Close Encounters With Los Politos
Close Encounters With Los Politos
Pillo, pillo, pillo.
I was wearing my headphones and listening to the audiobook of The Return, Hisham Matar’s stunning memoir about going back to Libya after the revolution in 2011.
It’s the third time in two weeks I’ve listened to it in its entirety. Each time it ends I am stunned, almost panicked it’s over. I start at the beginning again.
I’m happy to be listening, as opposed to reading. Usually I have some guilt about listening to audiobooks, as if I’m cheating on tangible books with pages.
But this is narrated by the author. I can hear his intellect. Just as I can see intelligence in faces, I hear it in his voice; his ease with words. He does with language what his aunt did with bread, as he sat and watched her make it one day.
As he writes about Libya, I am struck by both how little I know about it and its beauty. There is such a vast hole in my education about the way people live in North Africa and the Middle East.
I wish everyone would read The Return. I wish it were required by the Great Librarian in the Sky.
It’s like being sung a long, dark lullaby. Which is perhaps why I need to pull over—I’m getting too tired to drive.
It happens occasionally, and I didn’t sleep much the night before.
I’ve been doing this commute between New York and Virginia for forty years. Sometimes the repetitiveness of white lines on the highway puts me into a trance, and I must stop. I set my alarm for ten or twenty minutes, close my eyes, and meditate. Afterwards I buy a coffee and am restored.
I have a rule when driving—never, under any circumstances, take an exit. Always pull over at a rest stop. The reasons for this are manifold and include personal safety.
Certain states are abject liars (I’m talking to you, Maryland.) They’ve signs cheerfully declaring gas and restaurants nearby.
Do not be a sucker. You’ll drive five miles before finding a quagmire of sprawl including a gas station.
However, sleeping at the wheel is an emergency, and I am at least twenty minutes before the next rest stop. I pull over at Exit Two.
New Jersey is worse than Maryland. As anyone who has had the misfortune of driving there knows, it is notorious for an inability to make a left turn, a U-turn, any turn at all. I can see immediately that due to construction and the long line of cars facing the opposite direction, I am going to be in New Jersey for longer than I anticipated.
An hour. It was a harbinger for the rest of the journey, which has the sad distinction of being the longest in history, save the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 1997.
Yesterday took nine hours to go 300 miles, and I’m the lucky one. I wasn’t in any of the horrific accidents I passed.
Incredibly, the only place for a nap off Exit Two seems to be a daycare center in this huge office building. I feel uneasy resting here. I am sure napping in daycare center parking lots might get me on the news. But I must rest a minute, and I’m afraid to drive further down the road.
I read the text before I close my eyes.
A friend who knew I was headed into town asked me to help chaperone her kids on a field trip the next day.
I instantly know she must be desperate to ask me. As everyone knows, I am not overfond of children. I taught high school for two months when I was 25 years old and learned I could never be a schoolteacher.
But most of my close friends are teachers, from middle schools to universities. I know a great deal about the long list of dreadful idiocies teachers must now endure.
To a person, their complaints have little to do with their students, and everything to do with the mind-sucking hell they must endure from administrators. There are some very stupid laws on the books as well.
Testing, testing, testing. It’s all about tests and has almost nothing to do with teaching. I could write another few essays about this, so I’ll just give you the punch line: it’s shocking any teacher shows up at work. They all need our humble appreciation and much more money.
Truly, people. You have no idea. It’s a profession my friends once enjoyed and has turned into a thing of dread for most of them.
I’m going to call my teacher friend Ms. Tee for the sake of this essay, just in case I write anything which could get her in trouble. I don’t want to do that. Decades since our friendship began, I’m still a bad influence on her.
Ms. Tee is one of the few teachers I know who retains a sense of optimism. She teaches English as a Second Language (ESL) so knows she’s helping her students with something practical and necessary. She wants them to have good lives. She’s always on their side.
If Ms. Tee needs my help, there’s only one answer: yes.
Most of her students are from two areas: Central America and Afghanistan.
After we pulled out of Afghanistan and the Taliban took over, this area south of Washington, D.C, got a large influx of immigrants. Many are people who aided the United States during the war. They’re the ones lucky enough to get out.
Tens of thousands of others haven’t. It’s now illegal there for girls in Afghanistan to go to school past the sixth grade.
And due to food insecurity and violence, immigrants from Central America have increased. Places which used to be relatively safe no longer are.
There are reasons why, and U.S. policy contributed to it.
In 2019, the Trump administration cut funding to Central America’s Northern Triangle, because “America first.” Money was suspended until these countries did more to curb the number of people illegally migrating here.
When funding was cut to Central America, we cut out food, shelter, and medicine to already impoverished people. In return, more of them will have to come here for survival’s sake. It’s that simple.
Although funding has been reestablished since, its parameters are narrower than before. It’s not surprising we have more immigrants. By cutting funding, we added to the developing nightmare.
The next day I drive out to the state park. I wait in the parking lot, then see a good old yellow school bus arrive.
An endless stream of kids gets off the bus. No wonder she needs another chaperone; there are a lot them.
I quickly discover most everyone is from Afghanistan, Guatemala, and El Salvador. There’s at least one girl from Pakistan.
I sit with her at lunch. Her English is excellent, and she speaks without an accent. I ask how long she’s been in the United States; it’s over a decade.
“Why are you in this class?” I ask.
She’s in the class because there’s a rule which states she take at least one ESL class, no matter how good her English. Last year she was in AP English. This year she’s taking an ESL class with some students who’ve been here less than a year.
Testing, testing, testing. Rules, rules, rules.
I ask the girl how many languages she speaks.
Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, English, and Persian (Farsi.) She’s fluent in five languages and can also read and understand Arabic. She’s seventeen years old.
Any of you out there with a kid fluent in five languages?
She wears a hijab and has flawless makeup. She’s beautiful.
We are hiking to the river. I am in charge of the rear of the line, so I’ve got the dawdlers.
I’ll tell you one thing, teenagers are teenagers no matter where they’re from. Two lovebirds hang back, hoping I’ll forge ahead so they can make out in peace.
They’re truly testing my patience. It would be impossible for them to walk more slowly. But when I beg them “Rapido, rapido por favor…” we all laugh together. They are reassured their English is better than my Spanish.
I meet a boy from Guatemala. I like him a lot. He’s tiny, very slight, and has a huge mop of hair. We talk about Frida Kahlo. I tell him I saw an exhibit of her work at the Brooklyn Museum.
Everyone in their little group is suddenly paying attention. I talk about Kahlo’s body casts, and her paintings on them. I ask him if he’s an artist. He says,
“Well, I like to draw.”
Like most of the students from Guatemala, he’s Indigenous. I tell them about a friend who spent a lot of time in his country learning how to weave in the mountains.
I don’t mention how long it’s been since she was there, or that she went to Guatemala when it was safer to do so.
I ask them to teach me a song. They try. I only remember the chorus,
“Pio, Pio, Pio…” which are little cheeping sounds from a chicken. It’s enough to remember, and I find it on YouTube when I come home. It’s called Los Pollitos.
They laugh as I keep singing pio, pio, pio…
I speak to another boy from Guatemala. His English isn’t very good, he’s only been here months, not years. But we’re able to have a conversation.
His mother is still in Guatemala. His father is in Tennessee and got a job working on a chicken farm. He is here without them, or any of his siblings; he lives with a relative.
Somehow, we land on the topic of grief. His grandfather died, and he wasn’t there for the death or funeral. I tell him my father died when I was fifteen. We walk a little in silence.
“Sad,” he says.
“Yes,” I reply.
He tells me Ms. Tee is the “more best” teacher he has.
This doesn’t surprise me. I think she’s the more best too.
I can understand and speak a smattering of Spanish. I pick up something a bunch of them say—carne asada—and we start talking about food. I tell them how good the Spanish food is in New York; how much I love birria.
The young artist who likes to sketch tells me most people in town think they all eat at Taco Bell; and adds they tend to assume they’re all from Mexico.
So we talk a bit about how uneducated a lot of Americans are about the rest of the world. How little we know of travel.
I tell them when I took my niece to Europe, how impressed she was by our cab driver in Amsterdam. He was from Syria. He spoke flawless English and was fluent in many others.
The number of languages people spoke in Europe astounded her.
I wish Americans traveled more. I wish they read more. I wish they could have gone with me on our long hike in a state park and watched these kids skim stones on the river.
When we finally got back lunch had to be unpacked.
At least one kid didn’t eat a sandwich. Ms. Tee had requested turkey sandwiches and instead they supplemented them with ham. They were out of peanut butter and jelly and turkey. Only ham was left.
Muslims do not eat pork. I suppose it never occurred to the cafeteria staff.
I do not know which of them got here legally and which got here illegally.
But I wonder how many people would be confident enough in their American son to leave him in another state without either parent.
It’s simply what had to be done.
I wonder how many people in America have a child who is fluent in just one other language.
I think about JD Vance making up stories about the legal immigrants in Ohio, admitting it was a lie, and feeling good about his lie.
I think about the chicken farmer in Tennessee who very well may vote for Trump while employing workers from Central America, like my new friend’s father.
I think about our agricultural, construction, and hospitality industries, and how many undocumented workers are employed by them. These industries would be crippled without them.
We still have a low unemployment rate. Our economy relies on immigrants. I wish instead of almost apologizing, Democrats would lean into these truths.
We live in a world of so many lies. My run-in with a bunch of immigrants reminded me of what is true and good.
Like Hisham Matar’s memoir, spending time with them reminded me of the beauty of the world, and how little I know of it.
It was humbling. It was the more best.
Glad you got to experience the more best part of teaching!