Making a Home in Cincinnati

It has now been a little more than two years since we formally moved from Spain to Cincinnati to call it home. Mostly it has been pleasant, but there have been a few rough spots. Nothing, however, as rough as the time the Alhamoud family has had since their home in Syria was leveled by bombs in 2011and they lived first with grandparents, and then in a refugee camp, before coming to the United States in October 2015.

In a three-part feature, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported this week on the first Syrian refugee family to find its way to Cincinnati to be resettled. They had received a call from the United Nations in July 2015, while they were in a camp in Jordan, asking whether they would come to the US. Yes, said the father, thinking primarily of the possibility of a peaceful future for his children. It took more than a year of vetting before they set foot on the plane that took them from Jordan to Rome to Miami and then to Greater Cincinnati International Airport, in northern Kentucky.

The Enquirer story talks about the life they had in Syria before the war, the loss of their home and numerous family members, and the effort that they have made over the past year to adjust to life in Cincinnati: for all to learn English; for the father to find a good employer; for the mother to learn to care for her family in a very different environment and help them and herself heal from the terrors from which they have tried to flee; for the children to go to school and make friends; for everyone to manage to live with an uncertain future.

My UU community has been working to be connected with a refugee family to "adopt" for the past year, and this week I thought that we were close to finding one. But after we gathered commitment from at least five members to be actively involved in providing English language tutoring, transportation to grocery stores and medical appointments, help with children's homework, assistance in preparing for job interviews, and providing a general welcoming presence and orientation to the community, we learned that we were too late for the two families coming in the next two weeks. It's a good thing, I suppose, that there are more people wanting to adopt refugee families than there are families, or is it? There is not a dearth of families needing resettlement; there just are few coming to the US and to Cincinnati. And we are entering an era in which there may be even fewer coming across the Atlantic than there have been.

Nevertheless I expect there will be some more refugees and some more chances. I recommended the article "Finding Home" to the refugee support group this morning for background reading, because of the illuminating picture it gives about the resilience of refugees and the many people and efforts required to help someone make a new home for themselves.

Time and Time Again

This is the post I meant to write last Sunday, soon after returning from two weeks away, mostly in Spain, and the day of switching from Daylight Savings Time to Eastern Standard Time; but time got away from me. What I was concerned with then was how odd it was to have two seasonal changes of time within just one week. We were in Spain when Europe switched from Summer Time to Winter Time, on Sunday, October 30. Our hotel in Barcelona had thoughtfully put a notice in the elevator, and we had an extra hour to enjoy a Barcelona Sunday morning before we found our way to the Cathedral to watch the weekly national (Catalunyan) dance of the sardanas.

Then this past Sunday, after returning on Tuesday across only five, instead of the usual six, hours of time difference, we were in Cincinnati. We had not adjusted to the time difference yet and were still in the mode of waking at 1:30 or 2:30 AM, and struggling to stay awake until 8:30 at night. And then we had to deal with another changing of the clocks on Saturday night, just a week after we had already done it. We didn't have an efficient hotel staff to put a note in the elevator this time, but fortunately the mechanism inside the iPad adjusts itself automatically, so when I wok up in the middle of the night--2:30 AM--I didn't even have to remember that we had changed times. In fact, I didn't remember it until later, after I had slept a few more hours, and I went downstairs and turned on the CBS Sunday Morning program and realized  that it was only 8:05 instead of the 9:05 that it said on my digital devices. I had to look at the analog clocks to remember that we had changed, and then I occupied myself with running around the house and setting them back. There are more than I would have guessed.

 What I don't understand is why Europe and the Americas cannot agree on a common time to make this seasonal switch. For one week of the year, rail, bus, and airline timetables have to be adjusted to accommodate the first change, and then a week later, they have to be adjusted again when the second change comes. Broadcast schedules also have to be adjusted during that week--we had trouble getting the Danish morning news program that we often listen to in bed before 7:00 AM because we didn't know when it would be available. That's an inconvenience, but I worry more about the potential for miscommunication in serious international interconnections.Whatever automatic time settings are on the hotline between those with their fingers on the nuclear trigger--I hope someone has taken time change into consideration so warnings are adjusted and nothing goes off unintentionally!

But I didn't write about this last week, since time got away from me. By now I have adjusted to the five (or six) hour time difference between Europe and the Eastern U.S.--a late night on Tuesday this week helped that; or rather, it was the night after only two and a half hours of sleep on Tuesday night when I was finally able to sleep until a reasonable time on Thursday morning. And now I have other thoughts of "time and time again," for it is not the first time in my life that I have awoken on the morning after an election feeling worried and disappointed. I don't seem to have made much progress in my life in aligning my country's leadership with my own ethical and political values. But they don't seem to have made much headway in getting me to change mine, either.