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Blog CARECEN25 Teaching English-Learning about immigration

By Patrick Young, Esq CARECEN Program Director May 28, 2008 10:36 AM

This occassional series marks the 25th Anniversay of the The Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN-N.Y.).

In the first installment of these memoirs, I recalled first encountering the refugee community on Long Island in 1980. My experience as young Catholic who had been raised in part by my aunt who was a nun led me try to help people living in my own area who had been forced to flee political and religious persecution in El Salvador and Guatemala. I got involved with a network of young activists, including my future boss Ken Lederer, who were trying to inform Long Islanders about the human rights disaster in those countries which was being paid for by U.S.-taxpayer dollars.

Making speeches and showing films was allright, but I and several others, wanted to reach out to the refugees and provide them with more concrete help. I started to volunteer each week at the Methodist Church in Hempstead, where English as a Second Language (ESL) was being offered to students young and old from Central America.

At the time I was a twenty-two year old college drop-out. My mom had died when I was a teenager and my dad had a permanently disabling stroke while I was in college. I left school to take care of him and my sister and to earn money to support the family. I worked as an assembly line worker and later a forklift driver at Nankee Paint Factory in Farmingdale where I was a member of the Teamster Union.

When I started teaching my first class, I was surprised by how similar my students were to me. They had had their lives disrupted by tragedy and were doing things that had not been in their life plan. Unlike me, they were thousands of miles from home in a place where they were dispised and hunted.

I remember that the students began asking me why I taught them. They first assumed it was a job. I told them that I was unpaid. Then they thought that perhaps it was an internship and that I was preparing to become a teacher. Nope, I wanted to go into law. Then they concluded that I was doing my duty to my church, but I assured them that I was not a Methodist. Finally, learning my life story, one woman spoke up for the class. "You lost your mother as a boy", she said. "Most Americans lead lives that isolate them from death, but you have known suffering and you feel ours."

Perhaps.

We were taught to use the students life experiences as a way to get them to feel comfortable speaking in English. Whenever they spoke of things back in Central America, they always spoke with nostalgia. Every memory had a glow. Sometimes I would remind them that the news of massacres and assassinations in their homelands belied their rosy tales. A couple of students told me that they did not want to talk about the bad aspects of their countries because they came from places where criticizing the way things are can get a person killed.

After a few months of basic conversational English, I began to talk with the students about their rights here in the U.S. I told them about the minimum wage, their right to join a union, and what to do if an employer did not pay them. One student stopped me and demanded to know if I was a communist. I laughed and asked him why he would say that. He replied that in his country the only people who talk about rights are the communists and he was afraid that if he stayed something bad would happen to him.

I also talked to the students about their right to apply for political asylum. The asyum law had been passed just a year earlier, in 1980. It allowed people who had been persecuted to remain in the U.S.

When I talked to my students about asylum, they just laughed. They said that I was naive, and that asylum was not given to people like them. I told them that they were exactly the kind of people asylum was designed for. I later found out just how wrong I was.

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