Adopt, deport: how did I end up here?

A follow-up on those 1500 Cambodians who were deported, in what immigration observers agreed was a bizarre and tragic case of systems failure: Cambodia was deemed recovered enough to handle its own criminals. In a series of three-strikes-you're-out type rulings against immigrants who had never bothered (or been unable to) take U.S. citizenship, judges across Cambodian enclaves in the U.S. were all of a sudden ordering exile for people --most, former refugees-- with 20-year histories in America. As many of the initial reports mentioned, none of the deportees were saints, but many articles questioned the idea of sending people back to a country they barely knew as a remedy for social maladjustments here. (See an overview, an early report.)

A report this week in the Seattle Times finds one of the deportees two and a half years later, in a "remote village" where his distant relatives had taken him in. It's one of many reports covering the wake of a blinkered policy.

I had seen the deportees starting to arrive in Phnom Penh in 2002. Many of them landed at a the home of Bill Herod, who ran an impromptu shelter originally called RAP, or Return Assistance Project. That has since evolved into RISP, the Return Integration Support Program, funded by Vietnam Vets and US AID. Their website is worth exploring: it's a phenomenal record of displacement and fate. They have archived the extensive press coverage.

RISP offers a survival guide, but each deportee assumes his fate differently. In the photo gallery:

several returnees have become monks

Here's how Colombia works

Here's how Colombia works. It's perfectly laid out in today's El Tiempo, the last large paper in the country, if I can just deconstruct for you what's actually going on.

For the ninth year now, Bogota, a city of over 8 million people, is having a no-car day. That means that private vehicles are outlawed from 6:30 am to 7:30 pm. The info-graphic above tells us that 1.2 million cars will stay in their garages, or their owners pay a $100 fine. Only the red articulated buses and taxis are allowed access to the streets (the picture above is from last year) -- oh, and anyone with a licensed bullet- or bomb-proof car, or anyone with security escorts. Over 300 kilometers of designated paths will flood with bicycles today. The air will be noticeably cleaner. The mayor will push his entire fleet of 1000 buses into the network, and in general it will take half the time it normally takes to get from here to there.

Some people will grumble, but for 13 hours, a general sense of solidarity and accomplishment will be spread across the plain.

Tomorrow, the gridlock returns. In the mean time, Bogota is just mad-cap enough, just authoritarian enough to pull this off, and Colombians are Catholic patrician enough to be told what to do.

And while this is going on, the top report above announces that the US military, counter-narcotics and now counter-terrorism aid to Colombia, known by the Clinton-era name of "Plan Colombia," will be funded at 7 times what it was worth in 1999. Not an escalation, but an augmentation. Phase 2, with greater emphasis on humanitarian aid, economic development and refugee relief, had to be made palatable to the new Democratic-led Congress. But it's a reminder that the war's not over.

And below the fold (article circled in red), the real Colombia of paramilitary bosses and revenge killings:

Desde su asistencia a la primera versión libre del ex jefe paramilitar, en diciembre, comenzaron a llamarla para que se quitara del camino. Ayer, con seis tiros, dos sicarios sellaron las amenazas.

Yolanda Izquierdo acababa de salir a la puerta de su casa del barrio Rancho Grande de Montería, un humilde sector de la margen izquierda del río Sinú, para recibir a su esposo Francisco Torreglosa.

Dos hombres en motocicleta se les acercaron, cruzaron varias palabras con ellos y luego el parrillero disparó.

Ever since her attendance at the first open hearing against the former paramilitary boss [Salvatore Mancuso], in December, the calls began to come in telling her to get out of the way. Yesterday, with six shots, two assassins followed through on the threats.

Yolanda Izquierdo had just emerged from the front door of her house in the Rancho Grande neighborhood of Monteria, a humble part of the left bank of the Sinu river, to greet her husband Francisco Torreglosa.

Two men on a motorcycle approached, exchanged a few words with them, and then the man on the back began to shoot.

Izquierdo represented 700 peasants who had been forced to sell land to a faction of the largest paramilitary group in Colombia.

It's the third attack against paramilitary victims in 11 days, El Tiempo reports. (Where is the US press?)

And to the left of that report:

What can you do to stop Global Warming?
deck line: Use your iron less and open your refrigerator less frequently.

Wherein I fall victim to weak international copyright protection

Following the grand jury prize at Sundance going to "Padre Nuestro," I wrote a news brief for the largest-circulation daily in Bogota, El Tiempo. The reporting was then gamely stolen and bizarrely credited to the Spanish wire news agency EFE. I guess I became a cross-cultural stringer there, with quotes I gathered listed "as told to" Matthew Fishbane. Other words and descriptions from my original article submission appear verbatim -- but from here what recourse would I have for attacking that theft?

Sadly, it's a tale of provincialism: that the producer of the film had lived in Colombia and written a film there as well as hundreds of hours of Colombian serial drama was enough to claim a victory for the country on an international stage. This was, after all, the gist of my report, with more emphasis on the Colombian-born actress in the film than on the producer. A few connections to the paper, a couple of emails, and all of a sudden the bridge is made. Some readers commented early in the day about the stretch, but their complaint is not that Colombian triumphs overseas shouldn't be celebrated, just that the triumphs have to be "authentically" Colombian. A gringo who spent time there is just not connection enough. But if the producer says his work was influenced by working and living in Colombia, then isn't that reason enough? It was reason enough for me to nudge into the paper.

How do you say, "I have a cold"?

Reporter Jamie Holguin gives an overview in the Canton Repository of the basics of hospital translation, with "some blunders attributable to language barriers" culled from a 2002 study:

Like the elderly Russian man who was instructed to undergo a battery of expensive tests for angina after an emergency room physician misunderstood his complaints of “urgina” -- Russian for sore throat. Or the migrant worker from Oaxaca, Mexico, who was committed to an Oregon psychiatric ward as a paranoid schizophrenic, only to be released two years later after it was discovered that he was simply speaking an Indian dialect.

More significantly, perhaps, is recent research into providing transnational medical histories for foreign patients, who sometimes seem to appear as clean slates when they arrive in the U.S.

The following a-ha moment provides the epigraph to a recent study by the National Diabetes Education Program:

A middle-aged Cambodian woman had had an excellent relationship with her American doctor for 9 years, but he had no idea that she had been tortured. He had only partial success in controlling her type 2 diabetes. After attending a training session on treating the effects of terrorism after the events of September 11, 2001, the doctor asked the patient for the first time whether she had undergone extreme violence or torture. She revealed that two of her children had died of starvation in Cambodia, her husband had been taken away violently and disappeared, and she had been sexually violated under the Khmer Rouge. More recently, in the United States, her remaining daughter had been nearly fatally stabbed by a gang that burglarized her home. Since September 11, the patient had taken to barricading herself in her house, leaving only to see her doctor.

When the doctor became aware of the patient’s traumatic history, he used a screening tool to explore the effects of her traumas, diagnosing major depression. Over time, he was able to treat the depression with medication and counseling, eventually bringing the diabetes under control as well.

— Dr. Richard Mollica. Surviving Torture. New England Journal of Medicine 2004.

In New York, too, the past doesn't go away. A look at the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture in a future post.

Terror makes us more informed

We know that September 11 changed everything -- here's yet more proof. A study published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies concludes that multi-lingual families and households in the UK started changing their viewing habits after acts of terrorism, turning to news services other than English-language sources, after developing a perception of Western bias.

It's a "no-duh" that maybe needed articulation. But why had the bi-cultural families stopped watching or reading their ethnic news sources in the first place? Had the multi-lingual families been dumbing down to fit in? Further, the researchers found a highly nuanced understanding of political and international matters from news culled from such a wide range of sources -- this, in turn, set the foreign families at odds again with their English-only neighbors. The more you know, the worse off it is.

To win, it had better be foreign

Two years in a row? It must be a trend. Sundance has awarded its grand jury prize to a US-made Spanish-language film again this year, after last year's crowd-pleasing "Quinceañera." This year, it's "Padre Nuestro," a thriller about a pair of young Mexican immigrants in New York. The film stars Jesus Ochoa (above) as Diego, the estranged father of one of the two boys. The film's irony is built on this bear of a man not knowing which one of the boys may be his.

Ochoa is a prolific, prizewinning, full-fledged star in his native Mexico -- and totally unknown here, as are some of his co-stars, including the celebrated clown Eugenio Derbez, who plays one of the kitchen staff at an anonymous New York restaurant where Diego has stolidly washed dishes for years. Paola Mendoza, a Colombian-born New Yorker, plays Magda, a drifter swept up in the plot by the whatever-it-takes attitudes of foreigners literally kicked out of the beds of tractor trailers onto the streets of Brooklyn.

The director, Christopher Zalla, describes his film set as looking like the United Nations. "My childhood was one of constant movement," he says.

I was born in Kenya after my parents moved to East Africa to study its burgeoning socialist movement. They divorced, and over the next 18 years I was shuttled back-and-forth between them to wherever in the world their lives lead us. I lived in Africa, Europe, and South America, where I stayed for several years with extended family in Bolivia. When those 18 years were over I could speak three languages (I’ve forgotten one), I’d gone to 13 different schools, I’d lived in 21 different homes; and with each new encounter I found myself keenly aware of the existence of borders – spatial, cultural, and personal. I was always a foreigner in the foreign land. And then I came to New York, where everyone is a foreigner on some level. It’s my first real home.

This experience of movement and longing --as well as some solid Catholic morality of the much more cruel Old Testament variety-- is what gets translated to the wayward characters of a compellingly narrated film: immigrants more in search of family than economy, negotiating borderlands where the rights and wrongs of civility don't necessarily stand. But there are neither saints nor angels in this Our Father -- only a dark palette from director of photography Igor Martinovic and a remarkably de-glamourized Manhattan skyline, somewhere over some fences and across a river or two: not much closer, it seems, than it was back in Mexico.

Like its cousin, Maria Full of Grace, this isn't a movie about the American Dream. Diego hasn't bought in to the immigrant story because he hasn't had anything, or anyone, to buy into it for. As he starts delicately sewing artificial roses in his dilapidated hovel somewhere in ill-lit Brooklyn, one of the boys looks on with the universal teenage sneer.

"What do you get for each of those?" he asks.
"Cincuenta centavos."
"Fifty cents a piece? That's all? Pinche sueño Americano."

The film is well made, carefully shot and thoughtfully put together, but it's how the immigration experience is made universal that won over the jury in Park City. The way "Padre Nuestro" dashes headlong into the foreign all around us, and asks who among us are strangers.