The Pains of Bright Smiles

I wasn’t going to write something today, World Refugee Day.  Everyday is Refugee Day, as I’m a clinician for long-established refugees (currently mostly from Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, & Cambodia).  But I’ve also just returned from working with new Syrian refugees that crossed the Jordanian border. They’re welcomed with tents and fights at distribution centers in Za’atari, Jordan.

I’d like to say that I see bright smiles in the face of adversity:  How heart warming it is that people whose families have been fragmented and whose kids who have lost a parent to bombs, are still able to find happiness among the structural violence of poverty in a camp. It’s a similar cringe I feel when people return from a “poor country” and talk about how “happy those people are, even without food or shoes, and here we’re complaining about first-world problems.”

I understand the sentiment, and the desire to teach that materialism does not lead to happiness.  And yet, it fails to place proper weight on the reality of daily life – one snapshot of a smile is deceiving. Underlying the notion that people are happy when basic needs aren’t met absolves us of the responsibility to focus on the provision of such needs. And moreover, fails to see the person for their struggles.  As a privileged person in America, I wonder if we do this because  it’s too hard to bear that so many of our global citizens are actually miserable in squalor. The thought makes us uncomfortable. So we look at a child’s smiling face and naiively see what we want. We want those children to be happy.

Refugees are more than just a label of a refugee. They’re more than the beating, persecution, and discrimination  experienced. They’re complex people like all of us, who get angry at seemingly insignificant things, want to be loved, enjoy words of affection, and are seeking a place in the world.

To the refugee clients that I am seeing today, I am reminded to see you. Not only the pain you portray, but the strength and resilience underlying.  Not only the smiles you wear, but the torture that you are living deep inside. Thank you for being my teacher:  on how to tolerate and sit with someone’s pain to allow their natural strengths to emerge.  I am grateful.

And to the Syrian refugees of Za’atari, thank you for allowing me to enter your tents, for trusting me with your stories and hardships, and for continuing to have hope, despite external disasters. Please keep your children in Jordan and do not let them fight as child soldiers. Please see the aide workers as those trying to help you.  And please try to promote peace as possible. The world is trying to see you. We are bearing witness to your pain and struggles, along with your resilience and strength while you teach us critical lessons in humanity and spirit.