A young migrant mother is in my kitchen right now; I signed up on a local signup sheet as someone with a kitchen available to loan out to migrants. She wanted to bake a birthday cake for her daughter — one of the other volunteers bought the groceries, so I just provided the oven and a kitchen to work in.
She’s so grateful, it makes your heart break. When she arrived (with her adorable almost-six-year-old), I asked if she wanted me to help or if she was okay on her own. She asked for ayuda, por favor — it’s been eight months since she’s had access to a kitchen, and she wasn’t sure she remembered how to cook. And of course, the instructions on the cake box are in English.
So I walked her through it; she was eager to learn. While we cooked together, she reminded me that eggs were called huevos (my high school Spanish was a long time ago), and I taught her that in English, they were called eggs.
I went to do some computer work while the cake was baking, after putting Encanto on the TV for her daughter. I wasn’t sure if I could find a Spanish version, but the mother said not to worry, that it was good for the little one to practice her English. The mother thanked me again — I told her I understood; some of my own relatives had fled the troubles in Sri Lanka as refugees.
There’s some tension in Oak Park right now around giving aid to the migrants, when there are, of course, deep and ongoing needs in our community already.
I don’t know how to measure how best to allocate limited budgets — there are good arguments both for supporting the most marginalized and vulnerable, and for distributing equally across populations. I usually end up advocating a mix of both approaches, which is maybe not entirely ethically consistent, but it does help assuage potential community resentment…
But one thing I’ll say for all these young migrant families I’ve met in the last several months — they are very eager to work, to learn English, to establish a safe and stable home for their children. If we can get them through the difficult transitional period, to where they’re housed and able to legally work to continue to pay for that housing, I think they’ll quickly become very productive members of the community. Their urgent needs are likely to be short-term.
And the initial need to have them housed in some fashion over the Chicago winter was a crisis situation — after driving by the police station and seeing the little ones on thin mats on the concrete, I don’t think many of us could stand picturing infants and toddlers trying to get through polar vortex temperatures in a donated tent.
I went upstairs just now — the cakes had cooled, and I showed the mother how to use an offset spatula and a bowl of hot water to ice them smoothly; it was a new technique for her. And then I went to take a phone call, and when I came back, she was doing all the dishes in my sink (many of which weren’t from her cake-making), and which I’d told her not to bother with, that I’d get them later.
She wanted to do something for me, which I understood.
