionable in a host country. Smoking, spitting, stealing, and getting drunk can fall into that category. Players who join teams from other countries often need to be schooled in the ways of their new countries. For example, women in the U.S. object when Latin baseball players yell, "Hey, chickee babie."
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