What Can I Learn from a Refugee Today

Health 413
Anel Padilla
December 8, 2017
 I once read a quote that said: “When you show deep empathy toward others, their

defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That's when you can get more

creative in solving problems.” I believe that in Public Health, we are all about solving problems.

Even though we do not have the solution to every world problem, or we are not able to help

every person in need, we try to reach out to as many people as we can. As I read the books The

Farm in the Green Mountains and Salt Houses, I felt a personal connection to the characters in

the books and I learned many valuable things from them. I believe that the best way to reach

into the hearts of the people in need is to try to understand their stories and take what we

learn from them to get more “creative in solving problems.”

The Farm in the green Mountains is a non-fictional book written by Alice Herdan-

Zuckmayer. Zuckmayer and her family were a family that fled Germany to the United States at

the start of World War II. Her husband was a famous playwriter in Germany before they had to

flee. The reason they left was because Zuckmayer’s husband wrote a satire in which he mocked

how the German people will blindly obey anyone in uniform, something that Hitler did not find

agreeable. Her book is composed of letters that she wrote to her husband’s family relating all

about their new lives in the United States. First, her family moved to Los Angeles then to New

York, where they did not find the feeling of home that they were seeking. Eventually, they

settled in a small town in Vermont, where they found a farm that they rented for seven years.

In her book, Zuckmayer relates the struggles of being in a foreign land which such different

customs plus the new responsibility of building up and taking care of a farm.

Salt Houses is a fictional book written by a Palestinian-American author, Hala Alyan.

Even though the book is fictional, Alyan based a lot of the characters, events, and settings from
her family’s past. The story follows a family that has been displaced from Nablus, Palestine due

to violence and war, and forced to resettle in several places like Kuwait City, Beirut, Paris, and

Boston. Alyan recounts the story of the Yacoub family through each of the main characters, and

we learn what resettlement is like through the perspective of a mother, a man, a son and a

daughter, and lastly, through the perspective of a grandchild.

In class we learned that the definition of a refugee is someone who has a well-founded

fear of being persecuted because of any factors of race, religion, nationality, membership in a

particular social group, political opinion, and who is outside the country of their nationality and

is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself/herself of the protection of that

country. The characters in both books meet this definition of a refugee. In The Farm in the

Green Mountains, Hitler’s new regime in Germany threatened Alice and her family to lose their

freedom simply because of her husband’s political opinion. With this well-founded fear, she and

her family decided that they could not stay in Germany anymore. In order to avoid this fate,

they had to flee the country. In Salt Houses, the Yacoub family left the land of their inheritance

because the Israeli army rolled into their streets with tanks that destroyed their town, and

soldiers that killed the men and raped the women. One of the class slides mentions that the

2016 Global Displacement Statistics say that 20 people were displaced every minute in 2016

because of conflict and violence. It is obviously clear in these narratives that these families did

not want to leave their country but in order to save their and their families’ life, they had no

other option. They had to leave the place they called home. I have learned even more by

reading these books that refugees do not want to leave their home. They would prefer to stay

on their lands with their normal way of life, rather than abandoning everything.
 Another impactful class lecture was about violence against women. I learned in class

that women and girls are specific targets in conflict because it’s used as a way to show power

and control, to degrade and intimidate, to extract information, and to punish, among many

other reasons that make women so vulnerable. In class we learned that sexual violence is used

as a weapon of war. There are several reasons that perpetrators may resort to this type of

violence, but all those reasons are simply horrendous. In Salt Houses, the Israeli army used this

weapon against the sister of Imam Bakri. They invaded his house in the middle of the night

where he and his parents and a sister lived. In order to send a message that no one should

“disrespect” the Israeli army, they raped Imam Bakri’s sister right in front of him and his

parents as well as other soldiers. Bakri describes the scene of the event very detailed, as it

probably left him traumatized. In class I learned that gang rape constitutes about 90% of all war

rape. After this traumatic event, Imam Bakri and his family fled Palestine in fear. This story in

Salt Houses demonstrates rape occurring particularly in a phase where the army wanted the

Palestinians to leave the land.

Both books gave me a different perspective on the life of refugees because the families

in both books were upper-middle class. In the book Salt Houses, Salma says that her and her

family were protected from gunfire with the “armor of wealth.” In The Farm in the Green

Mountains, Alice mentions that back in Germany they had several “Marie’s” or servants that

would do most of the house work for them, and in the U.S.A., they had enough money to rent a

farm and buy animals that would maintain them occupied and with a purpose as they lived

their days as refugees. Because both these families were wealthy, they did not suffer

deprivation of their basic needs, something most refugees lack on a daily basis. One of the
things that reading these books taught me was that the effects of displacement, or life as a

refugee, are still traumatizing and terrible, no matter what your social status may be. The

characters’ lives were lived with constant fear and uncertainty. For example, when the police

came to see Alice’s husband, she was nervous that it meant that they would have to leave

again, even though they were there on a friendly regard. For Salma in Salt Houses, it was hard

for her to let go of the things she had abandoned back home before they were forcibly

removed.

One of the things that I learned from The Farm in the Green Mountains is that

maintaining ourselves occupied helps maintain meaning in our life. Alice and her husband do

not feel too much of the effects of being foreign because they maintained themselves busy with

all the chores in their farm. This gave Alice a sense of independence and that she could fit in

with the rest of the people and a life in which, for the most part, she was happy. From this

story, I learned that when everything around you is falling apart, you need to concentrate your

efforts on things that you can control. Alice’s government in her homeland was forcing her to

leave and they could not control that part of their lives, but they did control the farm and the

work in it, and that helped center this family as a way to fit in and find purpose.

From reading these narratives, I have learned to connect to the characters in the books.

I have learned to feel empathy for their story and the desire to help refugees grew even

stronger. I have learned that we can all relate to a refugee in one way or another, because we

are not that much different at all. From the stories in these books I have learned to look into

the future with hope that things will be better, but I also learned that the way I live my present

is very important. Why worry about the things I can’t control? That will not help me. But, if I
concentrate my efforts on the things that I can control now, that will allow be to become

stronger, despite what happens. These narratives have softened my heart and made me more

humble to know that there is always something else I can learn, especially from refugees. I

came into this class to try and learn how I can help them, but by reading these books, I have left

with a question that I hope will guide me throughout my career: What can I learn from a

refugee today?