Dr. Jedidiah's Diary Episode #71. Where could they find asylum?

Dr. Jedidiah’s Diary

Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling, meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single father who lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old perky self for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new people and listening to their stories outside his office have given him different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or being truly honest with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food for thoughts in life…. or a fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.

           

Episode #71. Where Could They Find Asylum?

 

I met José at this meditation club near my clinic. Although this place for meditation belonged to the nearby Buddhist temple, which was a very rare religious group in this town, most visitors to the quiet hall were atheists, someone with different religions, or those who were traumatized by painful incidents. I asked the monks who offer meditation classes there to lend me the cozy space in the back of their garden for the weekly therapy sessions with my patients. The monks smiled at my request and never seemed to scrimp on the opportunities to help people with indelible scars in their lives. I appreciated their generosity to let me and my patients get together in the garden.

 

The garden at the meditation club was not decorated with any of the flashy ornaments or even small tchotchkes from Asian Buddhist countries. It was just a small quiet place for worships and meditation without aureate sculptures, which must have looked far cry from fetching to most people. However, most of my patients came to this place as dejected souls whose ordeals and routs in life had reached a crescendo but left as someone who dared to venture out of their dark side and veer into a hopeful future. Among those people outside my therapy group was José who had drawn my attention like a butte aloof from others. Every Tuesday of my therapy meetings with patients, I happened to see this man sitting alone in the corner of the garden. He always looked emotionless and tired of this world.  When I gingerly approached this guy and asked if he had been coming to this club for a long time, he gave me a blank look and said “Why would that be important to you? Well, do not even think about inculcating your own small thoughts or opinions in me.”

 

 

It took me two full years to be his friend and come to learn about his heart-breaking experience as a national guard working in the border between Texas and Mexico. José told me about his grandparents who crossed the border to seek asylum in the U.S. They had done everything possible to raise their little ones by taking the most difficult jobs that were neglected or belittled by the legal U.S. citizens. These asylum-seekers’ successful stories had made more and more people come to the borderline for all those years, and José had become a national guard who must arrest trespassers from his own ancestral country and secure the border. Working as a national guard trooper, José saw a lot of little kids left unaccompanied, dying people who walked days and days without water to cross the border, and drug-traffickers who had nothing left to lose in their home country. The hardest thing for him was to face the massive migrant caravan whose eyes were filled with certainty for bright future in the land right across the border. Dealing with the illegal immigrants’ strong will to survive today and prosper tomorrow had been the most mind-boggling duty in José’s life, because he had to put every effort to stymie the plans of his own ethnic group from Mexico. He had to become a whole new person with no heart or mercy at all in the border between two nations.

 

 

When I asked José what he came to the meditation club for, he was quiet for a while and said “I don’t know….honestly, I want them to flee their puddle situation. They have no choice but to run away from poverty, violence, or persecution that’s plaguing their own land. But I can’t let them cross the border as an American national guard. I wanted to find some answer or solution to this dilemma that I am situated in. I come to this meditation club just to stay calm and sane even for a couple of hours a week.” Although José was no longer the national guard anymore, his mind was still full of pain, guilt, and frustration lingering around the border. He must have been the most toiling asylum-seeker in this meditation club.

 

Expressions

 

     1.   atheist: a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or god

 

2.   to scrimp on something: to be stingy in providing for….

 

3.   tchotchkes: a small object that is decorative rather than strictly functional; a trinket

 

4.   aureate: elaborate or highly ornamented

 

5.   fetching: attractive/ eye-catching

 

6.   a rout: a disorderly retreat of defeated troops

 

7.   to reach a crescendo: to come to the peak of a gradual increase : climax

 

8.   to veer: to change direction suddenly

 

9.   butte: an isolated with steep sides and a flat top

 

10.  to inculcate: to instill (an attitude, idea, or habit) by persistent instruction

 

11.  to seek asylum: to flee their home in search of safety and formally applied for legal protection in another country. Because he or she cannot obtain protection in their home country, they seek it elsewhere

 

12.  migrant caravan: a large group of people moving by land to cross international border (e.g., the people who travel from Central America to the Mexico–United States border)

 

13.  to stymie: to prevent or hinder the progress of something /or efforts to do something