Tag Archives: Immigration

The Dementia Dossier: Poor Bank

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Returning from an errand to the post office, I was explaining to my mother some aspects of my new work as an immigration attorney.  After leaving a 32-year career as a municipal government attorney, the director of the non-profit No More A Stranger Foundation (NOMAS) asked if I would consider starting a new career and working for her as an immigration attorney.  (I had volunteered there for a couple of years.)  NOMAS helps people with their immigration applications to legalize their status, at no charge to the clients.  The work would be part-time and paid “low-bono” (not quite pro-bono, but nearly).  I help prepare applications for naturalization, green cards, work permits, asylum, human trafficking visas, crime victim visas, student visas, and many others.  I am having to learn immigration law from scratch, and the Administration’s frequent policy changes aren’t making the learning easy.  Immigrants, whether in the U.S. lawfully or not, face real financial and social hardships.  They contribute to the economy and community, but often have the lowest-paying jobs and suffer discrimination, bigotry, and isolation.  NOMAS attorneys (a few) and volunteers (many) do what we can to legalize the status of immigrants so they can have improved quality of life.  As a sidebar story, our local Wells Fargo branch closed.  Mom and I knew the manager, bankers, and tellers, and were sad to see them leave, and sad to see our convenient banking location shuttered.  Coming home from the post office, we sat in our car at a red light as I explained immigrant hardships.  Mom did not respond or react at all to my narrative.  But upon seeing the closed bank building, she sighed, “Poor bank.”  I thought Wells Fargo was anything but poor.  And I thought my immigrants were much more deserving of her sympathy.  But Mom felt what she felt, and understandably related more with and sympathized more with what she knew than with what she did not.  And the universe of what she knows is shrinking.  (If anyone would like to support the work of the No More A Stranger Foundation, or are looking for a worthy Giving Tuesday or year-end charity, you may make a donation at the NOMAS website.)

Courage at Twilight: With a Vehemence

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“Welcome home!” Mom cheered with a bright smile and her arms raised high. “Welcome Home, Raj!” Dad echoed.  (“Rog” looks sensical but rhymes with “Frog.”)  The day was just another of 400 days I have come home to Sandy from work 55 miles away in Tooele.  Yet Mom and Dad made me feel like the son newly home victorious from the front lines of life.  Slurping our Lazy Rigatoni with sausage and sauce, I told them about volunteering that day at the free NoMas immigration clinic (No More a Stranger), and how I wished the facts for my asylum application were stronger, but that stronger facts would include kidnappings or beatings or murders, and how returning the man and his family to Maduro’s Venezuela likely would mean kidnappings and beatings and murders, and about how well I performed my work might mean escape, and if not escape, returning the man and his family to….  That morning, the shower pipe had again slipped into vibrating screams, which I loathe with rending vehemence, screaming in my soap-slimed face: “You’re doing it wrong! You’ll never be good enough!” and I had again adjusted the water quickly to quiet the unbearable banshee.  And that evening, after dinner, Mom handed me a note Dad had written to Tamara, and asked if could deliver it, but after a twelve-hour work day I did not want to find the emotional energy needed to deliver a note to a woman dying of pancreatic cancer, feeling awkward with what to say, but I said simply, “My Dad wrote you a note: he loves you and hopes for you, we all do.”  Tears and smiles: they arrive with our suffering and hope.  We do hope for her.  This is our faith, that in healing or in dying she finds hope and finds love.  Pine needles had fallen thick over the years, an unruly mat in the back yard, and I quickly filled both cans, pensive about Tamara, waiting for next week to fill the cans again.  With his bowl of chocolate ice cream and a slice of warm chocolate-chip pecan banana bread, Dad complained that he could not sleep the night before, how his hips and legs had hurt, how he sat on the edge of the bed in darkness wondering whether years of sleeping in the same spot on the same side of the same mattress might suggest turning the mattress over.  In the day’s eleventh hour, I hurriedly stripped the bed, flipped the queen mattress over, and strapped on fresh sheets.  Rising slowly in the stair lift, still they caught me in the last tuckings.  “Which way did you flip it?” Dad asked.  “I flipped it,” I answered.  I hope he sleeps better.  We shall see.