Waiting

When TH and his family left the former USSR as refugees, they went to Austria first, and then an international aid organization sent them to Italy. They lived in Italy for six months with a host family who took them in and gave them a room to sleep in. My FIL painted pictures of the scenery and sold them for pennies. TH washed car windshields on street corners to help make ends meet.

Once a week, they, along with all the other refugee families placed in the small beach town, would go to a park and wait. Once a week, a representative from the international aid organization would arrive and announce to the waiting crowd the name of a family, or two, or more, or none. The families whose names were announced had been selected, finally, after all their struggles, to start their new lives in their new countries. A spot had opened up somewhere, in some state, or in Canada, a spot with a local aid organization that said they had room for one to look after and get situated, and that family would cheer and cry and rush home and pack and leave that small town on the coast of the Mediterranean, that town that had served as a beautiful limbo, that waiting town. And the rest of the families would slowly turn and slowly disperse, back to their borrowed rooms to face another week of window washing, or painting, or house cleaning, or whatever it was they had found they could do to survive.

I've often wondered about those gatherings, about the emotions coursing through the veins of the weary mothers and fathers and children who had no home, who had only the hope of a home, the vague notion that somewhere, at sometime, things would change. They lived their lives in one-week increments, and on the day of the gathering, the tension and fear and hope and anticipation of finally, after all that waiting, hearing their name called must have been overwhelming. And yet when I picture it, I picture a group of tired, but calm, people. Imagine the disparity between the violent rush of emotions on the inside, that surely was so powerful the people should have been shaking, and the stoic outward appearance. And it all hinged on a single moment, a single word from the aid worker.

Imagine the disparity afterwards, when one family's lives are changed forever, and the rest of the crowd has to return to their waiting. Did they smile for the ones whose names were announced? Did they have it left in them to feel happy for them? Did their own disappointment over it not being "their" week fill them with a disappointment so strong and bitter they could no longer feel happy for others? Or were they so practiced at their stoic approach, at being rocks to weather the storms of their lives, so used to living behind their stone walls, walls that protected them from so many harsh realities and cruel disappointments that many on the planet will never have to face, that they no longer felt sorry for themselves nor happy for others. It just was. Another reality they had to face without complaint, because complaining didn't sell paintings or wash windows or feed children.

Who among us can really understand what these families went through, the ones who had to wait? There were families who arrived and were called away the next week, because it wasn't a first-come-first-served process--it all depended on where you had applied to go and which location had a spot open up. Those families, the ones who lucked into asking for the very location that had room, never understood, could never understand, the agony of the waiting. They never knew what it was like to have that agony become familiar to you, to become an expert at balancing the hope with the fear. They had faced other hardships in life, other disappointments, but of this they only knew the hope and excitement they felt at that first gathering, and the joy they felt when they heard their names. They never faced the wait. They never had to attend the gathering, week after week, forcing themselves to believe that eventually it would be their turn, that surely this week was their week.

And, of course, on the other end, who could ever understand the families whose names never got called? The families who ran out of money, or who had a child fall ill, making them temporarily ineligible for relocation to their new country, or who eventually just lost hope and settled there, there in the waiting town.

It is the waiting that is the challenge. The finding things to focus on between the gatherings. The finding a way to mitigate the disappointment you feel every time you don't hear your name called, and the pain and the anger at knowing you're going to have to wait again, and the fear that you live with while waiting, fear that next week won't be your week either, and ultimately the hope that begins to blossom against all odds, against all historical precedent, hope that next week will be your week. The waiting for it to be your week.

It is the waiting that is the challenge.