FORWARD>International>In India, a Historic Community Watches Its Numbers Dwindle

In India, a Historic Community Watches Its Numbers Dwindle

By Beth Schwartzapfel
August 25, 2007

Alibag, India - In most other Jewish communities, Magen Aboth would be considered an understated synagogue. But here in Alibag — a sleepy, dusty town on the west coast of India where one- and two-room huts with thatched roofs dominate the landscape — it’s a magnificent, proud building. Two stories tall and trimmed in graceful curves and carved flowers, its concrete facade is painted in shades of blue, pillars fronting a mosaic-tiled portico.

The hazan, Jacob Elijah Dandekar, leads morning prayers at 7:30 and afternoon mincha at 5:30, but there’s rarely a minyan. The group must make do with the seven or so people who come regularly. Dandekar, 72, says that he usually spends the rest of day reading the Torah. (“Or else the paper,” he says with a chuckle.) On this morning, he sits on a bench in the cool shade of the portico, shooing away the neighborhood goats that wander into the courtyard.

Alibag and the surrounding villages and towns — Ravdanda, Panvel, Pen, Nandgaon, Navgaon, about 22 miles southwest across a gray-green harbor from Mumbai — were home to what was once a thriving and vibrant Jewish community known as the Bene Israel. So many Jews once lived here, in fact, that this dirt road is called Israel Lane. The facades of many of the houses along it still bear Stars of David and Hebrew lettering. Four families now remain, totaling about 20 people. Of those, Dandekar says, it’s not a question of whether they will leave, but when.

“If they get a nice price for their property, they will go,” he said. “They are waiting for money, or waiting for their children to finish their courses, and then they will go.”

Dandekar’s English is passable, but he’s more comfortable in his native Marathi, and his translator today was Ben Siyon Ghosalker, the caretaker of Knesseth Eliyahoo Synagogue in Mumbai. Ghosalker, a cheerful man of 68 with a toothless smile and seemingly endless energy, is so effusive about the sights to be seen here in Alibag that he convinced this traveler to endure three sweaty hours on a bumpy, overcrowded bus from Mumbai. Indeed, Ghosalker is deeply connected to Alibag. Two years ago, his nephew was bar mitzvahed here. It was probably Ailbag’s final bar mitzvah: Adeyal Wakrulkar, now 14, is the youngest Jewish person left here.

The Wakrulkar family members own the S. David Soda Water Factory, housed in a worn cement building at the crossroads of two dirt lanes. Hand-drawn lettering in crumbling, colorful paint on the walls outside its entrance informs visitors in Marathi and English that ice cream and cold drinks are available inside. Ghosalker’s sister, Norin Wakrulkar, lives here with her son and daughter-in-law Levy and Sinora, and the couple’s two sons. Levy Yoseph Wakrulkar, born here in Alibag, celebrated his bar mitzvah at Magen Aboth and raised his sons here — the sixth generation of the family to live both a traditionally Indian and traditionally Jewish way of life in this town.

In 1964, when Levy was born, there were some 30 Jewish families here in Alibag; teachers from Mumbai visited regularly to teach religious school to the children, a bar mitzvah was celebrated every year or two, and come prayer times it was easy to assemble a minyan. Mirroring the larger Indian migration patterns to urban population centers from rural ones, however, many Bene Israel have moved to the city from the villages and have established lives in Mumbai and in the nearby cities of Thane and Pune. But most have moved to Israel. Of the 65,000 Bene Israel, 4,000 live in greater Mumbai and 60,000 live in Israel.

“We feel sad,” Sinora said of life in Alibag without the friends and relatives who have left in large numbers. “But we have e-mail and messages on the Internet. They come to visit every one or two years. And we go to Thane, and Bombay, and Pune.” But the Wakrulkars, for their part, are staying put. “We like Israel,” Sinora said, “but we like India more. India is our home.”

Shalva Weil, an anthropologist who researches Indian Jewry at Hebrew University’s Research Institute for Innovation in Education, noted that the emigration phenomenon is particularly intriguing, since Jews in India never suffered from discrimination. There were trickles of immigration in the 1940s after Israeli independence, Weil said, but there was never much Zionist fervor among the Bene Israel, who felt too Indian. Immigration began in earnest in the 1960s, Weil said, when economic opportunities became available in Israel on a scale on which they weren’t available in India.

“Friends and family wrote letters and said, ‘We’re happy here,’” Ghosalker recalled of the pattern by which his own family — one sister and four cousins — began to leave. “So they went, too, and wrote letters to their friends and family.” The snowball effect has left families without appropriate marriage candidates for their sons and daughters, Weil said, and so the exodus continues as young people now leave to get married.

It’s a circuitous and 2,000-year-long journey that may well have landed them back where their ancestors started. Legends abound about the origins of the Bene Israel, but the most romantic, and the one that seems to have stuck, claims that a boatload of oil pressers, fleeing persecution by King Antiochus of Palestine in second-century BCE, was shipwrecked here in the year 175. Seven couples survived, and they became the forbearers of the Bene Israel — living peaceably with their new neighbors, speaking the local language, observing the local customs and dress, and assimilating into their new homeland without losing touch with a few basic tenets of their religion. For example, they observed the laws of kashrut and circumcision and rested on the Sabbath (in fact, in Marathi they were known as Shanwar Teli, or Saturday oil pressers, in recognition of their day of rest).

But because the Bene Israel were cut off from the rest of the Jewish Diaspora for many hundreds of years (and, as the story goes, their holy books and religious articles went down with their ship), the specifics of Judaism — the Hebrew language, for instance, and the Torah and Talmud — were lost to them. That is, until they were “discovered” in the 1700s by a Cochini merchant who then brought them into contact with the wider Jewish world and its teachings. At their peak, in the 1940s, Bene Israel numbered some 20,000 in India; they built large synagogues in Mumbai and Pune, and small ones dotted these villages on the coast. An ancient cemetery in the village of Navgaon is said to contain the graves of the shipwrecked couples; newer headstones, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are written in English, Marathi and Hebrew.

The cemetery is in a field flanked by coconut trees, blanketed with a thick layer of grass and wild mint. Headstones cropped up from amid the brush here and there, but more common were plain stones sunken into the earth, laid in the shapes of rectangles, roughly the size of the bodies that had long ago been buried there. “Here lie buried the ancestors of the Bene Israel community of India,” read the inscription on an imposing stone obelisk that the community had come together to build some years ago. The obelisk kept watch over the graves of those “who were shipwrecked on the shores of Navgaon nearly 2,000 years ago…. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, they have emigrated in large numbers to the State of Israel, where they are happily settled.”

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood>Water, One Dollar

Water, One Dollar

By Beth Schwartzapfel
November 24, 2006

Mohammad B. Miah is a small man. He stands about five feet tall with his red and white and black leather hi-top sneakers on. He lives in Astoria, Queens, and he wants to know whether I work for the city. He motions in the direction of City Hall.

“You have a job?” he asks.

“I’m a writer,” I say, waving my notebook, which is green and skinny, and has spiral binding on top.

“You work for the city?” he asks.

“No, for a newspaper,” I answer, waving my notebook again. His English is not great, and I think ‘freelance’ will be too hard to explain.

Every morning, Mohammad spends two dollars to ride the subway to 293 Church Street, a garage-like space tucked between two fancy restaurants in a bustling corner of Tribeca. 293 Church Street is more like a not-place than a place. Mohammad calls it a “gar-iz.” It is run by a bristling man named John who has a grey mustache and a heavy Eastern European accent. For six months, Mohammed came to the gar-iz every morning to pick up a silver cart, which he would wheel here, to the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, and sell hot dogs. On a good day, he made about $60 profit. On a slow day, $40.

Mohammad has a vendor’s license, which he keeps in a dirty plastic sheath in his otherwise empty brown leather wallet, its tarnished beaded ball-chain necklace wrapped around it. The license cost him $60, plus $56 for a required 2-day class which taught him that he must wear plastic gloves to handle food, and offered guidance as to how to dress appropriately. The rent on the cart was approximately six hundred dollars per month. It varied, though. “If I am making good business,” he said, “rent go up.”

A vendor’s license allows you to sell food on the street, but a permit is necessary to own your own cart. One day, he showed up at the garage to find that the cart he was renting was no longer available. Permits expire every 7 months, so Mohammad speculates that the cart owner’s permit ran out, or that someone else laid claim to the cart. In any case, he says, pointing to a blue and yellow Sabrett umbrella on the other side of the approach to the bridge, “Maybe he have permit. I have no permit.” Which is to say, without his own permit, there’s nothing he can do.

So now he arrives at 293 Church Street each morning with two blue coolers and an old silver hand-truck. “Water! Cold things!” he says to a group of tourists walking by. “One dollar!” It comes out sounding like, “Wada! Coldings! Wandallah!”

He spends about $30 to fill up the coolers with water, soda, Gatorade, and ice. He wheels the hand truck down Church Street, weaving in and out of parked cars and traffic. The wheels on the truck squeak as he walks. The two coolers are stacked on top of each other, and the lid on the top cooler doesn’t fit quite right. Handfuls of ice cubes fall onto his feet and hit the pavement. His small frame moves quickly, and, struggling to keep up, I keep an eye on his blue and grey and yellow baseball cap, which is made from parachute material and Velcros in the back. He is like a compact little rectangle, with a tan fleece top and blue polyester pants.

He makes a left onto Chambers Street, passes a fruit vendor and a hot dog cart, passes Ralph’s Discount City, and tells me we’re going to the Blooklyn Biliz.

“The Blooklyn Biliz. You know the Blooklyn Biliz?”

I think he’s saying “Brooklyn Village,” so I shake my head no.

“I show you.” He tells me to walk on the sidewalk.

The sky is looking grey, and despite the temperature, which is only in the mid-50s, the haze and the humidity make the air feel hot and sticky.

“Maybe coming rain today,” he says, “people no buy cold things.” Mohammad looks up at the gathering cloud cover. “It’s hard making people like water.”

Mohammad picks a spot at the approach to the Bridge where there is a brass symbol of a walking person inlaid into the sidewalk, with matching brass arrows inlaid on either side, in each direction. The on-ramp for cars hugs the left side of the walkway, and the off-ramp hugs the right. Clumps of tourists walk by, holding cameras and guide books. Joggers and bikers pass, too, sweaty and fast. The Blooklyn Biliz looks dishwater grey on this cloudy day. Its usual majesty is dwarfed by all the taillights and the buildings, which, from this angle, seem at least as tall, if not taller. Even the buildings on the Brooklyn side of the bridge seem tall enough to jostle for the skyline’s attention.

“I set here,” says Mohammad. “People come across. They tired. They buy water.” He lays the two coolers side-by-side, takes their lids off, reaches into the ice, and pulls the bottles of Gatorade—which, at $2, are his most expensive item—to the top of the chilly pile.

“Wada! Coldings! Wandallah!” he calls to a passing blonde family.

“No thank you,” says one woman.

“OK,” says Mohammad, “have a nice day.”

His voice is slightly nasal, and he speaks quickly and confidently, as though he is not aware of the fact that he is often hard to understand. He has dark brown deep-set eyes and a square-shaped dark brown beard with a few grey hairs. Mohammad came to this country from his native Bangladesh when he was 34 years old. The lawlessness and random violence in his country had been wearing him down. “My country too much crazy people,” he says. “People gun. You have money, they take it.” He had been trying to get a visa through the lottery visa program since 1990. He hit the jackpot in 1998. “This country very nice. I like this country,” he says. “Here you have one thousand dollars in your pocket, nobody takes it.”

Mohammad has been here at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge for an hour. So far today, he has made $4.

“Gatorade, Miss?” he asks a passing woman. It sounds like “Gatorid.” “Want Gatorid? That’s good.”

Mohammad wonders if it’s too cold for people to want soda. “I looking for another job now,” he says. “Outside work, vendor, too headache.” Rain, cold, people’s whims—his living is too uncertain. “People buy water, I have money. People don’t buy water, I don’t have money.” When he wants to go to the bathroom, he must cart his coolers to a nearby bench and ask some people sitting there to watch them while he runs to Starbucks.

He lives in a 2-bedroom basement apartment which costs $800. I ask him if he lives alone.

“No, not a loan,” he says. “Rent. Monthly rent.”

He lives with a friend, another Bangladeshi. His wife is still in Bangladesh. He wants to bring her here, but it’s too expensive. “‘How come you no make America for me?’” he says she asks him. “I say no, maybe later.” When he goes to City Hall to try to get her a visa, they always ask about money, always money. “City say ‘how much you make money?’ If you have money, city give you visa.”

He interrupts himself. “Yes sir, wada?” He continues. “If you have no money, city says, ‘how can your wife eat?’”

The Urban Justice Center recently released a report about street vendors in lower Manhattan. They interviewed 100 vendors in 5 languages, and they found among them a median yearly income of $7,500. I cannot imagine Mohammad making even that much at this rate. “The typical vendor,” wrote the New York Times in an article about the report, “is a married immigrant man who is the sole provider for his family and has no health insurance.” That’s Mohammad. “Only 20 percent of the vendors reported English as their first language; forty percent said they were uncomfortable speaking it,” the Times went on to say.

Mohammad is a Muslim. He belongs to the Alamin Mosque on 36th Avenue in Long Island City. He prays five times a day. He might not get a chance to pray five times today, though. He looks at his watch. He sometimes goes to a mosque near here, if he can get away while he’s working. “You watch?” He gestures at his coolers.

“Sure,” I say. “I’ll watch.”

“Really? No problem?” he asks? “You watch, I go?” I nod. “No problem.”

“You watch, I go.” He’s happy. I watch his little blue and grey and yellow hat bob through the crowd towards the Assata Islamic Center, a mile north, on Allen Street.

A sign above my head reads “AREA UNDER NYPD VIDEO SURVEILLANCE.” I watch the twin yellow lights flash at the off-ramp. Bottomtop. Bottomtop. Bottomtop. I write in my skinny green notebook. I wait. A red double-decker Gray Line bus drives by, people spilling off the roof with their cameras. Bottomtop. Bottomtop. I look at the Bridge. Some 27 people died during its construction, most of them immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. One tourist in an orange Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt passes, doubles back, asks for a beer. When I tell him it’s only water, soda, and Gatorade, he leaves. While Mohammad is gone, I sell two sodas and one water. It’s been about two hours, and Mohammad’s total is now $7.

He returns in about 20 minutes. He smiles at me when I hand him the crumpled dollar bills. “Oh,” he says. “You sell?”

Mohammad has four children. The oldest is 17, the youngest—he has to count forwards on his hand from 1997—is 9. They live in Queens, too, with their mother, his first wife. She’s Bangladeshi but they met here. She divorced him a few years back when she fell in love with another man. After that, Mohammad went back to Bangladesh “to make another marriage.” It sounds like he says “mat-iz.” He gives his first wife money for their children.

“Wada?” He pauses to ask a passerby. “Cold dlink?”

“No thank you.”

“OK, bye.”

He turns to me. “You matiz?”

I’m wearing a wedding ring. I am, for all intents and purposes, married, although my partnership is not valid in 46 states and, until 1993, was flatly illegal in 14. For simplicity’s sake, I shake my head. No. It’s not a lie, not exactly.

“No?” he asks. “What happen?”

I just shrug silently. He leaves it alone.

Mohammad says he has tried to get a job in a restaurant, but he can’t because of his beard. The weather is getting cold, and he knows he won’t be able to sell cold drinks for much longer. So he has decided to try to get a job with the City. His options are limited because he can’t read or write much English. But he wouldn’t mind working with trash. “I make cleaning job,” he says, “OK. No problem. Garbage OK. I like this.” He looks appraisingly towards City Hall.

“Wada?” he asks the next person, and the next. “Wandallah."

WireTap>Youth Activism>Youth Demand Voting Rights

Youth Demand Voting Rights, Regardless of Ex-Felon Status
Thanks to a proposition appearing on this week's ballot, Rhode Island may join a growing number of states slowly reversing voter disenfranchisement for former felons.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
November 3, 2006

Andres Idarraga dreams of one day becoming a literature professor. As a junior at Brown University majoring in Comparative Literature, Idarraga, 28, seems well on his way to achieving his goal.

Unlike most of his classmates, however, Idarraga arrived at Brown -- and his dreams -- via the Adult Correctional Institutes, Rhode Island's state prison, where he served six years for possession and distribution of cocaine and possession of a firearm. It was in prison that he began to read voraciously; books like Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom and a biography of Thurgood Marshall really stuck with him.

"These guys became like role models to me," he says. "They had this hunger to make a difference." So in the year prior to his release, he sent out his applications to college. When he got out, at 26, after securing a place to live and reuniting with his family, one of the first questions that Idarraga asked his parole officer was: "Can I vote?"

The answer, like that which has been given to some 5 million other Americans, was "no." Under current Rhode Island law, Idarraga will not be eligible to vote until he is 58 years old.

Like 31 other states, Rhode Island bars people with felony convictions from voting while they are incarcerated, on probation, and on parole. Five states bar ex-felons from voting during parole but not probation; in 11 states, some ex-felons lose their right to vote for life. Only Maine and Vermont permit inmates to vote. As more and more young people fill the U.S.'s already overcrowded prisons, stories like Idarraga's are becoming increasingly common.

"The criminal justice system targets young people," says Maggie Williams, Project Director of the Voter Enfranchisement Project in the Bronx, NY, Public Defender's Office. "They are the ones that get picked up. They are the ones getting arrested. A lot of young people feel like there is more of a chance that they are going to end up in prison than that they are going to complete high school."

The pattern may start with school Zero Tolerance policies that criminalize students while they are still in high school. Critics describe this phenomenon as the "school-to-prison pipeline." Indeed, the number of school suspensions has almost doubled in the last 30 years, from 1.7 million to 3.1 million annually, even as violent crime among youth has decreased, according to the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund. In the 2003 book, Deconstructing the School to Prison Pipeline, Daniel Wald and Johanna Losen of the Harvard University Civil Rights Project wrote that 75 percent of those under age 18 who have been sentenced to adult prisons have not passed tenth grade.

Idarraga describes the phenomenon this way: "In some schools, the athletes are popular. In some schools, the smart kids are popular. In my high school, the bad kids are popular." Although he managed to graduate from high school, the job skill Idarraga had learned best there was dealing cocaine.

According to the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 41 percent of persons convicted of felonies in state courts are between the ages of 20 and 29, and seven percent are under 20. Taken together, these statistics indicate that almost half of all felony convictions nationwide are among people under thirty.

It is difficult to pin down exactly how many young people have been disenfranchised due to felony convictions. No analysis has been done to piece apart which states these young people live in, and therefore which laws they are subject to, but the vast majority of the current felony convicts in America under age 30 (the last BJS count, in 2002, indicated that number to be over half a million) will lose their right to vote for at least a period of time.

Critics say that disenfranchising people who have already served their sentences is tantamount to double punishment, and that engaging ex-felons in their rights and responsibilities as a citizen helps to re-integrate them back into their communities and prevent a return to illegal behavior. "People who are coming out of the system have paid their price," says Kara Gotsch of the Washington, DC-based Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization, which promotes reform in sentencing law and practice and alternatives to incarceration. "They deserve a second chance. That is equally so -- and probably even more important -- for young people, because they have an entire lifetime ahead of them."

Racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately impacted on both ends of the school-to-prison pipeline: according to the NAACP, while African-American students in the year 2000 made up only 17 percent of the overall youth population, they account for 34 percent of all school suspensions nationwide. Likewise, while only 16 percent of the overall youth population in 2003 were African-American, they accounted for 45 percent of juvenile arrests in that year. These statistics play themselves out in the voting booth. According to the Sentencing Project, 13 percent of African-American men nationwide are disenfranchised -- a rate that is seven times the national average.

"If you look at the incredible impact that the criminal justice system has on young, urban communities of color," says Williams of the Bronx Public Defenders Office, "and then you spiral that out and think about the implications in terms of civic participation, and the accountability of the political process to communities of color, we are setting up a very long-term pattern of communities not being engaged."

The tide may be turning, however.

Since 2000, six states -- Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Nevada, New Mexico, and Maryland -- have expanded the number of ex-felons who could vote, whereas only two states -- Massachusetts and New Hampshire states -- have passed laws that add to the restrictions of ex-felons' voting rights.

Most recently, in 2002, the Maryland legislature voted to restore voting rights automatically to most ex-felons three years after the completion of their sentences. In Florida, one of only three states which automatically bars all ex-felons from voting for life, Republican candidate Charlie Crist -- a former Florida attorney general and "tough on crime" state legislator -- recently joined Democratic candidate Jim David in supporting automatic restoration of voting rights to those who have completed their sentences.

Until this year, no state has ever posed directly to their electorate the question of whether ex-felons should be allowed to vote.

On Tuesday, voters in the Rhode Island district where Andres Idarraga would vote -- if he could -- will find him standing outside. Maybe he'll be handing out pamphlets. Maybe he'll be holding a sign. Maybe he'll simply strike up conversations. However he conveys it, his message will be: "Vote yes on 2." Proposition 2 asks voters whether they favor a constitutional amendment to restore the right to vote to people on probation and parole for a felony conviction. If it passes, 15,000 people -- Idarraga among them -- will win back their right to vote. Both the editorial pages of the New York Times and the right-leaning Providence Journal have both endorsed the measure.

"It's really quite unprecedented," says the Sentencing Project's Gotsch of Proposition 2.

In Rhode Island young people are disproportionately stripped of their right to vote. Young men are the most heavily disenfranchised group in the state, with 5 percent of men ages 18-34 unable to vote because of felony convictions. In neighborhoods with high rates of poverty, the numbers are tripled: 16 percent of young men in Providence's urban Southside cannot vote. Among young African-American men on the Southside, the number jumps to 40 percent.

"Youth from communities where many people have been to prison recognize that this isn't an outlier issue," says Daniel Schliefer, 24, field coordinator of the Rhode Island Right to Vote Campaign, which provides the organizational infrastructure to support Proposition 2. As such, young people are involved in the statewide campaign in huge numbers. According to Schliefer, fully two-thirds of the people working on the Rhode Island campaign are under 30. "Growing up in the shadow of the "get tough on crime" age," he says, this generation is in a position to reconsider the way society thinks about prisons and crime.

Brown Alumni Magazine>Saving the Children

Saving the Children
Two of them are from warring ethnic groups, but these three South Asians have been united by friendship for fourteen years. Now they are putting their bond to a higher purpose: building a model of pediatric health care for the entire developing world.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March/April 2006

Sanjay Daluvoy ’96 used to watch his mother make sandwiches. In Pasadena, California, where Daluvoy grew up, it was not uncommon for moms to make sandwiches for their young sons. But these weren’t for Sanjay. “There were millions of loaves of bread scattered all over the kitchen counter,” he recalls. “She and a friend were just making all these sandwiches in little lunch bags and dropping them off at homeless shelters. She never made it a big event, with publicity, or for recognition. It’s not like I can Google her. She just does it.”

After he earned his bachelor’s in business economics at Brown, Daluvoy worked on health-care policy in Washington, D.C., conducted research at Children’s Hospital Boston, consulted for health-care companies in San Francisco, started a dot-com called Infinity Markets, and attended medical school in Philadelphia. Through it all, his mother’s example stuck with him. So in December 2004, when the tsunami ravaged Sri Lanka, not far from the Andhra Pradesh region of southern India from which his family had emigrated to the United States, it’s not surprising that Daluvoy immediately felt a need to do something. “You wake up in the morning,” Daluvoy says, “and all the pictures you see are of people that are very similar-looking to you. It just moves you.” It’s also not surprising that, even though Daluvoy was in his fourth year at Jefferson Medical School, by February 2005 he was making plans to go to Sri Lanka with two friends, Kanishka Ratnayaka ’96 and Pratheepan “Deep” Gulasekaram ’96. The three men have been best friends since Brown, regularly talking and meeting whenever they can, even as the obligations of work and family spread them apart. Daluvoy knew that Sri Lanka would need doctors, and so he was sure that he and Ratnayaka, a pediatric cardiology fellow at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., had skills that could prove useful in the tsunami’s aftermath. And Gulasekaram, a lawyer, had lived and worked on Sri Lanka’s remote eastern coast; his experience would also be valuable. “The three of us,” Ratnayaka says, “just wanted to go help and see what was going on.” It also helped that two of the three men were not far removed from life in Sri Lanka, one as a Sinhalese and one as an ethnic Tamil. For more than twenty years, Sri Lanka has been deadlocked in a bloody civil war between the majority ethnic Sinhalese and the minority ethnic Tamils. In 1956 the government, made up of Sinhalese, passed a decree that, from then on, Sinhala would be the only officially recognized language in the country. At the same time, it restricted Tamil access to government jobs and higher education. By the late 1960s violence targeting Tamils had broken out. Since then, the Tamil Tigers have been conducting a guerrilla war with the Sri Lankan government, resulting in the deaths of 65,000 people and the departure from the country of another 300,000. Among those fleeing were Deep Gulasekaram and his family. Gulasekaram, an ethnic Tamil, spent the first four years of his life in Jaffna, a city he describes as the “capital of Tamilian Sri Lankans.” Gulasekaram’s father, a physician, had long been mulling over the idea of taking his family to the United States, but “what hastened the departure,” Deep says, “what made it absolutely urgent, was ethnic conflict.” By the mid-1970s, he adds, “the writing was on the wall. My grandfather’s Sinhalese friends confided to him that if he had the means to get his family out, it would be a good thing.” So the family moved to Los Angeles, and Gulasekaram grew up as part of a large Sri Lankan community populated by both Tamils and Sinhalese. Unlike Gulasekaram’s family, Ratnayaka’s family arrived in the United States intending to stay only for a short while, while Ratnayaka’s father earned a PhD in religious studies at Northwestern University and completed a one-year teaching job at the University of Georgia. A Sinhalese, he intended to return to Sri Lanka at the end of his appointment. But this was the 1970s, when specialists in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Eastern religions were in demand. When Georgia offered him a permanent faculty position, the elder Ratnayaka accepted. As a result, Kanishka grew up in the American South. “Athens, Georgia, is a very white and black community,” he says, adding with wry understatement: “There were not many Asians.” And so it was with two very different experiences that Gulasekaram and Ratnayaka arrived on College Hill as high school seniors in the spring of 1992. They’d both been admitted to Brown and were deciding where to go. Gulasekaram took the campus tour pretty much convinced he would be attending UC Berkeley in the fall. He was pleasantly surprised, however, to see another Sri Lankan in his tour group. “It was very easy for me to tell that he’s Sinhalese,” Gulasekaram recalls. “But for me, I was just more excited because he’s Sri Lankan.” Having just returned from an exciting weekend at the University of Virginia, Ratnayaka was also looking at Brown more or less as a formality. But on the tour the two young men hit it off and spent a fun weekend together. They then parted ways, assuming they wouldn’t meet again. In the end, both men did enter Brown, which they realized only after they ran into each other during their first week on campus. Soon the pair had met Daluvoy, and the three developed a friendship, Ratnayaka says, that became as much a part of their education as their classes and textbooks. Daluvoy’s family is ethnically Telegu, and though he says he doesn’t have the same connection to Sri Lanka as do Gulasekaram and Ratnayaka, he nevertheless sees many similarities between his family’s culture and theirs. The language of Telegu, for instance, sounds a lot like Tamil. When he is in Sri Lanka, Daluvoy’s south Indian features lead people to mistake him for a native of that country. Recently, he says, on a visit to Gulasekaram’s family, “Deep’s mom was just grilling him about not being married. ‘It’s important before you get too old’ ”—he raises the pitch of his voice to mimic hers—“ ‘You’ve got to be practical about it, you can’t wait till the love of your life.’ And I felt like if I just closed my eyes, it would be the exact same thing my mom would be saying.” Although they also had many other friends at Brown, the three men—and particularly Ratnayaka, who grew up around very few Asians—were drawn to the South Asian Students Association on campus. “It was very empowering,” Ratnayaka says. “It was emotional.” After Brown, Gulasekaram, who had concentrated in English and American literature, taught middle school for two years in New York City. He then earned his law degree, clerked for a judge, then practiced corporate law for two years. But the work was not satisfying, Gulasekaram says; he found himself having to “search for the goodness in what I did.” He became a teacher, first at Loyola Law School in New Orleans and more recently at NYU, where he is an acting assistant professor. Ratnayaka, meanwhile, went directly to Emory Medical School from Brown and then moved to Washington, D.C., for his residency in pediatrics. Daluvoy describes himself as the wanderer of the three, having taken time to fool around before beginning medical school. He is now in the first year of his surgery residency in D.C. Yet, even with the demands of medical school, residencies, fellowships, and law school, Ratnayaka says, “basically, all our holidays, we were trying to get together. We’d use any excuse to get together.” Observing the three men together is like watching a comedy routine among brothers: endless good-natured teasing, goofing off, inside jokes, and lots of laughter. But underlying the laughter is a restlessness and an idealism. Each man’s parents instilled in him a belief that with privilege comes the responsibility to give back, which may in part explain why each has been drawn to fields like teaching and medicine. From the time they met, recalls Gulasekaram, the three “had always talked about doing something, about creating a vision for how health care and education for children would run.” But school and careers got in the way, and they always said to themselves: maybe later. Later came in February 2005, when the men spent two weeks in Sri Lanka. They started in Hikkaduwa, the town where Ratnayaka’s mother had been raised. Two of her cousins still lived there, in a brick house Ratnayaka had often visited during his childhood and to which he had brought Gulasekaram on recent visits. The tsunami had killed one of Ratnayaka’s uncles, and the house had been destroyed. The three friends hopped from city to city, from south to east, from Sinhalese areas to Tamil ones, setting up ad hoc medical clinics in churches, schools, and tents along the way. People formed long lines, waiting for help. The men noticed that most of the ailments they saw were a direct result not of the tsunami but of the infrastructural chaos that followed in its wake. A lack of medications, for example, meant that children choked with asthma. The doctors treated burns and infections and the sickness that came from a lack of shelter, shoes, and clothes. “Really, all we did was put a Band-Aid on a gushing wound,” Gulasekaram says of their two weeks in the country. Soon, he says, they found themselves asking: “How can we have a serious long-term impact on children? We can always say we’re going to do something, but by that logic, we could literally wait forever. The time is now.” The men saw their opportunity in a statement released by the Sri Lanka College of Pediatricians about Matara General Hospital (MGH). Located in the southernmost part of the country, seven miles from the Indian Ocean, the crowded city of Matara was far enough from the brunt of the tsunami to escape the worst, but because it was one of the places to which people fled, its already stretched resources were quickly overwhelmed. Matara General Hospital is the largest of several area hospitals; patients are referred to it from all over the region. Even before the tsunami, MGH did not have enough beds for sick children; in fact, it had no separate pediatric ward for children with contagious diseases. The hospital often turned away ten to fifteen patients a day, even though the nearest hospital to MGH was two hours away by bus. The patients who were lucky enough to be admitted often had to share beds or sleep on mats on the floor. “You could go to the hospital with a cold,” Gulasekaram says, “and come back with something really bad.” As Gulasekaram remembers it, the pediatricians’ statement following the tsunami said, “had this hospital been fully equipped and functional, it could have been the point of care to save the lives of thousands of children in this area.” The men latched onto MGH as the cause they’d been searching for. But with typical zeal, they resolved not only to help this one hospital but to do it in a way that would serve as a model for treating sick children throughout the developing world. “A lot of governments and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] look to rebuild and restore,” says Gulasekar-am. “Our thought here is, this was tragic, but out of that tragedy is a remarkable opportunity to make this hospital better, not just restore it.” And so the men founded the World Children’s Initiative, whose mission is no less ambitious than “rebuilding the medical and educational infrastructure for children in developing areas across the globe.” The MGH project, which the men have christened Project Peds, aims to raise enough money to tear down and rebuild the pediatrics wing of MGH. They quickly enlisted the help of the MGH staff and the Sri Lankan government. As a reminder of what they are working toward, Daluvoy keeps photographs of MGH on his computer. The pictures show a cluster of one-story buildings sprinkled around a sprawling courtyard just off a busy city street. Here is an old woman in a maroon skirt standing in the dusty parking lot, her hair white, a child holding her hand. Here is another child, maybe five years old, his brown eyes huge. Here is the pediatric ward, ward number 15, yellow paint peeling off its walls. Metal-framed beds, painted white, are lined up in a row along the wall. Each has a number printed onto a square of white paper and taped to the wall behind it. These are among the beds the men hope to replace over the coming months. They hope that the new MGH will have the equipment and facilities needed to offer the best medical care in Sri Lanka. In addition, plans include the building of new conference rooms, classrooms, and study spaces, as well as easy Internet access. The team has recently secured enough pediatric medical journal subscriptions to rival a state-of-the-art medical library. But, Gulasekaram emphasizes, the hospital must not lose its Sri Lankan identity. The hope, he says, is for “a nice blend of best practices from the West [while] still maintaining some of the cultural character” of the region. The Project Peds team is particularly concerned about avoiding the mistake that Western do-gooders often make: in Gulasekaram’s words, “these methods work here [in the United States], so let’s transplant them.” Rather, the team has forged close connections with the Sri Lankan ministry of health, the Sri Lanka College of Pediatricians, and the existing MGH staff, as well as with various NGOs and physicians in the area. The team has also received support from two of the United States’ most respected children’s hospitals, Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, both of which will help guide the project and provide funds, credibility, and “expertise on problems that they [the Sri Lankan community] want us to solve,” according to Ratnayaka. In addition—and here’s where the MGH project ties in with the three friends’ larger ambition—the new wards at MGH will become a hub for learning, ideally a place where health-care providers from all over Sri Lanka can exchange ideas. And if that is successful, the men believe the model could easily be replicated all over the developing world. “Money can be raised to build anything and to bring in whatever instruments you need,” Ratnayaka says. “But in terms of knowledge, the kind of mind-share that we’re trying to promote through this project—that’s how this is going to be a model pediatric health-care institution. And that’s how it’s going to benefit other facilities throughout the country.” In addition to the Sri Lankan physicians, nurses, technicians, and social workers who will be participating in this “mind-share,” physicians from MGH will participate in ongoing scholarship exchange programs with experts from Children’s National and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. The Sri Lanka College of Pediatricians has an “extensive, exhaustive list of ideas,” says Ratnayaka, of what they would like to achieve with this new project. Topping it is an annual conference for health-care providers from all over the country and the world. The cost? About $2 million, according to Daluvoy. Almost all of this money will cover such onetime expenditures as bulldozing the old pediatric wards. The hospital’s day-to-day operating budget will come largely from the government, as it always has, and will be comparable to what it always has been. “It’s not true that they would have to spend more money,” on the new units, Gulasekaram says; rather, “it would have to be spent in different way.” Fearful that the Sri Lankan government will see this influx of Western money as a reason to slash allocations for MGH, the Project Peds team has already negotiated a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Health. “Basically what we are asking for is a non-reduction in funds,” Gulasekaram says. Of the $2 million, the team has so far raised almost half, including about $400,000 in grants from the Sri Lanka Medical Association of North America and the health-care behemoth Kaiser Permanente. In late February, the group learned that the Bush-Clinton Tsunami Relief Fund had approved a $400,000 grant for the effort. Bulldozing is scheduled to begin in July. All construction work will be by Sri Lankan firms, and all of the building materials will be local. In addition, the Project Peds team is hoping to set up a local foundation to ensure that the hospital continues to receive whatever it needs. Working in conjunction with community leaders in Matara, the team has invited local business owners, celebrities, and wealthy individuals to join Project Peds’ board of directors, with the aim of eventually turning them into an organized group that can provide both community involvement and a financial safety net. “When we leave,” Ratnayaka says, “this is their hospital. This is their gem. They need ownership.” It is a Sunday afternoon earlier this winter, and Daluvoy, Ratnayaka, and Gulasekaram have just finished watching a televised football game in Daluvoy’s apartment in Washington, D.C. Somehow during the game they managed to set off the smoke detectors while making pizza. Now it’s time for business. “I’m pretty sure the outcome of that conversation is going to be positive,” Ratnayaka says of a meeting he has planned with a potential funder. “No chickens before they’ve hatched,” Gulasekaram warns as he absentmindedly clacks a stack of quarters between his fingers. Ratnayaka points to Gulasekaram and raises his eyebrows playfully at Daluvoy. “I’ve been dealing with this for fourteen years,” he says. Each of the friends says that the range of their personalities is a big part of what makes their collaboration successful. Ratnayaka is “the perennial optimist,” says Daluvoy. “It’s like, ‘Do you really think we can do that?’ And he does. He’s not just saying it.” Gulasekaram, on the other hand, “cleans up a lot of raw ideas,” while Daluvoy brings the real-world experience of establishing and running a business. Eric Hess, an executive at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, admits that he was initially wary of teaming with an organization like WCI, which, he says, doesn’t have “the bandwith and the history that a big NGO has.” But he was soon won over: “They’re just energized for a cause. They’re young and energetic and wildly smart, and I know they’re going to do whatever it takes to get it done.” In addition to creating a model for health care, the friends want their partnership to be a model for mending ethnic rifts in their broken homeland. Because Matara is a largely Sinhalese area, Gulasekaram has felt some resistance from members of the Tamil community for his participation in WCI. Naturally, it hasn’t stopped him. “It’s important,” he says, “to have a lot of projects that are cross-ethnic. It gives a good model for people to follow. And I think our hope is that in the future, if we have the opportunity to do something in a largely Tamilian population, that we would do it there as well.” Their hope, the friends say, is that Project Peds will help overcome the sadness that Gulasekaram believes arises from “two people fighting on a very small island when they don’t really need to be fighting.”

Rhode Island Monthly>God is in the Details

God Is In the Details
Woonsocket’s own Sistine Chapel ducked the wrecking ball six years ago. Its second resurrection requires $3.5 million. Can it survive without divine intervention?

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 2006

Photographs reproduced here courtesy of Nat Rea.

This piece was awarded 1st place in the in the religion category in the Rhode Island Press Association's 2006 Editorial Awards.



The red and white house on the corner of Robinson Street and Progresso Avenue in Woonsocket has always been a busy but orderly place. The Doiron family has five kids, with eleven years separating the youngest from the oldest. But Yvette Doiron, the matriarch, “ran a pretty tight household,” recalls Dominique, twenty-seven, the youngest. And, like most of the other families in the neighborhood, the Doirons were a working-class, French-Canadian family. The parents of both Yvette and her husband, Ray, moved to Rhode Island from Quebec as teenagers to work in the mills, and Yvette and Ray spoke French as their first language. And, like most families in the neighborhood, the Doirons were also very involved in their Catholic church. They went to mass every weekend, Yvette was the leader of the parish’s Girl Scout troop and a Eucharistic minister, the boys were altar servers, the girls taught Catechism class, Ray was the parish sextant and sang in the choir. St. Ann’s Church on Cumberland Street was less than ten blocks from the Doiron household, and those blocks were heavily trodden by the fourteen feet that resided in the red and white house.

So it was only natural, when the Diocese of Providence announced in 2000 that it was closing St. Ann due to dwindling parishioners and rising building maintenance costs, that the Doirons would get involved. “They didn’t close this church without a fight, let me tell you,” says Sue, the second-oldest Doiron sibling, thirty-seven. “Though we didn’t get as far as chaining ourselves to the church.” What the family and a handful of other former parishioners have done, however, will probably have a much more lasting impact on the fate of St. Ann’s than any short-lived stunt might have had.

One way or another, St. Ann’s was going to be torn down. Either the Diocese would have dismantled it and sold the pieces – “they could have made a lot of money selling the marble,” says Sue –or they would have sold the whole parcel to developers, who likely would wrecked the church to build condominiums or a shopping plaza. A scrappy group of former parishioners hatched the idea of “a major center, a tourist attraction, a place of opportunity for local artists,” says Dominique. In 2001, the non-profit, non-sectarian St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center was born with the Doiron family at the helm. In 2002, the Diocese agreed to lease the building to the group at $1 per year for ninety-nine years. Ninety-nine years is a long time; the group is hoping they’ll last through this winter.

The stretch of Cumberland Street surrounding St. Ann is nondescript, a run-down thoroughfare with a Dunkin’ Donuts, dry cleaners, service station and funeral home, all fronted by big empty parking lots. From the outside, St. Ann’s Church also looks much like any old-fashioned cathedral on any run-down main street in any aging former mill town. Behind the building’s giant wooden doors, however, is the church’s sanctuary, a room so magnificent that it literally takes your breath away.

Smothered in color and light, the sanctuary is ringed by forty-eight elaborate stained glass windows. Its sixty-five foot vaulted ceiling and half of its walls – 20,000 square feet in all – are covered in buon-style frescoes, paintings whose pigments are integrated into the plaster itself and whose angels, prophets, saints and devils throb with brilliant color. Standing underneath them, head tipped back, you almost want to take chunks of the delicious scenes in your mouth and suck on them like hard candy, or climb into them and lie in the grass and pick flowers. Each of the individual paintings is a masterpiece, but the effect of them together is literally stunning. It’s as if a whole world is in this one room. You could spend a lifetime and never see it all.

BOUNDED TO THE NORTH BY THE Massachusetts border and to the east and west by North Smithfield and Cumberland, Woonsocket has the dubious distinction of having one of the lowest per-capita household incomes in the state, trailing only Central Falls and pockets of Providence. “Woonsocket,” says Dominique with a laugh, “has come to be known as the armpit of the state.”

It wasn’t always this way. The late 1800s and early 1900s was a boom time for towns along the Blackstone River, the epicenter of America’s industrial heyday. Woonsocket grew up around Woonsocket Falls, whose thirty-foot drop generated power for the town’s forty or so textile mills. Meanwhile, farmers in the countryside of Quebec were finding it harder to eke a living out of the land, and word spread about the many jobs in New England’s textile mills. By the time Woonsocket was incorporated in 1888, more than 40 percent of the city’s population – some 8,500 people – was composed of French-Canadian mill workers and their families.

Woonsocket’s French-Canadians were deeply religious people and the Catholic Church was the heart of their community. In 1890, with the city’s only French parish, Precious Blood, bursting at the seams, church officials decided to create a new parish. Members of the new St. Ann’s parish envisioned a magnificent building and began knocking on doors and digging deeper into their pockets at Sunday mass to build it. “This was a parish of poor immigrants, of French-Canadian mill workers who were really devoted to their faith, and wanted to build a temple for themselves,” says Dominique. The nickels and dimes started adding up, and by 1917, the French Renaissance-style church on Cumberland Street was completed.

In 1920, looking towards the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the parish, congregants decided to replace the church’s enormous windows with stained glass. Once again, the parishioners dug into their pockets. Plays were staged as benefits. Some of the wealthier parishioners donated the cost of windows as memorials to family members. The windows, shipped from Chartres, France, were installed in 1925. The centerpieces are two windows on either side of the transept, which are so large that, were they laid end-to-end, their square footage would exceed that of the floor plan of an average ranch-style house. Portraying the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, what makes these windows exceptional is their multilayered artwork. In the foreground of “The Crucifixion,” for example, are kneeling worshippers and Roman soldiers on horseback. Jesus on the cross rises from their midst. In an ordinary stained-glass window, behind this scene might be decorative colored panels. In this one, the scene is backed by the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Behind the walls, the hills. And behind the hills, a frightfully churning purple sky. The windows face north and south such that “The Resurrection” is always the brightest window in the building.

Nineteen-forty marked the parish’s 50th anniversary, and St. Ann’s pastor decided that the church’s interior should be decorated in honor of the upcoming golden jubilee. Father Henry Morin had always admired the paintings at St. Matthew’s Church in Central Falls, and he invited the artist, Guido Nincheri, to visit St. Ann’s. Nincheri, who lived in Quebec, had been raised in Florence, Italy, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there. He was best-known for his stained glass, but he was an accomplished artist in many media, including painting, mosaic, sculpture, and the Renaissance method of fresco painting known as buon fresco. Michelangelo used this method to paint the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican. During Nincheri’s initial visit to St. Ann’s, he noticed that the walls and the ceiling were still unfinished, covered with cement stucco and not plaster. Father Morin was apologetic. Nincheri was delighted.

Instead of applying oil or tempera to pre-existing plaster, fresco pigments are applied to fresh, wet plaster. The chemical changes which occur mean that the painting is integrated into the wall itself. The moment the pigment touches the plaster, it is permanent. The artist cannot remove paint, or paint over anything he has already done. If he makes a mistake, the plaster must be cut away from the entire area and the process must begin again.

The result is that the paintings never fade. They never chip or peel. And the colors are so rich and bright, they look like they’re glowing. “If you come back 400 years from now,” says Dominique, “these colors will be as bright and vibrant as they are now.”

Over the course of eight years, from 1940 to 1948, Nincheri painstakingly covered the entire church with frescoes. He used the congregants as models for his work, integrating more than 400 individual faces into the paintings’ 175 scenes. One of the centerpieces, “The Last Judgment” depicts three devils being cast into hell, two of whom face us. When the time came to paint the devils’ faces, Nincheri went across the street to St. Ann’s school, and asked for the two naughtiest boys in the class. The nun who serenaded Nincheri while he worked is immortalized as Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of Church Music, playing the organ over the choir loft.

Roger Nincheri, the artist’s grandson, is cataloguing his grandfather’s artwork, which can be found in 220 churches throughout North America. “I consider St Ann’s to be Guido’s Sistine Chapel, in terms of the size and complexity,” he says. Dominique agrees. “If you take [all of Michelangelo’s frescoes in] the Sistine Chapel as a single piece, this is bigger. By a lot. People spend thousands of dollars to go to Italy, but here it is, in this country, in Rhode Island, right in Woonsocket…It’s part of our heritage. Our ancestors came here and built it.”

IT’S WEDNESDAY, BINGO NIGHT at St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center, and though it’s only 4:40, the church basement is already half-full. The mostly elderly crowd is lining up their bingo daubers like many-colored soldiers on the tables, and hunkering down over baskets of French fries and games of cards.

Bingo is just one of the many offerings on the calendar. The building is open from 1 pm until 4 pm every Sunday afternoon for tours. The organization tries to offer at least one event each month. Some notable recent performers were Elisabeth von Trapp, the Vienna Boys’ Choir, the Community College of Rhode Island chorus and orchestra, and the Ocean State Summer Pops Orchestra. A production of Carousel is slated for May, and the Providence Singers are performing Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers” in June. Ultimately, the organization hopes to use some of the un-frescoed part of the sanctuary as gallery space for local artists, and to host weekly events that serve as an anchor for the Center’s calendar, such as a Sunday afternoon piano recital series. When he’s really thinking big, Dominique envisions removing the pews so the sanctuary can be used for weddings, banquets and balls.

The word is not out yet, however, and Center events are not always well attended. When von Trapp performed, it drew 100 people; in a room that seats 1200, “it doesn’t look like there’s anyone there,” says Dominique. Even when the Vienna Boys’ Choir visited, he recalls, “there were only about five or six hundred people, which wasn’t enough to pay the bill of bringing them in.”

Part of the problem is the church’s location. The old joke about having to pack a bag to travel from Providence to Warwick has some truth to it; Rhode Islanders are notoriously reluctant to travel more than a stone’s throw from home. What’s more, says Dominique, “it’s hard to get people to Woonsocket because they still think of it as a burned out town with nothing to do.”

Ticket prices are very reasonable. Events are usually pay-what-you-can, and the most expensive to date were $10. Ironically, however, this may deter visitors accustomed to performances at Providence’s Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium or other such posh venues. “There might be people who think that ten dollars isn’t going to get you much,” says Sue.

Bingo brings in about $1,000 each week, which was just enough to cover the building’s heat and electricity in 2004. Given the rising cost of oil, however, Ray says that this winter will decide whether the organization can stay afloat. St. Ann’s needs more than to just stay afloat, however; major structural repairs are necessary. The building has four different kinds of roof – slate, copper, rubber, and gravel – and all of them need to be repaired or replaced. The roof in the building’s north tower is leaking, which has destroyed some of the decorative stonework on the outside and some fresco work on the inside. The entire heating and electrical systems need to be overhauled. Right now the Doirons and a core group of 20 volunteers do all of the work, but most of it is band-aid work, like patching leaks. They need more volunteers, and they need more money, fast. According to a building survey, the necessary repairs and upgrades will cost an estimated $3.5 million.

The organization has received some funding from the Rhode Island Foundation, the City of Woonsocket and Preserve Rhode Island, among others. Recently, Lowe’s and the National Trust for Historic Preservation awarded a $100,000 grant that the center will use to repair the slate roof in order to preserve the frescoes, which are starting to show signs of water damage. Senator Jack Reed has secured a $300,000 federal appropriation which will become available sometime in the next year. But St. Ann’s has lost out on at least as many grants as it has secured, and its finances are increasingly precarious, meaning that the $300,000 may arrive too late.

“The premise of the lease is that we would be solely responsible for the building as long as our organization was in existence,” says Ray. But this guardianship causes a Catch-22; before they will allocate repair funds, many grantors require a building’s owner to take financial responsibility for unforeseen costs associated with the project. Because the building is owned by the Diocese, the organization cannot agree to these terms, and therefore is ineligible for the funds. Further, many grantmaking organizations will not fund religiously-affiliated organizations. Although the St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center is technically not religiously affiliated, “every piece of art in this building has a religious theme,” says Sue. That the building is owned by the Diocese does not help.

“We’re sort of hoping some of our programming will become more successful,” says Dominique, acknowledging that “it still may not be enough to cover the costs” of keeping the building open. Beyond that, the organization does not have much of a plan to get through the winter. Still, Dominique describes the mood among the organizations’ members as “nervously optimistic.” Nickels and dimes built the church, Sue reminds him, and nickels and dimes will save it.

Rhode Island Monthly>Brave Hearts

Brave Hearts

Young Afghan women are studying at Roger Williams University, gaining political and financial skills that will help rebuild their ravaged country. What no one anticipated was that these students would change our lives as much as we’ve changed theirs.

Beth Schwartzapfel
May 2005

This piece was awarded Rhode Island for Community and Justice's 2005 Metcalf Award for Diversity in the Media.



SHE HAD HEARD OF JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME. She had heard of “Ah-nold” and Times Square. But other than that, Mahbooba Babrakazai wasn’t sure what to expect when she arrived in the United States of America. She was exhausted after two days and two nights of travel, starting in Kabul, Afghanistan, continuing through Islamabad, then Karachi, Dubai, Zurich, and finally arriving in New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on a rainy night in August 2002. So when she and her four weary fellow travelers thought they had missed their last connecting flight to Boston, they sat down on their pile of luggage and tried to decide what to do next.

It turns out that they had misunderstood about the flight to Boston. Paula Nirschel and a small entourage of supporters, expecting them in New York all along, had already piled into a van at Roger Williams University. In the van were Nirschel, her husband, University president Roy Nirschel, and the school’s dean of business, Maling Ebrahimpour. A sign that Ebrahimpour had made was on the seat beside him, its blue letters spelling out Mahbooba’s name in Dari Persian. Meem. Heh. Bey. Waw. Bey. Hey Gerdak.

On the way to the airport, Nirschel’s husband tried to prepare her, gently, for the possibility that it still might not happen. Visas, exit permits, navigating customs in five countries – not to mention cold feet – were a lot of obstacles for a handful of young women to handle on their own. “Everybody said, Paula, really, they’re not going to be on the plane,” she recalls. Logically, even after her months of dedication and work, she knew they might be right. And yet, she says, “I knew they were going to be there.”

Needless to say, the travelers were there, the inaugural class of the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women, a scholarship program that Nirschel had dreamed up less than a year earlier.

While many in America turned inwards after 9/11, Nirschel was glued to the television. The images of Afghan women haunted her. “It was like an out-of-body experience. Days and days would go by…I actually could not sleep.”

She got on the phone – to Washington, to Kabul, to “anybody who would talk to me at the state department.” She was making up a scholarship program as she went along until eventually the details took shape. Her husband offered the first one at Roger Williams University. Nirschel used that scholarship as leverage and sent out letters to 3,500 college presidents around the country, asking for additional help. Robert Finn, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, offered roundtrip airfare for the first group of students, and assembled a group of U.S. Foreign Service officers, Afghani academics, and government ministers to interview applicants.

Nirschel then hand-picked women who planned to return home after graduation to serve their countries. She designed the program knowing that there were two potential stumbling blocks. She realized that many recent graduates get lured at graduation time with American salaries and jobs. She also knew that students who’ve spent too much time in the U.S. can find returning home very alien. So each June, the students go back to Afghanistan. Nirschel helps them secure internships with nongovernmental organizations, government agencies, and other groups. The summers spent working at home allow them to help support their families, build their resumes, and stay grounded in their country.

As a result, “these women…will end up in key positions,” says Nirschel. “President Karzai and ministers I have spoken with…are waiting for educated women to help to run the country…They’re very eager to get them back.”

So when Nirschel pulled up to the terminal at JFK Airport, she knew she was looking at more than her dream coming to fruition. She was looking at a handful of trailblazing women who will help rebuild Afghanistan from its shattered ground up.

Mahbooba, for her part, was flooded with joy and relief when she finally laid eyes on the people whom she still calls “Mrs. Nirschel and Mr. President.” Any concerns about whether the Americans would be friendly evaporated when she saw Ebrahimpour’s sign. “My name? In my language? I was like, Wow! We have somebody waiting for us!”

The group piled in the van and headed towards Bristol. After a short orientation, the women would spread out to Universities all over the country: the University of Montana in Missoula, Notre Dame College in South Euclid, Ohio, the University of Hartford in Connecticut, and Bristol’s Roger Williams University.

AS ONE MIGHT EXPECT, there have been some growing pains and reshuffling as the program evolved. A couple of the women transferred to different schools. Another made the difficult decision to leave the program and return home. Overall, however, the arc of the Initiative has been an upward-swinging one. Three years after the program’s inception, thirteen Afghan women are studying at universities throughout the United States. Several of the women from the first group to arrive are now preparing for graduate school and threeAfghan women now attend Roger Williams.

Mahbooba Babrakzai, twenty, and Nadima Sahar, nineteen, are juniors, and Arezo Kohistani, twenty-three, is a sophomore. All three women grew up in Kabul, but as teenagers all three moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Mahbooba explains that when the Taliban came to power, her parents knew that she couldn’t go to school anymore. “They didn’t want a future for me that was dark and I’d have no ideas,” she said. “That’s why my parents moved to Pakistan, to get my education. And then whenever the Taliban went, they would move back to Afghanistan.”

That is roughly what happened. The Taliban fell just as Mahbooba finished high school. “I was joking with my mom,” Mahbooba says, “that the Taliban were there until I was finished with my school. When I was finished, I could go back.”

In fact, just after she graduated from high school, her father heard on the radio that there was still time to take the Kabul University entrance exam. “He was so happy,” Mahbooba recalls, “and he was telling me, there is a chance, so me and you are going back to Afghanistan.”

They left the rest of their family behind in Peshawar and returned to Kabul so Mahbooba could take the test. Mahbooba says the house felt cold and empty without her family. She passed the exam and enrolled in medical school at Kabul University and was a few weeks into her first semester when she got a scholarship from the Initiative.

Mahbooba’s major is financial services – she plans to get a masters in finance when she graduates – but she changed majors a number of times before making up her mind. In Kabul it was medicine, but when she arrived in the U.S., she switched to computer science, then engineering.

Now that she has settled on business, Mahbooba sees the possibilities of women’s empowerment in finance. One summer Mahbooba’s job was in Afghanistan’s new Ministry of Commerce; she helped a woman secure a small grant to open a women’s clothing shop. The shop sells business suits, casual clothing, and party dresses for women. It is the first female-owned business in all of Kabul. Under the Taliban, Mahbooba wrote in an email, women often made and sold clothing. But since they weren’t allowed to own a business, “they would sell their hand made products to shops and those guys would keep the most profit.” Now women get to keep the profits.

Arezo Kohistani arrived in 2003 as part of the Initiative’s second generation of students. When Arezo finished high school in Peshawar, she got a job as an Operations Assistant with the United Nations International Organization for Migration in Islamabad. Her father, a lawyer, also worked for the U.N., so the family moved to Pakistan and lived there until the Taliban fell and they were able to return home. While in Islamabad, Arezo started a chapter of the youth-run NGO Youth and Children Development Program, which offered weekend classes in English, math, and Islam to Afghan refugees. The Youth and Children Development Program originated as a series of secret basement-schools for children in Afghanistan who were unable to attend school under the Taliban. However, even in Pakistan, where children were able to attend school, Arezo was not surprised to find that their desire to learn was fierce. Even before the Taliban, Arezo explains, Afghan schools were only open intermittently. The years of civil war that ravaged the country meant that it was not always possible, or safe, to keep them open.

When the family returned home after nine years in Pakistan, their house was in ruins. The seven members of Arezo’s family – her mother, her father, Arezo and her two sisters and two brothers – now live with Arezo’s uncle and his family while they slowly rebuild.

Nadima Sahar moved to Peshawar with her father and 3 sisters when she was nine or ten. Her mother was a lawyer with the World Food Program, and stayed behind in Kabul to secretly continue her work. Each morning she would put on her burka and take a cab to her office. What gave her away, though, were her trips to Pakistan to see her family. Though she only visited two or three times a year, the Taliban kept catching her as she crossed the Khyber pass. They gave her many warnings until one day they put her in jail. She was released with another, more scary warning this time: she had better not get caught again, or else. She was in the midst of despairing about how she might see her family again when the Taliban fell.

Nadima is a political science major with aspirations to become Afghanistan’s first female president. She plans to attend law school after graduation. Dr. Jennifer Campbell, Assistant Professor of Writing Studies, taught her for two semesters and says her student is a force to be reckoned with. “Nadima Sahar says she’s going to be president of Afghanistan?” Campbell says. “Then Nadima Sahar is going to be president of Afghanistan.”

Encouragement from her mentors at Roger Williams, not to mention her mother’s striking example, helped Nadima to develop the confidence to voice such lofty ambitions. Though there are now women governors of several Afghan provinces, and there was a woman candidate in the recent presidential elections, there’s a segment of society that doesn’t view these as acceptable jobs for women, Nadima says. She initially thought she might study business, or medicine but changed her mind. “The only way I could really make a difference is to get involved in government,” Nadima says.

Campbelladds, “She’s got this completely quiet demeanor, but you don’t want to mess with Nadima.”

IN SOME WAYS, THESE THREE ARE serious young women. They’re determined to succeed and devoted to their country and their religion. They spend far more hours studying than most of their peers. Their professors are unanimously impressed with their dedication and their focus. The women pray five times a day. They will have their marriages arranged when the time comes. They do not date. They do not drink or go to parties. Nirschel says this single-mindedness is because they are on a mission to become role models for the women of Afghanistan. “They take that responsibility very seriously,” she says

The women are also hilarious and fun to hang out with. They are relaxed, laugh easily and often, and tease each other constantly, though they are too polite to tease most anyone else. (Arezo laughs as she tells Nadima the word in Dari that she uses to describe Mahbooba. All I can get out of her is that it is a small bird. Suffice it to say, she says, that “most of the time I just tease her. I call her small and cute, and she says, ‘don’t call me that!’)

They love shopping, and it took them some time before they learned how to manage their work-study paychecks wisely. “My first paycheck,” Arezo laughs, “all gone to Target.” Now they have a code--don’t look at things you can’t buy.

“Sometimes she’ll say, ‘Nadima, look at those shoes!’” Nadima teases Arezo. “And I’ll say, ‘Arezo, you are blind’,” which is their code for ‘don’t look at things you can’t buy.’ “And Arezo will say, ‘right, I have no eyes.’”

But even as she describes the self-restraint she has mastered, Arezo shakes her head in mock sympathy for all the things she does not buy. “We feel really bad for the clothes. They will really miss us if we leave them there.”

The women love the ocean. Nadima calls it their soulmate. Arezo said that she had seen the ocean in Pakistan, but it was not until they were homesick that they realized how comforting the ocean can be. “Whenever we feel sad,” Arezo says, “we just go and sit.”

While all three women are friendly and warm, Arezo and Nadima agree that Mahbooba is the most outgoing, social, and talkative of the three. Lindsay Toto, a Roger Williams University senior who is one of Mahbooba’s closest American friends, says that the most important thing she has learned from Mahbooba is how important laughter is. Before she met her, Toto explains, it was easy to get overwhelmed by school and lose perspective. But Mahbooba “told me her dad is someone who makes everyone laugh when times get bad…so I can tell that’s from her family.”

IT’S CLEAR THAT THE AFGHAN STUDENTS’ lives have been changed by the Initiative. What’s less predictable is how American students have been altered by it, as well.

When they first arrived on campus, for instance, the Afghan women encountered many misunderstandings about Afghanistan and Islam. Countering these misconceptions was part of the women’s mission when they put aside their fears and got on that plane in Kabul. “If I I think the people would not be friendly to me and therefore I am not going,’” Nadima asks, then “how could we change the negative perspective that people have about Afghans and about Afghanistan?”

Mahbooba’s friend Lindsay, for her part, says that Mahbooba’s presence at Roger Williams has changed her mind. “Having been a freshman during 9/11,” she says, “I think a lot of students had reservations about having students from Afghanistan come over here.”

But Lindsay says that “having met Mahbooba really changed my life. When you start to view people as individuals…to be able to see that people have homes, and families, and love, and go on and live their lives every day, despite the difficulties,” then one really starts to gain understanding.

When she first arrived, Arezo was taken aback by some of the questions that her fellow students asked. “They were asking me, ‘ooh, you’re from Afghanistan? Have you ever had TV in your country? Do you know what apple is? How can you wear such clothes?’ On media, they just show Taliban, and mujahedeen, fighting on the mountain, and women wearing burka. So they think that we are living in the caves.”

Mahbooba was asked how many camels she owns. She was also asked the apple question. “The apple one was really funny,” she says, “because they were like, A-H-H-pull.” Mahbooba laughs when describing her sarcastic response to this question: “OK, no, I don’t know what apple is.”

The women answer each misconception with a careful explanation. And maybe a giggle. For example, Kabul is a big city, a bustling metropolis of honking cars, shoppers, kids playing in the street. For holidays and special occasions, the women wear elaborate and colorful costumes, threaded with gold and hung with beads. But even in Kabul, most days, they wear jeans, or a long skirt, with pants underneath, and a headscarf. Many women in Aghanistan’s more remote providence wore burkas long before the Taliban came to power, but the women explain that Islam requires only that a woman cover her hair. They feel somewhat sad about it, but they’ve decided not to cover their hair while they are here. Since the purpose of the headscarf is to discourage men from staring, the women know that wearing them would defeat the purpose. “Here if you wear the veil,” Arezo says, “everyone stares.”

All of the women’s parents, mothers and fathers alike, went to Kabul University. Their parents have always been proud and encouraging, and pushed the women to live up to their potential. “If you want to be someone,” Arezo recalls her father saying, “be the best one.” She laughs as she repeats her father’s motto to Nadima. “If you want to be teeth, be the top teeth.”

So when their classmates’ questions revealed certain assumptions – that the Afghan women were not street-wise or savvy, for instance, or that they were not valued by their families – the American students, in fact, revealed themselves to have a limited understanding of Afghan culture. “They were feeling very sorry for us,” Arezo recalls, “and I was thinking, ‘What do you mean by this?!’”

The women admit they had their own preconceived notions of the US before arriving, which has helped them to understand where the American students are coming from. To combat ignorance on both sides, Nadima says, “usually when we give any presentations in our classes, we focus a little bit on Afghans.”

Arezo did just that with her final project for Computer Science 101. It’s hard to imagine how an Introduction to Spreadsheets project could relate to Afghanistan, but Arezo constructed a multilayered spreadsheet about opium production and the Afghan economy. The women also give speeches about their country and their culture, both on and off campus. Recently they gave a lecture about Afghan culture and Islam to a lecture hall packed with 200 of their classmates and professors. When the University launched a journal called Reason and Respect: A Journal of Civil Discourse, Nadima wrote a thoughtful piece called, “Ramadan, the Month of Fasting,” in the inaugural issue.

Nadima has also engaged other students, even those who were initially hostile. The Roger Williams University College Republicans, for instance, are a rather outspoken bunch. College campuses tend to be bastions of liberal thinking, but this group has pulled some pretty head-turning right-wing stunts. In February of last year, for instance, they offered a “whites only” scholarship in protest of affirmative action. Shortly after the Afghan students arrived, the group’s chairman, Jason Mattera, wrote an article attacking Islam in the conservative campus paper.

Nadima wrote her final paper for her Expository Writing class in response. It’s an essay Nadima’s professor, Jennifer Campbell describes as a twenty-page dialogue about why Mattera should understand what Islam really is, instead of the misrepresentations he’d made. (Nadima politely describes their conversations as her attempt to clear up a little misunderstanding about Islam.) Even two years later, Campbell remembers this paper for how compelling it was, how earnest, and patient. “She’s…unfailingly sweet and unfailingly polite,” Campbell says. “But at the same time, she is like girl of steel. She will go up to anyone, and in a very loving way, she will engage them.”

IT IS 10:30 ON A THURSDAY NIGHT, and Arezo pads to the door of her dorm to let me in. She is wearing slippers and blue flannel pajamas with clouds on them. On the way to the room that she and Nadima share, we step over empty beer cans in various states of crushed-ness. Arezo jokes that she had a few drinks. I joke that I won’t mention as much in the article so her parents won’t get the wrong idea.

It is an Afghan custom to offer food to guests, so Arezo has prepared classic dorm room fare: a Tupperware full of microwave popcorn. She also offers me sugared almonds, an Afghan delicacy which she brought back from a recent trip to California. They are delicious.

Arezo and Nadima have set up pillows on the floor of the room they share, which reminds them of home. Arezo is sitting on these pillows, rewriting notes from one of the day’s lectures, when Nadima breezes in.

Nadima is a mentor in the Bridge to Success Program, which pairs Roger Williams students with minority students at Newport’s Rogers High School. That night the Bridge to Success crew has gone to the Providence Black Repertory Company’s production of Cheryl J. West’s Jar the Floor. Nadima and her mentees all enjoyed the show, and Nadima fairly glows as she sits cross-legged on the floor of her room and recounts the story of the play, in which four generations of African-American women gather for the family matriarch’s birthday. Nadima is also on the mock trial team, so we chat a bit about the case her team recently won at a regional championship. She loves these sessions, partly because they help her look forward to law school, and partly because they’re good training in seeing every story from many different angles. “Most of my friends in mock trial are Republican,” she says, “but they accept other people’s opinions, whether they agree with them or not.”

I tell the young women about an email conversation I’ve been having with the President of the College Republicans, Mike Martelli. I’ve brought a transcript of some of the emails Martelli and I have exchanged to get the women’s thoughts. “Personally I am not a fan for the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women,” Martelli wrote. “Last I checked, [the Afghan students] would be returning to a culture where women are second class citizens and are not valued…Seems to me that we wasted something there, considering their religious leaders love to oppress them.”

Nadima recalls her conversations with Mattera and is not particularly surprised. “To me, it seems like a really ignorant opinion,” she responds. “It’s the twenty-first century.”

“He was only talking about Taliban,” Arezo says. “Before then, women were doctors, governors, judges, pilots….they should learn about religion and culture and country and then talk.”

“He is expecting a country that has been in constant war for 24 years to have women presidents?” Nadima asks. “Countries with peace have no women presidents!”

Echoing her friend’s sentiment, Arezo asks, “Why does the US have no woman president?”

The women stress that this young man’s sentiment is in the minority on campus. For the most part, they say, their reception here has been warm and welcoming. “Everyone welcomed us with a smile on their face, and was really helpful in helping us to get used to the environment,” says Nadima. But as much as the women dismiss Mattera’s criticisms with a wave of their hands, his sentiment nevertheless strengthens their resolve. “This makes us stronger,” Nadima says. “It makes us more ambitious to prove ourselves…When I become the first female president, I can prove to him that women are truly not slaves.”

“I used to say I want to become the first female president,” Nadima adds. “When I hear things like this, now I say, I must become the first female president.”

I remember what Professor Campbell said about Nadima. Get out of the way, Mattera. Here comes the girl of steel.

NADIMA, AREZO, AND MAHBOOBA might have liked very much to go to Kabul University. Twenty-five years ago, professors came from all over the middle east – indeed, all over the word – to teach there. The University hosted a busy exchange program. But a quarter century of civil war, then a repressive regime that valued obedience over knowledge, followed by air strikes and ground wars to unseat that regime, have left the university in ruins. Mahbooba was a student there for part of one semester, so she speaks from experience when she says that students there are suffering a lot. “A lot of things are torn up,” she says. In the winter, the dorms have no heat, and “the food is not, like, good.” At first, this sounds like the kind of comment any college student might make about cafeteria food. But then she continues. “The government is not rich enough to feed everyone there…Even if there is something to eat, it is not sufficient to give you energy.”

Arezo recalls walking at night with her father. After 9 pm in Kabul, the streets tend to empty out, so it was quiet. It was also winter and very cold. Arezo noticed a group of young people huddled under a streetlight, and she asked her father what they were doing. There was no electricity in the dorms, he explained, so the students had brought their books outside to study by the streetlight.

The Initiative to Educate Afghan Women will be most powerful when it succeeds into obsolescence, when women come to the U.S. to study in order to participate in a rich cross-cultural exchange, not because they have no other options.

The thirteen women will return to their country with U.S. educations. Then they must roll up their sleeves and crouch under that streetlight with the students from Kabul University. Together they will rebuild Afghanistan’s universities, its hospitals, its infrastructure.

“We know that…one or two people cannot do a lot for the country,” Arezo says.

“But we can do our part,” says Mahbooba. “I can’t wait to go and do my part.”

WireTap>Fighting to Stay

Fighting to Stay
Cambodian American youth are often caught between their parents' respect for authority and a growing number of lawmakers who want to see them sent -- often for the first time -- to Cambodia.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 14, 2005

Theary Voeul says her big brother, Sok, has always been a “really fun brother.” Every day, he would pick her up and dump her, giggling, on her bed, and challenge her to wrestling matches. They would go sledding in the winter and play football in the spring. He is also like a sister in some ways. “He has so much to say, gossip and stuff. He would talk about girls to me,” says Theary, 19.

Sok, 21, whose full name is Bunsok Cham Chhorm, was arrested when he was 19, following an incident where he fired an illegal handgun into the air. While out on bail, Sok stayed home and stayed out of trouble. He was a hardworking employee at a pool company, he joined an organization for Southeast Asian youth, and he helped the organization to paint colorful murals around town. So, when he went before the judge again, she could see he was trying. Instead of sending him to prison, she sentenced him to a three-year suspended sentence. “She didn’t want to lock him up,” recalls Theary. “She wanted him to go back to school, keep doing good.” But the judge had no control over the officers from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (formerly the INS), who were waiting to take Sok away.

Theary and her mom didn’t hear from him for weeks. They didn’t even know where he was until an immigration lawyer did them a favor and made some phone calls. They found out he is being held in a detention center in Louisiana, some 1600 miles from his home in Providence, Rhode Island, facing an order of deportation to Cambodia. Sok has never set foot in Cambodia – he was born in a refugee camp in Thailand before settling with his family in the US. He doesn’t speak Cambodian. In fact, ethnically, he is not even Cambodian. His family is from the Brao tribe, an ethnic minority from the highlands of Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. Theary says being Brao will make Sok a target if he is sent back.

Sok is one of the 1200 to 1500 legal American residents who have been ordered deported to Cambodia, subject to ever-tightening laws regarding who may stay in the United States, and who must go.

The generation of Cambodians who were born in Southeast Asia and raised in the U.S. (often called the “1.5 generation”), who are now in their 20s and 30s, are subject to a unique set of circumstances. Whereas their children – even their younger siblings – were born here and are U.S. citizens, 1.5-ers are permanent residents, or green card holders. That is, they are here legally, but they are not citizens. They grew up first in refugee camps, then in poor urban neighborhoods, sharing homes with relatives or sponsors and negotiating a foreign language and foreign schools where they were made to feel like outcasts. “Think two or three people sharing a mattress in the worst part of town,” says Porthira Chhim, Director of Programs at Cambodian Community Development, based in Oakland, California.

The parents of the 1.5 generation, speaking little or no English and raised in Cambodian culture which teaches respect for authority, are largely deferent to the law and timid in the face of American bureaucracy. The older generation is also haunted by their experiences in Southeast Asia – by family members that were killed by the Khmer Rouge, by the time they might have spent in brutal “re-education camps,” by the villages where they grew up having been burned, razed, or bombed. As such, many suffer from alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression, which make them somewhat emotionally unavailable to their children. So, says Chhim, the 1.5-ers “gang together, out of survival, and the system punishes them for just trying to survive.” As a result, Cambodian young people are being deported in large numbers to a country that they fled for their lives before they were old enough to remember.

Chhim says this system amounts to a “criminalization of young people.” The good news is that young people are fighting back. Some of the same attributes that put them at risk for deportation – being part of the fabric of their communities here, not being intimidated by the system – make them excellent advocates. Youth-run organizations all over the country are working to stop deportation, and they have a long fight ahead of them.

It used to be that most permanent residents convicted of a deportable crime were entitled to a hearing, called a 212(c). At a 212(c), says Joren Lyons, Staff Attorney at the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco, “the judge would consider what age they immigrated here, where their family is, their employment history, their community ties, whether they were fluent in their home country’s language,” before issuing a deportation order. But two events changed that equation.

In 1996, Congress broadened the definition of an aggravated felony. Previously, aggravated felonies – felonies which are deportable – were limited to serious crimes such as murder or drug trafficking. With the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the list of aggravated felonies grew to include anyone who serves more than a year in prison for theft or violent crime. Simultaneously, Congress decided that aggravated felons were no longer eligible for 212(c) hearings.

Under these new circumstances, says Lyons, it no longer matters whether your probation officer says you made every meeting, whether you’ve lived here since you were two, or whether what family you had in Cambodia has been killed. Without a 212(c), there was no forum to even explain these things. “Boom,” says Lyons. “Off you go.”

What’s more, these rules were retroactive. That is to say, it does not matter if you’ve committed a crime that is considered an aggravated felony under the new rules, but was not an aggravated felony when you committed it. You’re an aggravated felon now, and you’re eligible for deportation. The Washington DC-based Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, known as SEARAC, in a recent publication called “Concerns About the Deportation of Southeast Asians in the United States to Southeast Asia,” asserts that “some Southeast Asians in the U.S…pled guilty to charges before 1996 because they could not have known about the deportation consequences and because their lawyers encouraged them to plead guilty.”