Refugees

In reading over this to look at themes that might have emerged I see there’s a lot of bad things here. Lot of problems, lot of pain. But that’s what we were about: solving problems, lifting up the afflicted, trying to do the spirit.

————–

We were in Dallas a few weeks ago. I went for a walk in the old neighborhood where refugees used to live and I used to work. One building after another each one filled with memories of struggles, of desperation, of beauty, of loneliness, of hard, hard work, of endurance, of strength, of triumph lost in the desperation, but triumph nonetheless.

Where the old couple lived with their deaf and mute granddaughter who may not have really been related. After a few years the husband had a stroke and ended up in a nursing home on Bryan and the wife walked to the place, her conical hat, every day to take care of her husband. At his funeral home the family was holding a vigil and the funeral home guy brought a customer into the room to look at the casket the husband was actually in. The granddaughter went to work for Fiesta Mart. She and I had lunch together a few times over the years.

In one of the downstairs apartments a man was murdered, stabbed to death and his wife slashed and assaulted. I found out about it when Leslie called me to come to her office and the woman was sitting on her floor under a table with what looked to me like primitive stitching to close the wounds and there was a Baptist minister huddled mute in a chair. I went to the apartment to get something and there was blood literally everywhere – floors, walls, ceilings. One of the detectives asked me some questions in a friendly manner = to assess whether I should be interrogated.

Where two brothers argued over a bowl of rice and one stabbed the other, killing him. I always thought their mother had the most beautiful eyes.

4320 San Jacinto – the pretty Mexican woman with mutilated genitalia.

The children capering around a 5-gallon bucket and a mouse inside they were killing with sticks.

Where the old American woman lived with her son. She was a hoarder and eventually burned her apartment out.

4400 – where the old thin woman with lung disease lived sharing a one bedroom apartment with a woman who had been crippled from a Khmer Rouge injection. The old woman lived in the tiny living room and the disabled woman lived in the equally tiny bedroom. The two women hated one another. Chuck, in my bible study group bought the old woman a window air conditioner.

In a corner apartment lived a family in which the husband had liver cancer and the daughter ended up killing herself. In another one-bedroom corner apartment there was a family of 6 – husband, wife and four sons. The husband went to work for in a hospital food service and stayed in that job for 30 years. The wife opened a little liquor store and parlayed that into several large stores.

Upstairs a man was dying from a rare cancer. His wife and teen son and daughter took care of him. I took him to the Parkland ER where they parked him on a gurney in a hallway. I offered him a stick of gum and he refused. He died there later that day. When I called his sponsor he said, “I can go maybe $200” for the funeral. A few years after he died his son had a GI bleed and suffered brain damage as a result. His daughter was doing well the last I saw of her when she helped a friend who was dying of breast cancer.

Where “The Mansion” was is now a vacant lot. It was a large two-story house where in room after room refugee families made their homes. For a few months when he was an infant my son stayed part of every weekday with an old Cambodian woman in that house. She would hold him when he was awake and rock him in a hammock when he was asleep. In the old days the apartments next door was where the woman who took care of my son lived with her daughter and granddaughter. The granddaughter’s story is here: https://ckjournal.com/keo

It was in this apartment that General William Westmoreland, commander of all the U.S. troops in Vietnam visited with us to have an orange soda and a cookie and hear about the work we had been doing in the refugee community.

Outside of many apartments people were growing lemon grass and basil and other produce.

Upstairs there were two sisters. Martin and I were talking with them one day and the next day they went swimming in a lake and one drowned and the other was in ICU for some days. I remember how small she looked in the bed in Children’s Medical Center.

There was a very nice family upstairs with sons and daughters working. They had a celebratory feast for my students. I wish I remembered their names. One of the daughters and her family and I were friendly for years.

The man with no face.

The “youth counselor” according to his business card who tried to take a teen boy from his family. They thought they had to agree to him taking the boy. We ended that deal.

People barging into refugee’s apartments and taking whatever they wanted. We had a grass-roots spear-making project. Jam them through the door when the robbers rattled the doorknob and the problem went away. Cool.

Someone called Leslie’s friend, Alison to report some children being molested. Leslie and Alison called police who said “we’ll take a report.” I knew someone who worked in the sex crimes against children unit and I called him and the molester was arrested in the next day or so. They (L & A) went together to the trial to mind the children while waiting for them to be called to testify. They went back for the sentencing: Life, because he’d been convicted twice before for similar crimes.

There was a police storefront housed in what used to be an unsavory bar (I was driving past one day and a women standing there lifted her skirt). My students operated out of that storefront for several years. For a while a derelict man named W—— would come to the storefront for a student to do a weekly(!) dressing change on a chronically infected leg that had maggots in it.

We were evicted from the police after the commander over the Central Patrol District came by to see the sergeant in charge and neither the sergeant nor any other police officers were in the building – just Baylor students, volunteers, and refugees – including a Roma (gypsy) girl who stood up on a desk and did a sexy dance for the commander who deeply did not appreciate it.

A Chinese woman sold soft drinks and snack foods out of her apartment. Her daughter had a large nevus (mole) on her cheek. The mother told the daughter that the nevus was punishment for wasting her husband’s money in a previous life. The little girl was set for surgery to remove the nevus and I was going to take them. The girl came out of the apartment and got into the truck, then her mother came out and said something and the daughter says, “My mother says there is a man with a gun in there.” And then she says, “There he is.” And I was pulling the mother and the little brother into the pickup and there was a man with a revolver stuck in his pants and he was walking fast looking kind of intense and I was driving backwards across a couple of parking lots. At Children’s hospital they gave the girl a fentanyl sucker and pretty soon she was all happy and relaxed and on the way to surgery.

A woman died and the preacher didn’t show up for the funeral so it ended up with two Mormon missionaries and me holding the service. They didn’t know what to do and neither did I, but we did the best we could.

In one of the buildings there was an apartment that had rooms that seemed like a labyrinth. One day I was in that apartment with a student, Olivia, who I liked a lot. We were talking with a Cambodian woman and Olivia said, “Mr. Kemp, there’s a fire in the closet.” Sure enough the woman’s 4-year-old son had set a fire in the closet. I threw the burning clothes out of the apartment and got a burn from a melted tennis shoe. A few years later a Mexican girl named E——- was in the apartment and it caught fire. She ran the wrong way and was trapped and died. I have candle from one of the novena services.

There was a woman with tuberculosis upstairs. The TB nurse doing direct observed therapy (DOT) was a friend of mine and I would see her every week or so. DOT is where a health professional of some kind directly observes the patient taking their medicine every day. The woman’s daughter and I were friends on Facebook for several years.

Also upstairs was a woman with cervical cancer who I and my students took care of for 2-3 years (cervical cancer is a slow grower) who ultimately died curled up on a worn-out loveseat in the living room at the very moment I walked into the room after a trip to Boston. Her daughter had been her main caregiver and she and I and a cute little gangster

from downstairs washed the lady’s wasted body and dressed her in a sarong and a pink T-shirt. Somewhere along the way her son went to prison for robbery. He had committed some violent crimes and was sentenced as an adult. When he got out of prison about 10 years later he was deported to Cambodia. I saw him between release and deportation and he thanked me for caring for his mother. The last time I talked with his sister was six years ago.

Two former prostitutes lived downstairs. They liked to fix me lunches. One of them had a daughter with a severe seizure disorder.

In the corner apartment lived a Latino family with a 50 year-old son who had congestive heart failure. His mother was a terror, but she tolerated the students and me. I believe we made a difference in the CHF and extended his life by a few years.

An American man used to walk around the neighborhood with his head encircled by tape (to keep his thoughts inside). When someone would get too close to him he would start shadow boxing in a threatening way so everyone would cross the street when he was coming along with his head taped up, ready to fight.

Never to forget the American woman who was obese and bedfast and who, when the students turned her over roaches scattered from beneath her back. We saw her for several years and then Alison took over – eventually she died from cancer in that little apartment where I would sit at the table with her partner Mr. E while he smoked cigarettes. So long, Tressia.

There was a new man living across the street. I took him to the Parkland ER for buboes (enormously enlarged lymph nodes in his groin) and somewhere along the line a doctor brought me into a dark room with glowing monitors in the middle and along the walls and people sitting facing the monitors making notes and the doctor showed me the image from the man I’d brought in and I could see he had markedly enlarged nodes all through his chest. AIDS, TB.

Across the street I was in an apartment one evening and Cambodian people were watching TV. There was white car driving along highways somewhere filmed from a helicopter and I asked what was going on and someone said, “OJ” and I felt like there was some kind of a lesson in someone who had everything driving along like that and people who had nothing watching.

A woman was standing on the sidewalk on Carroll Street holding her limp baby. I stopped, she got in and we drove to Children’s Medical Center where someone in the business office said we should skip the registration and she took us straight to the ER. The baby had pneumonia and she lived.

1604 Annex was a large two-story building sometimes with gangsters at front and back. This is where my students came across two teenage girls living in an empty apartment with some blankets in the corner. They were runaways from their molester father. The students set the girls up with some furniture and clothes. I would see them around for a long time after that. One went to prison and the other became a manager at Walmart.

There was a Guatemalan woman living there who was prostituting. She offered me sex, but I said no thank you. She was a nice person.

There were a lot of nice people in that neighborhood.

It was good to walk through there again.