Anyone Can Do This--Part 3

But it is not simple.

Photo by Ümit Bulut on Unsplash

It happened that Ben had been without work for a long time. Then one day he was offered a job, but it was far away in another state with snow and ice covering the landscape for half the year. Liya was unwilling to move with the Fosters because she was from Ethiopia where the weather was hot. She was afraid of the cold also because she had had a viral illness that had damaged her nerves, and the cold made them hurt.

Sarah wanted her husband to take the job because she knew that being without work had been very hard on him and his sense of worth. She didn’t really understand how Liya felt. She assumed she would follow along and be part of their family in the new place.

The Fosters went out to the new state to look for a house. They ended up buying a house big enough to contain the whole family. But when they went back home to organize the move, Liya was adamant about not moving with them. She said she had found someone to stay with and would be all right. Sarah tried to find her an apartment and was willing to pay for it, but Liya said no. She didn’t want to be obliged anymore to the Fosters. She felt they had done more than enough.

This meant that the Fosters had to move to the new state by themselves. They moved into the house they had purchased and found it was too big for them. They were alone and Sarah felt very sad. Liya and her daughter came out to visit at Christmas time. They seemed to be doing fine and seem to be happy.

A year passed. Liya called up Sarah on the phone. She said she had something to say. She sounded very apologetic as if she had done something wrong. She told Sarah that they had been living in a homeless shelter for the past year. She had not told them that this was going to be the case because she didn’t want Sarah to feel bad. As you can imagine, Sarah was devastated. This was the last thing she wanted to have happen. She felt that her own blindness to what was going on with Kiya had led to the situation. Ironically, what the state had predicted had happened. They had essentially turned Liya out and left her on the street again. Only this time it was with a four-year-old daughter. And the four-year-old daughter didn’t understand.

Sarah was heartbroken because of what had happened. Combined with the effect of the move and this news she couldn’t sleep. She became depressed and began to have trouble walking. Now the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. She had many tests on her heart, her lungs, her hormones, you name it. She began seeing a psychiatrist for counseling and medication. All of this made Liya frantic. Now she felt guilty because she couldn’t be there to help.

Was it wrong for Sarah and Ben to have taken the job and moved? Is there a moral here? What was the purpose of all of this? What had been a happy ending now was complicated by mixed motives and bad results.

After they had been in the new state for three years Ben’s job ended. The house was too big and the mortgage too large for them to stay there. Suddenly their plans collapsed. They needed to move back to the old state. In a sense, it was a relief to return. They could be close to family again and see Liya and her daughter. But their relationship had changed. Sarah saw more clearly how dependent on the government Liya was. The solution wasn’t to have her move back in, though. The solution was for her to find some way to become independent of government aid.

Sarah realized that she hadn’t understood the depth of the predicament that Liya was in. Liya needed to get educated, to learn to read and write English and speak it better if she was to obtain a better job. But to do so she would have to give up her work and that would leave her in a position of having no income. The government would continue to pay her rent and give her food stamps, but she would have no way to pay for gas or internet, or any other bills. And the food stamps would not be sufficient to make it through the month. She was in a catch-22 situation. Liya was very strong and did not want any more help monetarily from the Fosters and the Fosters had to respect her for it. It was not their job to rescue her. They needed to let her make her own choices and acknowledge that she was part of the family.

They discovered that they had different understandings of what family meant. Sarah was more than happy to have Liya be close and part of the family in an American sense of the term. But Liya had an African sense of family where the statement “my house is your house” is meant literally, where everything I have is yours.

One time they got in a fight over china belonging to Sarah that had been in the family for decades. Sarah didn’t want Liya to wash the dishes because she wanted to make sure Liya didn’t break any. Sarah was afraid that she would get angry if that happened. The dishes were too precious because they represented family to her. Liya didn’t understand because she was family, and it was her right and privilege to do the dishes for Sarah. Months later Sarah realized that she had put unbroken dishes ahead of Liya’s place in the family, a typical American thing to do, to put things instead of people first.

Kia is now nine. The Fosters and Liya have all known each other for nine years. They have grown together and deepened their understanding of each other, but there are still cultural divides. Sarah understands better that she does not have the right to rescue or to impose her viewpoint on Liya. She needs to let Liya live her life and to love her. She needs to let Liya love her back in a way that she understands.

She also knows that Kia now faces the necessity of bridging two cultures, her mother’s, and Sarah’s. She was born and grew up here in the United States and she is surrounded by the American culture. She goes to an American school and uses technology with ease. Her mother grew up very poor with few resources in a very difficult time in Ethiopia, and with Ethiopian standards of behavior, which are much stricter than current American standards. Expectations for how much help children must give, and how obedient children are to be, are very different between the two cultures.

Many children in our schools today are faced with these circumstances. The strictness the parents require seems radically unfair to the children. They don’t understand what things were like for their parents.

What to do? Maybe it is the case that the Fosters are supposed to help Kia to bridge the gap in cultures, to help her find a way to understand both. To do this they themselves must understand more fully.

This is in essence the struggle that our culture faces. We must come to understand each other, to show mercy and forgiveness to each other. These are difficult things to do. But if there’s anything to take away from this story, it is that it is possible to find common ground and live with each other in peace. Even with love.

This story is true.