Little Bee

I left my workplace today and came home to an apartment with limited television channels and internet so opted to rest my mind with my ever-reliable and loving Kindle reader. I am reading a book called "Little Bee" right now for the book club we started in my office. It was my suggestion and won the most votes and it's a little tragedy in my life. It's incredibly powerful and very well-written and horribly sad. I left a day of what seemed like failures...failures to help a person find a way to get to work, to help a person find a way to get his son healthy, to help a person speak the same language as this new world he has found himself in...and now I am reading the story of a little refugee girl in England, detention centers and trauma and death. Somehow this is therapeutic to me-to read the reality of the people I am trying to help. That does not mean it makes the failures any more poetic or easier to face. I am new at my job and I speak no languages other than English. I have lived a blessed life, with all of its shadows and valleys. I have never seen a machete outside a collection or a museum and I have not known true jungles. Is it good for me to read this story? It is strange to feel that my connection to it is through a cubicle with a computer and two phones and greek yogurt and the minor annoyance of unexplainable fruit flies? I am connected to them but I do not think they are connected to me. The failures mean it is a constant struggle to ensure that they know I am on their side. That just because I avoid the glass doors when they are in the waiting room, that does not mean I do not care. That I will not help. I think they say thank you over and over just so that they can prove to you they are trying. That they can learn English. They say hello over and over too and it does not mean they are grateful. It does not mean that they understand your voice. Only that they can hear it. Their repeated hellos and thank yous are my failures. They are reminders that these people feel they must prove their worth to me. They are reminders that these people do not expect  to be viewed as having worth. That I have not adequately showed them this inexplicable love I have for them and their families. I am living to find a person the opportunity to push carts in a hot parking lot or sweep up stale french fries.