Random Thoughts on Attachment to Place in Everyday Ramblings

Nostalgia = from Greek nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain.

I heard a short snippet of an interview this morning while puttering around my kitchen (getting food for the cats and wild birds in order) with a Syrian man who is helping Mercy Corps in the camps inside the country for displaced people.

He said that he too was displaced and he missed his kitchen and the life he had.

I read an article in the New York Times Insider over the weekend about a 24-year- old young man who was Syrian but born in a Palestinian refugee camp who started out as a police officer and then was drafted into military service by his government. After striking up a relationship with a reporter and texting her regularly about where he was being sent (and how he felt about it), was sent into an insurgent controlled area with no weapons on a non armoured bus and then captured and publicly beheaded far from home late last year.

He too missed his home and the possibility of getting married and having a relatively normal life.

Last night I picked up a copy at the library of City of Thorns by Ben Rawlence about the Kenyan refugee camp, the largest in the world called Dadaab that is full mostly of folks from Somalia. It tells the stories of nine people and what their daily lives are like.

Mercy Corps used to have their local headquarters two blocks from where I live and they still store some trucks and equipment nearby.

I work with a quiet very bright guy from Kenya. He got homesick about three years ago, tired of the long expensive and arduous seeming journeys back home twice a year so he quit and went home. And then there was that horrible violent attack on the shopping mall in Nairobi and his family encouraged him to come back here. We hired him back. He is even more quiet now.

The people that live in Dadaab live off food aid, they are not allowed to work because the Kenyan government doesn’t want to acknowledge that the camp is permanent (even though it has been there now for 25 years and houses nearly half a million people). Portland isn’t that much bigger.

The tree stump is the picture was a cherry. It was cut down last week.

Around the corner on the same block a 70-year-old towering pine came down a few days ago.

Talking to Tad, who has huge cut up chunks of the tree in his front yard, about the changes in the neighborhood it was he who brought up to me that nostos means returning home and he felt in a way the neighborhood was doing that, painful at it is…money is moving in and the disrepair is being swept away by population pressures.

I also talked to the fellow who has lived for thirty years across the street from the “Crocker” house that was auctioned off yesterday most likely to a bank.

It has no walls, no interior walls. Someone gutted it at one point and never got any further. The wiring was hanging exposed from the ceiling. The owner died of hepatitis there about six months back and his partner just locked up and left.

We make assumptions about change, about people’s lives but we most often don’t know their struggles do we?

Not a day goes by now when I am not grateful to have a means of support, and my own kitchen, and by the world’s standards an incredible amount of ease and safety.

My wish today is that out there someone, one family that has been displaced is able to find a new place to call home, and an area to cook in that they will treasure for the rest of their lives.

We hear so much about the folks that take the risk to migrate and not enough about those who don’t even have that as an option.

Last updated February 18, 2016