16 
THE SHIP OF THE DOOMED
On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples. . . .
On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
THE SECOND TIME I ALMOST DIED IN CHILDBIRTH, I could not stop thinking about refugees.1 Specifically, a boat full of Rohingya refugees who were seeking refuge and were not allowed to land anywhere—a ship of the doomed.2 I heard about it in the feverish pitch of the hospital room where I was close to dying. Kept alive by machines and medicines, I caught snippets of the world outside of my bed with blurry eyes. My body had decided to fail. My tiny new baby needed me to get better faster than I was able.
At night, when I was the most alone, I thought about those people in the boat—the slow beeping of the monitors checking my blood pressure, my husband asleep in a chair, our baby in a plastic hospital crib. I could not reach my baby. Other people had to take care of the son I had fought so hard to bring into the world. I did not let myself feel sad about this. Instead, I thought about people who were suffering more. I thought about the boat people, the Rohingya. I saw their faces in my mind.
I had made it; my baby had been born. They had got me on the medicines before my heart burst. We were lucky, I told myself fiercely. The Christian language of my youth drifted up to the top of my mind. We were a miracle.
But were we? We had survived while little children starved to death on a boat that drifted from one closed country to another; the world watched silently as we all agreed there were some people too desperate to help. I turned over the faces of the people on the boat like rocks in my fingers. I wanted to make them smooth with my worry. I wanted to save them with my anguish. I, who had barely escaped death, wanted to save everyone else myself. I didn’t trust God to do it anymore.
A few weeks after I left the hospital I had a dream. In the dream I sat at a long wooden table, which stretched into a black infinity. Not a terrifying blackness, a warm, electric darkness that spoke of saturation and richness. I was sitting in an oil painting, but with colors more real and more familiar. The props reminded me of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: wooden bowls full of artfully arranged fruit, rustic loaves of bread scattered in the middle. I was on a bench at the longest table of my life, quietly and with my hands folded in my lap. Around me people were eating and laughing and talking with each other—people I somehow both knew and did not know, people I recognized but had never met. They were throwing a party to which I had somehow snagged an invitation. I squinted at their faces—men, women, and children, and suddenly I knew where I had seen them. I had seen these faces on CNN. Dark brown skin, black hair, lines of worry worn into the creases around their eyes. These friends, all around me, were the Rohingya refugees who fled their country and got on a boat, desperate to escape those who wanted them eradicated. I watched them, joy radiating from their faces, and then I picked up a piece of bread to eat along with them. I heard an audible voice so loud it woke me. This is what heaven is like. I heard a voice full of timbre, both inside and outside my experience. “In heaven, you will feast with those who have suffered the most on earth.”
I woke up with a heavy blanket of peace around me for the first time in months. I luxuriated in that feeling, willing it to never leave. But of course it did. When I turned on the news again, there was always another story of suffering, another story of people in need, and a world which was bound and determined to look away.
My friend Jessica has lived and worked with refugees in the city of Austin, Texas. Recently she wrote a book called After the Last Border, detailing the experiences of two women who had resettled in the United States from very different backgrounds. In writing her book my friend became deeply imbedded in the history of the US Refugee Resettlement program. She focused on a particular moment, one that most Americans have forgotten. In 1939 there was a ship filled with almost a thousand Jewish refugees who had fled the terrible night known as Kristallnacht, when the German army razed synagogues, killed Jewish citizens, and started sending people to concentration camps.
The few who could got on large boats and tried to flee to safety. First Cuba, and then the United States ultimately denied them access or entry, even going so far as to have ships with guns stationed in case people tried to swim to shore. The people who had fled Germany for their lives and the lives of their children could see the land, the promise of safety. But the United States said no; better safe than sorry is what then-president Roosevelt decided.
It’s estimated that over half of those refugees—for that is what they were, before there was a legal term for it—ended up in concentration camps. Sent back to the hell that they had tried to escape, so close to freedom, yet sailing on a ship of the doomed, a ship deemed unsafe.3
Of course we would have reacted differently, wouldn’t we? If people in the United States had known the extent of Hitler’s schemes, wouldn’t we have welcomed in the boats of the desperate? Current events tell us otherwise. The narrative continues on a loop: desperate families seeking shelter, twisted by politics and popular imagination into the violent, the unsafe. They will take our jobs or kill our children; they are strangers, not neighbors. We have no responsibility to them.
As a child growing up I remember learning about the Holocaust in the hushed tones of the still shocked. Wasn’t it unbelievable? That educated, Westernized, advanced, Christian White men and women could do such a thing? There was a horror underlying my education in this regard that seems misplaced now. It is believable because it happened. And part of the reason why so many were killed, why so many were tortured, was because the people who could have given them shelter shut their doors and minds and hearts to their neighbors in need.
The story goes that after all of the evidence of the Jewish genocide came to light, the US Refugee Resettlement program was born out of the ashes of WWII and the atrocities it highlighted. Thanks to the tireless work of survivors and others, a government program to help resettle people who would otherwise perish became a moral imperative.
In the beginning the refugee resettlement program primarily focused on English-speaking, educated, professionals from war-torn countries. In recent decades, however, as conflicts continue to grow and as our world enters a time of mass displacement unlike any we have ever seen, the program has focused on human rights abuses, seeking to resettle people who have experienced the most discrimination or been allies of some sort in conflicts where the United States has been involved. This is why we saw waves of Hmong refugees, then Sudanese (including the lost boys), then Somali and Somali Bantu, then Afghan and Syrian refugees.
I did not know these roots—in fact I knew little at all—when I first started volunteering with refugees in my own city of Portland more than fifteen years ago. These families from half a world away were simply miracles, and I accepted them as such. Later, a few questions would surface. Why this family and not another? Who gets chosen, and what is the reasoning? Deep into both the refugee crisis and our country’s response to it, I engaged with new-to-me neighbors who had survived the very worst the world has to offer. I got a degree in teaching English to speakers of others languages, and I tried to focus specifically on literacy. Many of the women I met and worked with and lived with and taught had never been to school. The common denominator, the thing all of them had in common, was some kind of trauma—the trauma of poverty or of being female in a patriarchal society or the disruption of education due to war or famine or an oppressive government regime. The people I met were survivors. They were the lucky few, the less than 1 percent of refugees that get resettled worldwide.
I think I might have a touch of secondary trauma. I never ask for stories, I have never sat down and asked a friend or neighbor who has experienced forced migration to tell me the horrors they have outrun. But sometimes the stories just pour out. There is the woman who scrubbed her daughter’s face of bright red cherry juice while she told me how all the female engineers like herself were killed or driven out of her old city. There is the friend who works herself to the bone going to community college and taking care of her four children, who politely interrupts me when I beg her to take a break. “Whenever my mother calls me from our country, the first thing she asks is if I am going to school. Because when I was eighth grade the Taliban came, and I wasn’t allowed to go to school anymore.”
There are the women who tell me their family was wonderful, not too poor, that some of their sisters got to go to school even. But they themselves were the ones who had to stay and watch the goats or get married at age fourteen or watch the children of their brothers. The women in my English classes who tell the stories of their families, both the children that survived and the children they have buried. And most of them have at least one, if not multiple, sad stories to tell.
A few years ago, when my daughter was seven and my son almost two, I found myself in an elementary school cafeteria that smelled faintly of boiled vegetables. The room was windowless, the linoleum was swept clean and furnished with picnic-style tables pushed next to each other to create long rows. My toddler and I were desperate for friends, and so once a week I would dust off my English teaching degree and break out my materials. I went to the weekly class with ginger-molasses cookies. I made coffee as the women showed up. I printed worksheets full of phrases I hoped might make their lives the tiniest bit easier. I tried to communicate love in small ways in this weekly ritual of practicing English in our elementary school cafeteria. My neighbors came to my class, shy at first, then smiling broadly, their shyness effaced by the presence of a blond-haired toddler. They touched my son’s face. They stroked his hair. They took pictures and sent them to distant family members.
One morning I settled in at a cafeteria table with three new women, all of them bright-eyed, wearing colorful headscarves. They breezed through my assessment questions: they knew the alphabet and could tell me their addresses. I asked them how long they had lived in my city and what language they spoke and where they were from. The leader (there is always a leader) answered for everyone. She was older than the other two. She wore lilac polyester pants, a flower-printed hijab, a shirt with sequins surrounding the sleeves, a hint of lipstick on her bright face. This woman told me that had all come to Portland in the past year, that they speak Rohingya, and that they are from Myanmar.
I asked her to repeat herself, and she said it again. “You, you speak Rohingya?” I asked, peering closer at her face. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I speak Rohingya. I am Rohingya.” The other women sitting at the table beamed at me and nod. Yes, they are Rohingya too. I surprised them with the force of my enthusiasm. “Rohingya!” I nearly shrieked. “Here, in Portland!”
They drank the coffee I poured into Styrofoam cups, too much sugar and powdered creamer for my taste, perfect for theirs. They ate the cookies I made and brought out a tin of almond biscuits to share. They tried to make my son laugh, but he refused. He whined at me until the oldest woman gave him a cookie, forever buying his stubborn love.
They are the lucky ones, the ones whose ships or airplanes made it here. Our limited shared language failed us, and the trails that brought them to my school cafeteria remain inscrutable, mysterious. They were simply there, at that moment, sitting with me. They were some of the last refugees to make it into my city before policies started changing. Before the US refugee resettlement was slowly dismantled, piece by piece, in front of our eyes. But at that moment, we didn’t know. We simply ate cookies and drank chai together, experiencing the tiniest taste of how big God’s dream for the world is. How God sees every ship of the doomed, every stateless wanderer, and every lonely girl longing to do good.
I thought back to the dream I had when I had almost died. And I thought about the day it was redeemed, where I sat at a long table together with those who have suffered so much on earth, acutely aware of the love of God for them and myself at that moment. We sat at a table in an easy silence born of a desire to stretch that moment as long as possible. When the class was over, I pushed my son’s stroller home, and the women walked back with me. I waved at them from my front stoop as they continued to their own apartments. I will see them, nearly every day, walking to and from school together, gathering our children and taking them home. Every Friday we will feast together in the house of joy known as one of the lowest-rated schools in the state. We will drink our coffee and eat our cookies. We will sit in the mystery of being alive, of what it means to be a miracle in a world of suffering, for that one hour every week.