Two Sisters: Fleeing Two Wars - Part One

Salvadoran sisters Zelda and Rosa del Carmen both fled their country’s wars; twenty years apart. The civil war of the 1980s propelled Zelda to the US in 1989, and the gang war against El Salvador’s people forced Rosa in 2009 to the US border. They both sought asylum in the US. Their reception as asylum seekers has parallels, and both those similarities and differences are instructive.

Rosa del Carmen Ayala and her two boys, Lucas, age 14, and Gilberto, age 12, from El Salvador, walked over the US border from Mexico one September morning in 2009, and were arrested immediately by US Customs and Border Patrol. They were detained at a checkpoint for about twelve hours while CBP checked their identity documents, and listened to their story about fleeing the murderous rage of a criminal gang in their neighborhood in San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital. Rosa, a small woman with curly black hair usually covered by a knitted cap, looks much younger than her 35 years, and is shy. She has a way of ducking her head and looking upward towards those with whom she is speaking, then ducking her head again. The effect is charming. Maybe that was part of the reason that she and the boys were released after only a few hours, and given a notice to appear in court to present their asylum claim.

Almost all asylum seekers who come over the Mexican border are detained for months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in California, Arizona, and Texas. Asylum seekers comprise less than five percent of those who entered the US without documents at the Mexican border in the decade beginning with the Bush administration and continuing under the Obama administration. They come primarily from Central America, but there are some from Mexico, and a few from Africa, South America, and Asia. For Mexicans, the word on the streets of border towns is that they will be detained for more than six months, and then deported, if they try for asylum. Instead, Mexicans make no claim of persecution, and they get expedited deportation at the border when they are caught. Most will try to cross the border again the next day.

Rosa gave the ICE officer her sister Zelda’s address, in central Washington State, and the officer sent notice to the immigration court in Seattle to schedule the first hearing for asylum. Then Rosa and the boys boarded a bus for the trip from Texas to Seattle. Zelda told them to ask for a bus to Wenatchee when they got to Seattle; she would pick them up there. Zelda lived in a small town about 20 miles north of Wenatchee, in the Cascade Range of the Rocky Mountains, with her 20 year old son and his wife and new baby. Rosa had work within two days of her arrival at the fruit packing company where Zelda and her son and daughter in law worked; it was minimum wage and no benefits, but there were bonuses for packing faster. Experienced packers made up to fifty percent more than newcomers. The boys went to school in Wenatchee, taking the bus there and back every day. They were in English classes with other children of fruit packers. The house that Zelda rented was packed with six people and a baby, but Zelda was strapped financially, and Rosa would be helping with the rent.

Zelda is the oldest sibling in the Ayala family. When she was a young woman in the 1980s, her small town three hours from the capital was contested ground during El Salvador’s twelve- year civil war. The government suspected that the town was a guerrilla stronghold, supplying arms and supplies to rebels in the capital, and imposed martial law. Soldiers occupied houses at will, and behaved with impunity. Zelda was raped by several of the soldiers who had taken over her house. The army captain in command declared that Zelda was a guerrilla sympathizer, and when her husband protested, he was murdered, along with their two toddlers. Zelda fled on foot with a friend, Beatriz, whose husband and child had also been murdered; neither of them believed they had anything left to lose.

Very few women victims of war left El Salvador alone as they did; in almost all cases, women stayed in place, despite horrific violence. It was the young men who fled. But Zelda was unusual. She had gone to high school, the first and the last in her family to do so. She was a community educator in her neighborhood’s Christian base community, the movement of the Latin American Catholic Church that electrified poor communities throughout Central and South America with its “preferential option for the poor.” The communities met to study the Bible in the 1970s and 1980s and to seek to apply its message of radical social equality in their lives and in their communities. From the beginning in El Salvador, these groups were suspected by the government of socialist leanings, and their meetings were disrupted, their churches desecrated, and their members jailed. When the civil war broke out, the government engaged in wholesale roundup and murder of those involved with Christian base communities, so as to wipe out any possibility of support for the leftist guerrillas.

Zelda and Beatriz walked at night, moving north, hiding in the day, and made their way through Guatemala’s civil war, and then through Mexico on foot. They had no money, and lived on food and water they found and the kindness of strangers. It took them five months to walk to the US border in Brownsville, Texas. They were arrested and detained in an old YMCA gym that served as a stop-gap detention center for the unprecedented floods of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans fleeing their civil wars. The gym/detention center with its blankets and pillows scattered on the gym floor, its three meals a day, and its high roof were a comfort to the women, and they were reluctant to leave after their hearing with an immigration judge who accepted the applications for asylum that a volunteer legal worker from Houston had filled out for them. Zelda didn’t know what asylum was, but the volunteer, who didn’t speak Spanish well, said it was a way to stay in the US. The judge told them they were free to go until their next hearing on their claim for asylum. He said that the notice about the next hearing would be mailed to them at their addresses.

They had nowhere to go. They had given the immigration officer at the detention center the address of a person in Seattle who they didn’t know; it was a common practice in the makeshift detention centers in those years for refugees to help one another like this: if one had an address, he or she would share it with another, so that they could be released. Without an address to which the next hearing notice could be sent, the system would flounder, detainees would be stacked to the ceilings. If the immigration officers and judges knew that the addresses were shams, they didn’t let on.

Zelda and Beatriz walked the ten miles from the detention center to Brownsville, and found a refugee shelter where they were given a meal, $20 each, and two bus tickets. They chose Seattle since it was the only name of a city they knew, and rode in what seemed to them deep comfort for the six days it took to arrive at the Greyhound station in Seattle. They stayed in a downtown women’s shelter for a few days, long enough to hear about farm work in the Yakima Valley, picking apples, and got two more bus tickets to Yakima. It took less than a day for them to find a farm labor contractor and to start picking apples that September in 1989. They slept in a worker’s camp and used their daily pay to buy food from a woman who cooked for migrants.

Zelda didn’t hold out much hope that she would win asylum in the US. She had heard that a tiny percentage of Salvadorans fleeing the war since the early 1980s got asylum. But she wasn’t tempted to avoid the immigration court, either; she was determined to make her stand and speak out against what was happening there. So she wrote the court with her new address, a migrant workers’ program office in Sunnyside, outside of Yakima. She had asked one of the workers at the program office for a description of what asylum meant, and this is what he gave her:

Asylum is legal protection against deportation. It is the status sought by non-US citizens who enter the U.S., either legally or illegally, asking for refuge based on claims of persecution or fear of persecution in their home country.

In a couple of months, the apple picking season ended. Beatriz left the migrant camp and moved in with a labor contractor and his four children; she was to receive pay for taking care of the children and the house. The contractor offered to let Zelda sleep in the living room for rent, but Zelda declined. The camp was closing up for the winter, but she didn’t like the man; she suspected he would sleep with Beatriz and consider that it was payment enough for her labor. She heard that there was a company north of Yakima in the small town of Wenatchee that was looking for fruit packers to work through the winter. The company provided barrack housing to workers who needed it. She thought she’d work there until her asylum hearing. She wasn’t sure what would happen if she won asylum, but she imagined that her life would open up with possibilities, with perhaps even a chance at a good job as a social worker for migrants.

To be continued...

Mattress in the Courtroom: The Muddy Path to Court

On a fresh, cool early morning, we left the capital, Lusaka, in a big USAID SUV with a driver and the Mission’s democracy officer, a Zambian attorney, to see how the court system in a small town operates. As we drove away from the hotel, the government buildings with their tended grounds, the shopping mall, the big old trees and the neatly stucco-walled compounds of upper- and middle -class housing complexes gave way to dozens of one-story storefronts lining the road, with litter blowing on the bare packed red earth. There were no trees. Women with lengths of brightly-patterned cloth wrapped around them for skirts carried large flat round baskets of fruit or vegetables on their heads, and men pushed wooden gurneys loaded with enormous burlap bags of produce or grain. Along the railroad tracks, people spread cloths on the red muddy ground on which to display all kinds of goods: clothes, cell phones, shoes, bars of soap, CDs and CD players, coat hangers, baskets of straw and plastic containers. There were women cooking over open fires, offering hot food for sale.

In less than an hour, we came to Kafue (ka-few-ee), and turned off the main road where a white metal sign announced “Kafue Subordinate Court”. We drove, very slowly, over a deeply rutted road, and parked on marshy land in front of three small white stucco buildings – the courtroom, the jail, and the court offices. There were no other cars in sight. People walk here – the state of the roads demand it, among many other reasons.

We picked our way over the wet ground, stepping a small stream on the way to the court administration building, where the chief judge awaited us. His office held statute books from 1995; he had never received any supplements. When he needs to know if the law has changed in the last 14 years, he calls lawyer friends in Lusaka who can help him. His court mainly hears criminal cases, primarily rape and incest, with some robbery and theft.

Once a week, he hears civil cases: debts, inheritance, and defamation. He showed us the record of appeal from the local (customary law) court decision that he was deciding that day: it was handwritten by the local court judge and held that the divorced woman in the case could not share in the property from the marriage because she had not worked outside the home. It’s a wrong decision, the judge said; we had a Supreme Court case years ago that said women are entitled to half of all property acquired during the marriage, but the local court judges don’t know it. I try to train them, but there are so many other things to take care of. He had a kind face and a gentle manner; he was humble too, about his role deciding the fate of thousands of people every year. I would have wanted him to judge me, were I in the dock in Zambia.

After we met with the chief judge, we walked to another building, the courtroom, to see a trial in progress. There was a double-size foam mattress in the very middle of the courtroom, on the floor. It was covered with a tattered, torn, and very dirty sheet, and a big blue carpet was heaped on it. There were three prisoners in the dock, the judge at the bench, and a police prosecutor at the counsel table. There are no state prosecutors for local and subordinate courts, which hear at least 95% of the country’s criminal cases. People were seated on the benches for the public; we quietly walked in and took seats at the back. Of course, we stood out, and the whole room, including the judge, stopped and looked at us before the judge continued.

The accused, two women and a man, were charged with stealing the mattress, the carpet, and some documents from a house. The man was in jail, but the women were out on bail. There were no bailiffs in sight, no handcuffs, no shackles. The accused were not represented by counsel, which is the case in nearly all criminal cases here. The judge asked if the accused were ready to go forward in their own defense; no, the prisoner said; the case was continued until March 25. He’ll stay in jail for another week, until then.

There’s so many problems in administration of justice in Zambia that donors (or as we say, “international cooperation”) have stayed away in droves from it, mostly because the leaders themselves don’t seem to want change or think it’s possible. Everyone in the justice system here is aware of the grave deficiencies but throw up their hands about leading for change.

So I wasn’t prepared for this courtroom trial. I thought I’d see grave miscarriages of justice, and put one more stroke down in my notebook against Zambian judges and police, with notes about police brutality, forced confessions, overcrowded court systems, untrained and unprofessional judges, lengthy pre-trial detentions, unconscionable delays, and on and on. Yes, all that may be true, but I didn’t see it here. The continuance was for a short time; the proceedings were translated into the local language, Nanja; the judge read the accused their rights; and the evidence was hauled into court. There was no sense, at least to me, of us-versus-them, we the good people, you the despised prisoner. It did seem to be a judgment of peers, a gathering of the people. At least what I saw that day fits with the traditional goal of justice here – to restore harmonious relationships, not to break them beyond repair. After the judge left the courtroom, the prisoner did too. He walked on his own back to the jail, tailed by a policeman.

Home Alone: Part Two

When the agent handcuffed Marta, she said, “Please help me! My dog is in my trailer by herself. It’s just a few doors down. Please let me go there and give her to someone to take care of her. I’ll go with you, I promise. Just let me take my dog to my neighbor. She’s home alone.” But either the agent didn’t understand Spanish, wasn’t listening, or didn’t care, because he hustled her out the front door and into the van without a word. Marta began speaking more and more loudly, then shouting, until the agent gagged her with a strip of cloth across her mouth. Then she stomped her feet against the floor of the van until he shackled her feet together. After that, she sat still, arms twisted behind her back, tears coursing down her face.

When the van got the detention center, two big guards took Marta out, shuffling with her shackles, to the women’s processing area. The guards stood by while she was freed from the handcuffs, gag, and shackles, in case she tried to hurt someone. But Marta stood still, and asked, “Do any of you speak Spanish?” Some of the inmate processing staff did speak Spanish, and Marta began speaking urgently. “It’s my dog. She’s in my trailer alone. I have to call someone to come and take her. Can I use a phone now?” All in good time, one of the processors said, first you have to be checked in. After that, there will be no phone calls until tomorrow. What if everyone wanted to make a phone call tonight? The whole system would be thrown out of whack. Marta started to protest, but saw one of the guards shake the handcuffs at her. After that, she followed all orders, crying silently. It took six hours, until four in the morning, for the “processing.” She was led to a bunk in a large room with dozens of women sleeping in double stacked rows, and fell into bed exhausted.

Guards called all the women out of bed at 6 a.m. With breakfast and shower, and many hours sitting on her bunk with nowhere to go, it was 11 a.m. before a guard led her into a room where Marta met with a harassed-looking man who said he was her deportation officer. He began by asking her for her full name and place of birth, but she interrupted. “Please listen,” she said, “I have an emergency. My dog has been locked up in my trailer since 6 o’clock last night, without getting out, and without food, and her water will be long gone by now. Will you let me call my sister now so she can go get her?” The officer looked at her blankly for a moment, then pushed a phone to her. “Dial 9 for an outside line,” he said. Marta dialed. When her sister answered, Marta said, “I’m in immigration detention, Rocio. They took me last night. Jennifer has been home alone all this time. Can you go over there now and take her home with you?” Rocio had many questions, but Marta said, “I’ll call you later with details. Just get Jennifer. You still have the key, right?” Rocio promised to get her.

Only later, after Marta had been released on bond from detention, did she learn what happened to Jennifer. Rocio had been in eastern Washington visiting her daughter at Washington State University when Marta called. Rocio called her son to go get the key and get Jennifer, but her son didn’t answer his cell phone until that evening. Meanwhile, Rocio left Pullman, and drove straight for six hours, but didn’t arrive until after 9 p.m. She grabbed the key to Marta’s trailer, drove the 15 miles from her house to Marta’s, and finally liberated Jennifer at 10:30 that night, more than 28 hours after Jennifer had been left alone. She took Jennifer home with her that night.

The next day, at 9 a.m. when the bond window opened, Rocio went to detention and paid Marta’s $7500 bond. By 3 p.m., Marta was released, and Rocio picked her up. “Jennifer’s fine,” Rocio said as soon as she saw her sister. “She’s with Tyler.” When Marta and Jennifer were reunited that day, even Tyler, Marta’s stoic nephew, was moved to tears.

Rocio had petitioned for Marta’s legal residence many years before, and the visa was now available. She was eligible to get her permanent residence, and she did get it within a year of being arrested for being in the country undocumented. She and Rocio hired an immigration attorney to handle the case, and represent Marta in deportation proceedings, to terminate the process. She was one of the few lucky ones. She had been in the US before 2001, when Congress decreed that those whose family members petitioned for them before May 2001 could get their residence. Residence however, would only be possible when the long wait for the visa – from three to 18 years, depending on the country and family relationship -- was over. No one who entered the US undocumented after that time could get residence based on a family petition, not even spouses of US citizens.

What Marta could never understand was why the officers had arrested her. It was a huge waste of taxpayer money, when she was not a criminal and posed no threat to anyone. She paid taxes, and offered a good service to the community with her tailoring business. She had a permanent residence visa immediately available to her. What a waste! And what cruelty! But two things it had done for her, she told Jennifer. The arrest made her decide to make friends for herself and Jennifer with her neighbors, give two of them keys to her trailer, and make sure that she had their phone numbers with her always. And the second thing? It politicized her. She took Jennifer to every single protest march in Seattle and Tacoma that she could find against inhumane immigration laws and practices. Jennifer always wore the sign: “ICE left me home alone. Bark out against injustice!”

Home Alone: Part One

Marta loved to design clothes and she loved to sew them. She taught herself, using scraps of fabric to make clothes for dolls, and later made clothes for herself and for her mother and sisters. She filled notebooks with her designs, but the family couldn’t afford the fine fabrics she craved. She made do with coarse materials, but the family was still by far the best dressed in their lower middle class neighborhood. When she was fifteen in 1965, she begged her parents to send her to Tegucigalpa, Honduras’s capital, so she could apprentice with a dressmaker and designer known throughout the country for dressing for the elite and wealthy. Her father was a tailor in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second largest city, and while he wanted to make Marta happy, he doubted that she could get into the great man’s workshop. He was touched by her brave spirit though, and so he took her to the capital on the bus, with her notebooks and a trunk full of her designs, and sat in the waiting room while Marta asked for a meeting with Mr. Alvarez, the famous designer. She got the interview that very day, and as her father later said in confidence to her mother, it wasn’t because of her looks either. It must have been talent and determination, since Marta was the plainest in the family, and had little time for social graces.

Marta stayed in the capital and worked for the designer for almost a year, learning to cut fabric. She would have gone on in her apprenticeship, but her father died suddenly, and she had to return to San Pedro Sula to help her mother run the tailor shop. Her sisters were still in high school, and had no interest in tailoring. Her mother did the business side, and Marta made the clothes: suits and shirts for men, as her father had done for thirty years. She hired a young man to do the measuring and fitting since it was completely unacceptable for a woman to measure a man, and she began making clothes for women too. Her sisters grew up and married, and Marta and her mother kept the shop going. It wasn’t the life of high fashion that Marta had dreamed of, but it did allow her artistic scope, particularly when her customers gave her a free hand. The business did well until the early 1990s when rival criminal gangs warred over who owned San Pedro Sula, and the middle class customers who had been loyal to Tito’s Tailoring for generations fled the city for safer suburbs, or the capital, or the US.

One of Marta’s sisters, Rocio, had gone to the US on a visitor’s visa, and then met and married an American. When she became a citizen in 1995, she offered to bring her mother to the US as a resident, but Marta’s mother was hesitant to leave Marta. Under US visa laws, permanent residence is immediate for parents of US citizens, but brothers and sisters of US citizens have to wait in line. The line might take years; the US Congress determines the number of visas available every year, and there are never enough for all those who want them. The tailoring business had fallen away to nearly nothing by 1995, and their old neighborhood was now ugly with burnt-out buildings and ankle-deep trash. It was dangerous to go out even during the day. Marta urged her mother to go to the States, and told her that she herself would get a visitor’s visa and come to visit. Marta’s mother made her promise that she would move from the neighborhood and live with a sister and her family in the capital, where she would be safer and could try to get work. Then when Rocio’s visa petition for Marta became available, Marta could get her permanent resident card and come to the US.

After her mother left, Marta sold the sewing machines for what little she could, and she did try to live with her sister, her sister’s husband, and their four children in their small apartment in the capital. But she felt that she was in the way, and she could not find a job, no matter how many tailoring shops she visited to show her portfolio. She knew what they said when she left each shop: she was too old. She had thought it herself when she had her own business; she wanted young people who she could train in the way she wanted, not those who already had their ways set.

She applied for a US visitor’s visa twice, and was turned down each time. Each visa appointment cost $50 US dollars, money she had to borrow from her sister. She was 45 years old and felt that she had come to the end of her options in Honduras. She borrowed money from another sister, and flew to Tijuana, Mexico. There she found a coyote, a smuggler of human beings, and paid to be taken across the border as part of a group of young men and a few young women. She was older by 20 years than the oldest in the group, and she struggled to keep up. She made it to San Diego, and she got a bus to Seattle where her sister and mother lived. She lived in her sister’s mother-in-law apartment with her mother, and got a job in the clothing alterations department in a big department store in downtown Seattle. After a few years, she had saved enough money to open a little alterations shop of her own in Burien, a town south of Seattle where many Hispanic people lived, and she designed and sewed dresses for recent immigrants for weddings and other special occasions.

Her mother died in 2001, and her sister was divorced shortly afterwards. Her sister had to sell the house, and Marta went out on her own to look for a place to live. She found a trailer park in Burien that she liked, and bought her own trailer to set on her rented plot. She was surprised by the sense of freedom she felt, living alone for the first time in her life. She thought she might be lonely, and she considered what she would do if she did. She could join a church, or try one of the new internet dating services, or join a singles group. But she wasn’t lonely. She worked most days from 9-7 p.m., except Sundays when she worked in her tiny garden, cooked for the week, cleaned, did her errands, and read fashion magazines for new ideas.

She didn’t know most of her neighbors, except for a friendly Mexican family that invited her to their many gatherings. Their trailer was no larger than hers, but they had three children and various other family that stayed for periods of time. She turned them down most of the time, but went for an hour or so sometimes, bringing her special dish, pan de coco – coconut bread rolls, or sometimes fried sweet plantains with sour cream. One night, one of the children brought home a puppy, of some indeterminate mixed heritage that he had found walking alone along a main road, but his parents refused to let him keep it. Marta surprised herself and them by saying that she would take it. She had never had a dog in her life, or ever thought she wanted one.

The first few weeks were confusing, both for Marta and the puppy, but they both persevered by some grace, and by the time three months had gone by, they were inseparable. She named the puppy Jennifer, an American name she had heard and liked, and took her to the shop every day. Jennifer didn’t shed hair, which was fortunate, and she was of a peaceful and friendly disposition. Customers mostly liked her, and Jennifer knew how to stay out of the way if someone didn’t like dogs. Marta started taking long walks with Jennifer at midday, which was good for both of them, and going to a dog park on the weekends so Jennifer could play with other dogs. By the time six months had gone by and Jennifer was no longer a puppy, Marta could not imagine life without her. Jennifer slept at Marta’s feet, ate when Marta ate, and learned to chase balls and return them for treats, which made Marta laugh.

A year after Jennifer came to live with her, Marta went one summer evening to the Mexican family’s trailer for a birthday party for one of the children. She left Jennifer at home since she thought she was better off away from the noise and confusion of the party, with so many people in such a small space. Right before Marta got up to leave the party, four agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement knocked on the door, pushed it open, and arrested every one of the adults, including Marta, after demanding that everyone show them “papers.” No one had papers to show, and they were all handcuffed with their hands behind their backs, put into a van, and after a two hours’ wait while the agents loaded more handcuffed people into the van, driven to the immigration detention center in Tacoma. The agents took the children to a neighbor’s trailer, a neighbor that the family didn’t know well, but who said they’d take them when ICE asked.

To be continued...

Ed In Chile: Part Two

It did not occur to Ed to protest, or to file a lawsuit, or to build a movement of students to lobby for him. That would be distasteful to him. Lilia had the skills to do it for Ed, but he would not ask her or allow her to fight for him. He knew, in a vague way, that he was out of step with the rest of the department, with the rest of the university, but he had never spent time thinking about it. The university wasn’t the place for him anymore. He strongly doubted that there was a place for him in Chile.

At first Lilia couldn’t believe that Ed was just going to leave his job, walk away from his salary, and reduce his pension to a pittance. She urged him to at least try to do what Sergio wanted him to do, and she pledged to find people to help Ed develop research ideas that would appeal to corporate funders. She herself would help him rewrite his curriculum to come up to Ministry guidelines. She could not understand Ed’s point that he would never be happy prostituting his talent and skills, as he labeled it, in hope of keeping his job. She told him that he could still do his own research on the side, and teach first-year university students who weren’t yet locked into state-mandated practical curriculum.

But Ed did walk away, and he didn’t have another job. His children were disapproving, Lilia was angry, and his wife’s family took to whispering about the state of his mental health. He had never given himself time to develop friendships, so he had no one to talk with. He spent the first months after he cleaned out his office going twice a day to the pool in his condo building. It had been thirty-plus years since he had swum at all, and he was stiff and awkward in the water. But slowly, slowly he began to be more comfortable and to move more easily. While he was swimming he didn’t think about anything. The pool was on the 25th floor of the building; it was surrounded on three sides by glass walls, and the high roof had large skylights. In a month he was swimming a mile during each workout, and he had lost 20 pounds.

When he wasn’t swimming, he lay in a deck chair by the side of the pool and watched clouds. Sometimes he re-read the science fiction novels he’d loved as a boy and as a young man, before he went to graduate school and his life was too busy to read anything but the scientific literature on yeast. The science fiction comforted him. Reading them, those early sci-fi novels of the 1950s and 60s, where science solved all problems and the future was lustrous, he forgot the last 40 years of his life. Perhaps because of this, it seemed natural that he would return to Seattle. After two months, he was sure of it. Lilia was still angry and the children didn’t need him. Lilia spent at least half her time in Europe anyway. He would live with his parents and share the burden of their care with Nancy, his sister. She had been taking care of them alone for the last five or so years, as their strength failed. He could be useful again.

Besides, Chile wasn’t his country. Ed thought back over the last 30 years and told himself that it had never been his country. He had Lilia and the kids, and his job in Chile, but now all that was over. His true country had been his family and his work. He knew nothing about the politics, and little about the country’s history. The kids could visit him when they wanted to; Lilia, too, if she ever wanted to. He was going home. When he told Lilia that he was going, she predicted he’d be back in months. She reminded him that he always found his parents difficult to be around for more than a few days. But she didn’t beg him to stay. Ed was mildly surprised at that, at how lightly their 30 years together could float away, at how they could let it do that.

When Ed called Nancy to tell her he was coming home, he didn’t say it was for good. He told her he had retired early and could spend time now helping out with their parents. Nancy said he was welcome, of course. It would be good for their parents to have Ed around for company. They now had a housekeeper who also cooked and did personal care, but errands, groceries, house maintenance, arranging for doctors’ visits and outings, and general oversight were Nancy’s purview. She would be glad to share these tasks with Ed. She had two teenagers and a husband, and worked full time as a gardener at the University of Washington.

Ed packed light. He was surprised at that too, that he needed to take so little with him. He found his goodbyes easy to do; his children, his wife’s family, the doorman of their condo building, a couple of his former colleagues, a few of his students who had kept in touch over the years. There wasn’t anyone else. He said that he was going to spend some time with his parents and sister, help out for a while. Lilia took him to the airport, and their goodbyes were short. On the long flight, as he tried to sleep in his tiny seat – Ed was a big man -- he had a sudden memory of his first plane ride to Chile, when he was coming to meet Lilia’s family, interview at the university, find an apartment, and make wedding plans. He was 26, with a new doctorate in biology, a swimmer’s strength and physique, and a loving fiancée waiting for him when he landed.

He had been sitting next to a Chilean, a slight, grey man in his 60s who spoke English well. The Chilean, Julio, said he was going home to live after 43 years in Seattle. He emphasized the 43 years as if he himself could hardly believe how much time it had been. He had worked for a big parking garage company as a bookkeeper for most of those years. He was a US citizen, had Social Security and a pension, and had already bought a house, as yet unseen, in the small town 50 miles north of Santiago where he had grown up. He said he had no family left there, but friends from his youth still lived in the town. He thought he’d finally have time to write poetry. He loved to read poetry, he said, but had never had time to write while he was working.

Ed asked about his wife and children, and he remembered the look on Julio’s face: a grimace. Julio said he was divorced and his children grown and out on their own. They would be staying in the States, he said. Ed asked if he would miss the States. Julio paused a long time, and then said, “I don’t know what I miss. I don’t think I can find what I’m missing. It’s not in the States, and not in Chile. Maybe I lost my place.”

Julio said no more about himself, and began asking Ed about his reasons for traveling to Chile. Ed talked of Lilia, his job prospects, and his happiness. He was normally more reserved, but he was brimming with joy and was delighted to share it. He said goodbye to Julio and went out to meet Lilia and all her family who were standing at the gate with welcome posters and flowers for him. Lilia was nearly jumping in her excitement to see him. The happy group swept him up with them, and he didn’t see Julio again until they were standing at the baggage claim carousel. Julio was by himself. He caught Ed’s eye, and gave him a small wave. Julio mouthed something before he turned back to the carousel to look for his baggage, but Ed could not tell what he said. He lost sight of him after that.

When the plane landed in Seattle, Ed walked alone to the baggage claim.

Ed In Chile: Part One

Ed grew up in Seattle in the 1950s, the son of a Boeing aerospace engineer and a mother who was passionate about gardening. He loved to swim, play the accordion, and conduct “science” experiments in the backyard, most of which involved something that might blow up if handled wrong. He invited his grade school friends to his parents’ basement to watch what liquid nitrogen did to common household items (it exploded them), and he spent hours in the summer collecting varieties of plants and insects and looking at them under a microscope. He was on the swim team in high school, and entered and placed highly in science fairs every year. When it was time to go to college, he chose a local private school with a strong biology program as well as an excellent swim team, and did well. He went to the University of California at Berkeley for his master’s degree and doctorate in biology, and graduated in 1972 with more than a dozen job offers both in business and academia. But staying in the US was not even on the table.

In his second to last year at Berkeley, he met Lilia, a doctoral student in inorganic biology from Chile. He was 24 and deeply in love; she spoke English with a charming accent and was beautiful with her long dark hair and graceful movements. She was his most serious relationship ever, and there was no question in his mind: he would follow her home to Chile. She didn’t want to stay in the States; she had a job waiting for her as a full professor in the biology department at a Santiago university. It was the most exciting city in the world, she told Ed; besides, she was from Santiago and all her family were there. She said he could easily land a job in at the university, teaching graduate students. She was right. He got an assistant professor job before they landed in Santiago, and had six months of intensive language study before his first class. They had a Catholic wedding, and got an apartment near the university in a lively neighborhood where musicians and artists lived and worked.

It was exhilarating to be in Santiago. Lilia’s family was welcoming, and his students were engaged and dedicated. The scientific community worldwide published in English, and English was the language of international conferences or from his international colleagues. Ed did not feel isolated from the latest discoveries in his field. The university encouraged his field work and experiments, and gave him time, resources, and space to devote to them. He published extensively in biology journals.

Ed and Lilia’s first child arrived in 1976, and their next in 1980. They moved to a larger apartment, and had live-in nannies and maids. They loved their children, and spent what time they had, apart from their work, with them. But it was clear that their passion was their work. Lilia was a highly-regarded teacher, and even more in demand as an international conference speaker. She published articles frequently in international biology journals, and had steady stream of income from consulting work with manufacturing companies and governments regarding the environmental effects of manufacturing by-products. She traveled extensively throughout the world.

Ed’s career was quieter. He loved the curiosity and intelligence of his students, and got inspiration from working with them on research projects. He sometimes was invited to speak at international conferences, but he was content to be home with the children while Lilia traveled, and to focus on his laboratory at the university, and his students. He delighted in her success, and didn’t feel that it took away from his. He took the long trip to Seattle to visit his parents and sisters once every summer for a month or so, and took the children. Lilia sometimes came for a few days or a week, too. In this way, the years went by.

Ed mostly didn’t miss living in Seattle or the States. His world was his family and his students and his research. He told himself that he could live anywhere, as long as he had Lilia and the kids, and his work. The wild swings of the Chilean economy in the 1970s leveled out in the 1980s and 1990s, and his and Lilia’s salaries continued to increase. He was happy, and even happier when he could go with some of his doctoral students to his mountain cabin in Cerro Arenas, a few hours away from Santiago, and conduct yeast experiments.

One day in 2000, when Ed was in his fifties and the children were grown, Sergio,

his university department head, met with him regarding his research and his teaching. It’s a new day for us, Sergio said, what with the recession and cutbacks in our government funding, we don’t have the money we used to have for theoretical research. We are going to have to show some practical application for your research if we want to keep getting it funded. I’ve been under a lot of pressure from the university president, he said, and I’ve been shielding you from it for a couple of years now because students like you and your classes are popular.

Sergio said Ed needed to choose research that had immediate practical application, publish his research results much more than he had been, and change his curriculum to focus on the Science Ministry’s new guidelines for master’s degree students in biology. Ed had seen the guidelines, and had dismissed them as simplistic and so directed to practical applications that the underlying science was given very short shrift.

Sergio gave Ed three months to “turn things around” as he called it. And then what? Ed said. What if I don’t, or can’t? Let’s talk about that in three months, Sergio said. He turned to his computer and started reading email. Ed was still sitting in front of Sergio’s desk, staring at his intriguing sculpture of the periodic table. It was the work of a well-known Chilean sculptor, given to Sergio by the CEO of one of the country’s large oil companies. The company had also given the university a large grant to work on improved chemical means of purifying crude oil.

“That’s all, Ed,” Sergio said. “Let me know if you need anything from me as you go through this.” Ed got up and left the office. He knew he couldn’t do what Sergio wanted, and he knew that Sergio knew it too. His work was over here, and it was over far sooner than Ed wanted it to be. His work. He had been naïve to think that his delighted playing with experiments, his sharing with students, his enthusiasm for the pure job of doing science, could last in the new Chile, the international economic powerhouse Chile. Yes, he had a state-protected job until he was 65, but he wouldn’t be teaching. Sergio would hire someone else who could bring in grant money, and Ed would lose his lab and his students. Sergio would say that he was looking for a position for Ed, but there wouldn’t be one; he would be counting on Ed just to leave.

To be continued...

We Are Citizens, Aren't We?

Annie had been in the US since she was a year old and never thought about her immigration status. Her parents had taken care of all that. If anyone asked her, she said that she and her family were all citizens. They had all – her parents, her sisters and brother, and she – came to the US right after the Second World War, from New Zealand, where her parents and older sisters landed as refugees from Hungary during the war. They were the lucky ones; the most of the rest of their families died in concentration camps. But when she was growing up in southern California, she didn’t feel lucky. Her father died before she was four, and her mother remarried a man with an evil temper. Her sisters fled home as soon as they could, and Annie and her brother Stephen endured beatings with their heads down, trying to be invisible.

When she was sixteen, had left school, and was ready to get a job in the ballpoint pen factory where her mother worked, she went to the Social Security office for her Social Security number. She hadn’t brought any documents with her since she didn’t know she needed them. When it was her turn to approach the window, the clerk laughed and called out to her fellow workers to get a load of this girl who thought she could get a number without any proof of identity. Annie hurried out of the office, her face red with shame. She asked her mother for documents that night, and was surprised when her mother sat down to talk with her. Her mother never had time to talk, what with her work at the factory and housework, and trying to keep the children out of her husband’s sight. She gave Annie a card with Annie’s picture as a baby pasted on it, and Annie’s name, with the words “Lawful Permanent Resident” printed at the top of the card.

“I thought we were citizens,” Annie said. “Aren’t we?” Her mother’s hands shook as she tied up the old paper folder with the rest of the family’s immigration documents. “We never did anything about it,” she said. “After your father died, I didn’t know how to go about it, and your stepfather, well….he didn’t want me to spend any money or time on paperwork. Just don’t lose that paper, Annie. He won’t like it. It’s all we have to show that you are legal here.”

Annie got her social security number and started work, but didn’t stay long on the assembly line. She was bright and quick, and the manager promoted her to front office secretary. She was designing advertising for the company by the time she was 18. She lived at home and gave her earnings to her mother; if she hadn’t done so, her stepfather would not have been happy. Both Annie and her mother knew what that would mean. And the extra money meant that Annie’s brother could finish high school without having to drop out to work full-tine.

Annie made friends, girls who worked in the shops and small companies in Santa Monica’s business district, and they often lay on the beach, swam sometimes, and talked and drank cokes until it was time to go home to their housework and dinners. Annie left her purse on the beach blanket when she swam; one day her purse was stolen, and with it, her permanent resident card. She didn’t tell her mother, since she saw no need to worry her. And besides, she already had her social security number. Her mother died of cancer when Annie was 19; right after the funeral, Annie and Stephen packed their few clothes and fled their stepfather’s house. Stephen lived with a high school friend’s family, and Annie rented an apartment near the beach. She made enough money to provide the basics for herself and Stephen, but it was nearly half of what the men in the ad department made. When she asked her boss to increase her pay to equal that of her peers, he laughed out loud. Women don’t make that kind of money, he said.

Annie quit the job immediately. She later marveled at her own gumption, when she was older and more cautious. She opened her own graphic design company the next day, working from home, going in person to many of Santa Monica’s retail shops to promote her ad design services. She didn’t make enough for her rent and food, and for Stephen’s clothes and pocket money, in the first few months, so she worked at night as a waitress in a 24-hour pancake house. But within six months, she had enough money to rent an office and hire a secretary. In a year, she hired another designer, then a salesman. In two years, she was able to pay for Stephen’s college and buy a house of her own. She was 23 years old and the head of her own successful advertising firm.

Stephen graduated from college and came to work in the firm. Annie loved sharing the firm with him; she could ease up a bit, take some time for herself, maybe meet someone and get married. She got back in touch with high school friends, and went to the newly-fashionable square and contra dances and to the beach again. She joined a Christian church and helped with the singles ministry, arranging dances and hiking outings. She met Gary on a hike in the Agoura Hills. He was outgoing, talkative, and confident, not exactly good looking, but alert and quick enough to make up for it. She didn’t know what he saw in her, and was flattered by his interest. No one had ever been interested in her before. He was a salesman for a car parts company, a few years older than she.

After they married and he came to live in her house, he pressed her to sell out her interest in the firm to her brother, and to use the money to open a car parts company with him. She was not interested in car parts, but she wanted to please her husband. They opened the company, with plans to market directly to car manufacturers, but instead of making money, they lost it. There was a major recession in the early 1980s, and American car makers sharply cut back production. They lost her house to foreclosure, and pawned her jewelry for enough money to rent an apartment. She took a job as a teller in a bank, and Gary went back to selling car parts. They were frosty with each other; she didn’t like to blame him, but she was bitter about selling her firm. She tried to hide the extent of their money troubles from her brother, and she vowed she would not ask Stephen for money or ask for a job at the firm. She was touchy about being the older sister who had everything under control; she was the one who helped Stephen. She didn’t want it to be the other way around.

She and Gary soon fought every day about money. She didn’t want to spend money on anything that wasn’t necessary for keeping themselves and their two little girls, Sonia and Micaela, fed, housed, and clothed, but Gary insisted that he had to look the part of a prosperous salesman if he was to be successful. He needed a late model car, good clothes, and a nice watch. Their bills piled up, and creditor calls came every day. One day as they were screaming at each other, with their two-year-old also screaming in terror at her parents’ fight, she ran out the door to work at the bank, and came back that night with $2000 she had taken from the till. She hoped that he would say that he couldn’t take it, that they would do anything else rather than steal, but he didn’t. He took the money.

Of course the bank discovered the theft, and she was arrested and sentenced to a year in jail. She said later that the separation from her daughters was the hardest thing she ever endured in her life, worse than the beatings at home when she was a child, worse than the imprisonment itself. She served six months, and when she came out, Gary was gone. She never saw him again. The girls were with her brother and his wife, and they cried when Annie took them away with her. She didn’t know where she was going, but she couldn’t stay and face her brother’s pity and her friends’ gossip. She had her old car and $500 in cash from a prisoners’ help fund and she drove north to Seattle, to get as far away as she could. She knew no one there, and that is the way she wanted it.

She stayed in a Salvation Army shelter for a few months with the girls, and found a job selling encyclopedias and magazines door to door. She was always an excellent saleswoman, and had soon had enough to rent an apartment just north of the city, where she heard the schools were best. She found a job selling cemetery lots, then a better job selling jewelry in “house parties”. She moved on to setting up craft fairs in small towns, and then onto the internet in the early 2000s, where she sold jewelry, perfume, craft supplies, and framed oil paintings. She bought a house in a quiet suburb, and sent the girls to college. She found a lawyer and divorced Gary, and married again at age 45. With her husband Craig, she had another daughter, Rachel, at age 46, and became a grandmother at 50 to Sonia’s first child. Craig had a small handyman business, and with Annie’s income they had enough. They took time to travel with Rachel and developed passions for bridge and for dancing.

By the time Rachel went away to college, when Annie was 64 and thinking of retiring, she knew she had to do something about her immigration status. She had no way of proving she was in the country legally, no way to register for Social Security. Money would be very tight when she started to wind down her business. Craig was already retired, at age 69, and had developed some worrisome heart problems; Annie wanted to spend more time with him, take him to his doctor appointments, and take care of him. She spent a day on the internet researching immigration lawyers, reading their websites and checking lawyer rating listings. She found one she liked, and made an appointment. She was afraid of what she might learn; Craig went with her to the appointment for moral support.

The lawyer asked questions, and learned how Annie entered the country, and about the bank embezzlement. She recommended a request for Annie’s complete immigration records and the criminal records; it would take about six months or more for the immigration records. Annie agreed with the strategy and the lawyer made the requests. Five months later, the lawyer called; the records were in. Annie had entered the country legally and was a permanent resident, and now she had proof. But the crime made her deportable; if she applied to renew her permanent resident card, she would be placed in deportation proceedings. She might be sent back to New Zealand, where she knew no one, unless she won a case for cancellation of deportation in court.

But there is an option, the lawyer said. It may lead to deportation proceedings, but you will have a defense. You can apply now for citizenship; the requirement for citizenship is that you prove good moral character for five years before the date of application for citizenship, and that the crime occurred before November 1990. It is a gamble, with the risk that the immigration service will not apply the law correctly and put you in deportation proceedings anyway. If that happens, we will go to court to require the judge to give you your citizenship. It’s the only way for you to prove your legal status. It will mean additional legal fees if that happens. Do you want to go forward?

Annie took a week to think about it. What if the lawyer was wrong and there was no relief from deportation? If the law was clear that she was eligible for citizenship, why would the immigration service put her into deportation proceedings? If they did, would the judge agree with the lawyer? If the immigration service could find that she wasn’t eligible, wouldn’t the judge find the same thing? She prayed. She relived her shame about committing the theft. She had told no one about it except Craig, not even her daughters. Her brother and his wife never had revealed it to anyone, and she had dropped all of her southern California connections. If she did not get her citizenship, and had to fight for it in court, her daughters would have to know. Her friends and her church community would know. She thought that it wasn’t worth the huge risk, and that she would just live without Social Security. She had never left the country, and never would, to avoid the probability of arrest at the airport when she returned.

Craig told her, “I know about the crime, and I still love you. I think girls will too. And any friends who don’t love you once they know aren’t worth having anyway.” It did help to know that, and to have his support, but it was she herself who could not forgive herself. Then Craig said, “Annie, we need your Social Security. Do it for us.” She called the lawyer and went forward with her citizenship application. Three months later she got notice of her citizenship interview at the immigration service. In preparation, the lawyer had her prepare a declaration about her life, and her remorse about the crime. Her brother wrote a moving letter about what a fine person she was, the hardship she had endured, and the aberration that the crime had been. She told her daughters about the crime; not one turned away from her. They each wrote letters of support for her. Her prayer circle at church pledged to pay for the immigration examiner who would hear her case, and to meet together to pray at the time she would have her interview.

Annie studied the one hundred citizenship questions and memorized the answers. Name one reason the colonists came to the US, she read. The study guide gave five, and she memorized them all: Freedom. Political liberty. Religious freedom. Economic opportunity. Escape persecution. She was studying for her freedom; she felt, freedom from shame and fear.

On the day of the citizenship appointment, she woke with fear that settled in her stomach. She couldn’t eat. Craig reminded her that the prayer circle would be praying during the entire interview, and that strengthened her enough to get dressed and into the car. Craig drove, and they got to the immigration building an hour before their appointment. The lawyer came. Craig held Annie’s hand. He couldn’t go with her into the interview, and she nearly cried as she and the lawyer walked from the waiting room into the examination room.

The examiner was a harassed and weary-looking woman of about Annie’s age; she said her name was Officer Taylor, and told Annie not to sit down but to raise her right hand and swear to tell the truth. Annie swore. Officer Taylor read aloud some of the questions on the application, and Annie answered. Have you ever been a prostitute? Have you ever failed to pay federal or state taxes? Have you been a member of the Communist Party? Have you ever lied to obtain an immigration benefit? Have you ever been arrested? Yes, Annie said, I have. Tell me what happened, Officer Taylor said.

The lawyer had told Annie to state the facts, and she did. “I took money from a bank while I was employed there, in 1985. I went to jail for it. I was in jail for six months.” The lawyer handed Officer Taylor a packet of documents, with the certified court records, and the letters of support, along with Annie’s declaration of the facts. Officer Taylor took them without comment, and then asked Annie seven of the civics questions. Annie got all of them right. Annie then read a sentence in English, and wrote a sentence in English. “You passed the civics and English test,” Officer Taylor said. “If you’ve ever been arrested I can’t approve your application until a supervisor signs off on it. We’ll let you know. That’s all for today.” How long will it take to let me know, Annie asked. As long as it takes, Officer Taylor said.

In the waiting room, Annie asked the lawyer, “What do you think?” The lawyer said Annie had to wait; Officer Taylor was fair and experienced. In a month or two, Annie would get the decision. Annie waited a month with increasing fear; she was sure that the longer the immigration service took to decide on her case, the greater the likelihood that her application would be denied and she would be placed in deportation proceedings. She called the lawyer, who said that she had not yet received the decision. “See if you can forget about the application, forget that you are waiting,” the lawyer said. “Then when the decision comes, you will think it’s been a short time.” Hah! Annie thought. Forget that everything is at stake, forget that I could be deported and never see my family again? Forget that I might be exiled in a foreign land? I can’t forget! She told Craig that she never should have done this, that it was the second biggest mistake of her life to apply for citizenship. Then, when it was almost a month after her interview, she got a thin envelope in the mail from US Citizenship and Naturalization Service. She asked Craig to open it, and she sat down with her head in her hands, to await the news. He opened the envelope, and was silent for a moment. Then he said, “It is for another appointment….let’s see….it’s for the naturalization ceremony. Annie, you got your citizenship!”

Annie, dressed in her best, went to the ceremony with Craig, her three daughters, her four grandchildren, and the entire prayer circle, in October 2011. They each held US flags, and all of them cried when Annie went up the stairs to the podium to get her citizenship certificate. She was one of 50 new citizens that day, from 27 different countries. When her 6 year old grandson asked her, “Nana, what is citizenship?” she laughed and told him, “Freedom, Tyler, freedom from fear.”

Journey To Dungloe Part Five

The Welcome

When we knocked at the parish house door, the priest let us in at once. In Donegal, wherever we went, everyone was in, had time for us, and was unfailingly welcoming. We’ve come to see if we can find my grandfather in the confirmation records, I said, in about 1903-05. He led us to his office and took several thick ledgers from a cabinet. “’Tis a pity,”he said. The confirmation records only go back to 1913 in Dungloe. He asked for my grandfather’s name. John Thomas O’Donnell, I said. “More’s the pity,” he said. “The O’Donnells are thick on the ground here, and Jack O’Donnell one of the most common names about.” How about Daniel Francis O’Donnell and Emma, his parents, in the 1880s? He scrolled through computerized parish records from the 1880s to the first decade of the 20^th century, and showed us the thousands of O’Donnells listed. It would be impossible to know which of these might have been my family, without more information. “Now, Emma,” he said, “that wouldn’t have been a Catholic name then. If she were Protestant, she was unlikely to be from Dungloe in those years.”

I was deeply disappointed. All our success in finding my grandmother’s parents’ lands seemed to pale beside this break in our link to my grandfather’s past. We went back to Main Street and began to walk down from the top of the street, looking at the buildings and shops – O’Donnell Pharmacy, the O’Donnell Building. The stores were mostly closed now, at 7 p.m. We were looking for a pub, and found one – the Town Bar. It looked at least a hundred years old, with its black and white painted sign in the lettering of the 1880s; the door was open. We could see a long hallway that opened into a room decorated in the style of a turn-of-century pub, with a woodstove and high-legged tables for standing and drinking pints of stout.

We walked in, and a man came out of a room off the hallway to greet us. “Can I help you?” he said. We asked if the pub was open. He said, sorry, the Town Bar wasn’t a bar, and hadn’t been one for many a long year. But come in, and welcome, he said, my mother lives here. This had been his family’s pub for seven generations, until about 50 years ago, when all the children of the house immigrated, to England, the US, and New Zealand. He grew up in England, where his mother had gone to find her fortune; she had returned in her 70s to Dungloe to live in the old house.

No, we won’t come in, pardon our intrusion, we thought it was a pub, we said. No, no come in, he said, we are glad to meet you. So we did; we sat for an hour or more with the Meehan family in their sitting room that looked like it was directly from a Dickens novel, with a view of the sea from the window. Mary, the owner of the house, and her brother Daniel visiting from the US, and Mary’s son Philip and his wife Irene, with their three young children from Glasgow – we felt like we too were family, and very welcome. We told of our search, and they of their emigrant stories. My great-grandmother Mary Toner had the same name as Irene’s grandmother, and they both came from the lands not far from Letterkenny; since Toner is an unusual name, we must be related, we said, and exchanged email addresses to follow up.

How is it that people here have so much time for visiting, and for meeting strangers? Perhaps it is because they are at peace, already arrived at where they want to be. The children, 12 and under, served us tea and biscuits, cheerfully, and listened with interest to the conversation. This family was so happy, so secure in each others’ love; it seemed to me, that it spilled out to all around them. They hadn’t had to emigrate because of poverty, they had no tale of parents dying young, they knew the stories of their ancestors. In that happy house, with roots that led back at least 250 years, I felt a weight of sorrow about my own family’s emigrant fate, and how pain as well as joy transmits down the generations.

We said goodbye to the Meehan’s and set off towards the lands around Sligo Bay, where we would spend the night in the shadow of Benbulben Mountain’s immensely strange and primordial heft. I was leaving behind in Dungloe the chance of learning about my grandfather’s life; more, I felt I had lost the chance of connection. It seemed then that Ken and I were the ones leaving all behind in Dungloe, to emigrate.

We drove across the country the next day to Dublin, and saw Brian Friel’s play Translations at the Abbey Theatre that night before we left Ireland. The play is set in 1830s rural Donegal, when the British have sent soldiers and surveyors to map the wild country and Anglicize the Gaelic names. Most of the country people fear the soldiers and hate their work to turn the Irish land into English land, but a few welcome them as bringers of modernity. But the welcomers are deluded; the British will never see them as part of any future that makes sense to them. The British may bring modern times with them to remote Donegal, but those times will crush the Irish. The only response for many Irish was to emigrate, or to die. In that way, my family was triumphant after all; they chose life.

Post script: My husband uncovered some of my grandfather’s story after all, in the month since we returned from Ireland. Jack O’Donnell was born in Philadelphia as I thought, but his parents didn’t die when he was two, and his father wasn’t born in Ireland. My great grandfather Daniel Francis O’Donnell was born in Philadelphia in 1863, to Henry and Sarah O’Donnell, who emigrated from Ireland likely in the mid- 1850s when Henry was about 25 and Sarah was 15. She may have come with her parents, or alone. We don’t know where they immigrated from, yet.

Henry and Sarah married in Philadelphia, and eight children, only two of whom survived past age five: my great grandfather Daniel and his sister Elizabeth. Some of the children lived a few days or hours, but two of them died in their fourth and fifth years. Henry was a laborer and driver, and his son Daniel began his own career as a driver when he was 17. Daniel married Emma (we don’t know her last name yet); she gave birth to my grandfather in 1891.

By the time my grandfather was nine, his mother was missing from the census records of the family, although Daniel still listed himself as married. One of my uncles told me that he heard the whispered story that his grandparents had divorced or separated. Another uncle said that Emma had been English and had returned to England; it would have been a scandal in the family to marry a Protestant. Daniel died of pneumonia at age 43 when his son was 13, and my grandfather was raised by his only remaining relative, his aunt Lizzie.

So there was no Dungloe connection; if there is one, it will be an astounding coincidence. There are many thousand small towns and farmlands in Ireland from which Henry and Sarah may have immigrated. But I’m pulling for Dungloe. Stay tuned.

This poem by the Irishwoman Eavan Boland speaks directly to my family’s history and the history of many immigrants who come with only hope and the old songs, and nothing to lose.

The Emigrant Irish

By Eavan Boland

Like oil lamps, we put them out the back —

of our houses, of our minds. We had lights
better than, newer than and then

a time came, this time and now
we need them. Their dread, makeshift example:

they would have thrived on our necessities.
What they survived we could not even live.
By their lights now it is time to
imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,
that their possessions may become our power:
Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parceled in them.
Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering
in the bruise-colored dusk of the New World.

And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.

Journey to Dungloe: Part Four

To the Horizon

From the coast road, we saw the Atlantic north and west and east, stretching blue to the horizon. We took a looping one lane road on the headland called Horn Head. It was a sunny, warm day and still it was desolate and romantic; the headland was studded with huge whitish rocks that looked like resting sheep. There was no one else on the headland, in either car or on foot; we stopped to eat our lunch but it was too windy to eat outside the car. Even inside the car, the immensity of the Atlantic was awe-inspiring and humbling. How fragile human life is here and everywhere, and how tenacious.

It was only about 30 miles more to Dungloe, but the coast road was narrow and winding, and lovely; we stopped frequently. We took a break at Teac Coll, a pub nearly 140 years old, owned by the same Gaelic-speaking family still. The young man behind the bar spoke into the phone and to customers in Gaelic, and to us in fluent English. He said he had been to the US for college but of course came back to run the pub; who wouldn’t, he said. Do you see how lovely it is here? He told us that people in the Gael Teac regions of Ireland, where Irish is the first language, speak Gaelic exclusively except when speaking to outsiders. Gaelic was forbidden until the 1830s by the English during their rule, and then strongly discouraged, but the Irish in far Donegal never stopped speaking it entirely. The road signs throughout the Gael Teac are only in Gaelic; we resorted to translations in our guidebook to find our way.

The outskirts of Dungloe are a short jog off the coastal road; bland suburban houses and a few new-looking shops scattered on asphalt roads. As we got closer to Main Street, though, the street took on what must have been its 19^th century look: narrow stone streets with weathered stone two- and three- story buildings. And Main Street itself, where our Donegal church directory told us the parish house would be, was a lovely sight. Seven or eight blocks on either side of the street are lined with white and pastel painted shops; the sun was shining, and we could see the sea beyond from the top of the street before it dipped and rose again.

We drove down and then up the street, looking for the parish house, but couldn’t find it. Ken stopped the car and rolled down the window to ask directions from two elderly women with shopping baskets on their arms. “Ah,now,” one told us, “the parish house hasn’t been in the Main Street for some time.” She told us how to get to it, and asked if we were visiting. “We think my wife’s grandfather is from Dungloe,” he said, “We are here to see where he came from.” “Welcome home!” she said at once. Her greeting brought me to tears, and surprised me. I hadn’t cried when I saw the soft green and peaceful land where my great-grandparents’ farms had been, or even when I learned about the harsh poverty and ingrained discrimination in that beautiful place that forced their emigration.

But it was different for my grandfather. Why had he not given his children more information about his life? Where had he lived growing up? What was his childhood like? Or was it that no one asked him? Or remembered now what he said? I felt that he had unfairly cut us off from our own history. I was invested in finding him in Dungloe and claiming the town as mine by right of inheritance.

To be continued next week...

Journey To Dungloe: Part Three

The Four Hundred Year Old Wee House

In Creeslough, a slightly bigger town than Church Hill, we stopped at a small grocery store where the owner was working the till. We said we were looking for any Toners about, and he called over a customer to help him answer our request. No Toners around here anymore, the customer said; the last ones died some time ago, and the rest immigrated. But go out to Nat Russell’s farm; he’ll know where they lived. The directions to the farm were to turn left at the big stone house, the last one in the town, and follow the road to a fork where there’s a huge boulder. Take the left fork and keep on until you see the Russell van; they do building work, and their name is on the van.

We found Mr. Russell at home, a lively man in his mid-70s, wearing knee high rubber boots and working clothes. Follow me, he said, I’ll show you where the last of the Toners lived, Hannah and her brother Billy. Sweet-natured people, he called them. He walked quickly up the road – no more than a strip of pavement barely wide enough for one car -- and we followed in the car. He showed us an empty lot between a large cow barn and a big tool shed. Their wee stone house stood here, he said; it was 400 years old, that house and barely big enough for a tiny kitchen and a small room for two beds. They lived here until they died.

Hannah and Billy were the last of the Toners in Creeslough district. They died at advanced ages in the 1960s, after selling the small farm in the 1950s on the mountainside where my great grandmother was born. They spent 40 years in Philadelphia, but returned home when they retired. They had inherited the farm, and perhaps they were Mary Toner’s niece and nephew. I want to see the farm, I said, and asked Nat Russell for directions. But there’s no way to get up there now, he said, except by a hard long climb. The roads are gone.

Ireland had eight million people before the 1845 famine, and only three million by the time my great grandparents left Ireland in the 1880s. Died of hunger or sorrow, or immigrated, and most never returned. The countryside is still depopulated, especially in Donegal; Ireland’s population is only four million now, with one-third in Dublin. We drove as far as we could towards Gortnalecky, the farm tenanted by Mary’s parents; along the thin strip of road that Nat Russell told us used to be a cow path when he was a boy. The fields stretched empty and green with low grasses, all the way to the purple Muckish Mountain standing straight up from the fields as if cut out and placed there, sharp against the sky. It was the most beautiful place I’d seen in Ireland. There was nearly absolute quiet, strange in a place that obviously used to be farmland. We stopped the car at the turnoff for Gortnalecky, and gazed towards the far distance, where the farm would have been. There was no road now. I imagined this place humming with life and work and people, 170 years ago. People fled this place for their lives. I wonder if they longed for it again, from their tenements in Philadelphia.

It was nearly eight in the evening when we drove the five miles back to Creeslough. Nat Russell said that it would have been too far to walk to church or school, from Mary’s farm; they would have gone to church for special holy days only, and Mary would not have gone to school. We stopped at the Corn Cutters Rest for dinner, a restaurant that had been in operation for a hundred years; the haddock and mackerel chowder was the best either of us had ever had. Our dinners came with mountains of potatoes: seven large scoops of potatoes for each of us. One hundred and seventy years after the potato blight wiped out Ireland’s potato crop and up to a third of the people died all the restaurants we visited piled on the potatoes at every meal. We’ll never be hungry again! The whole country seemed to say.

The next morning we stopped at the Creeslough cemetery; Ken found Hannah Toner’s grave, with lettering already so faded that he had to trace out the words with his finger. The stone was tilted and moss-covered, although it was just fifty years old. There were no family left to care for the grave; by the time she died, at age 89, most of her friends would have been dead too. The graves were laid out in a way I saw in other Irish graveyards: each stone was set at the head of a large rectangle made of iron railings, so that it looked like a bedstead without a mattress. That night, I dreamed that I was Hannah, lying six feet deep and sensing my great great niece sitting by the grave.

We were only a few miles to the Atlantic; did Mary and James ever walk there to see it, far below the cliffs? Before we got to the coast, we saw a cow standing in a wood; it was at least double normal size; it dwarfed the others in the herd. I thought it was a giant cow statue, until it moved.

To be continued next week...