When the only home you know becomes a place you may never see again
AMERICA AND AMERICANS ARE MANY THINGS, BUT I WAS reminded of how simultaneously bewildering, charming, generous and scary this place can be while watching a new documentary called This Is Home, about four Syrian refugee families who relocated to Baltimore just months before Donald Trump was sworn into office. The film premiered at Sundance this year, and I think its gentle humor may have surprised those who were expecting a grim refugee tale.
In one scene, Mohammed, a Syrian dad, is learning how to shop for groceries with a kind and enthusiastic worker from the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a nonprofit charged with getting the families settled. She takes him to a massive wall of milk containers—in other words, a typical American dairy section. They stand in front of this monument to choice, with a translator on speakerphone, and the guide starts going through all the kinds of milk, from skim to whole fat, 1%, 2%, with and without lactose—the explanation goes on and on in Arabic and English. The look on the father’s face is somewhere between confusion and panic. (And she didn’t even get into almond milk and flavored creamers.)
This story is from the February 5,2018 edition of Time.
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This story is from the February 5,2018 edition of Time.
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