Solidarity

One of the four pillars of CCSC is simplicity. This year has been the opposite of simple for me.

We don't have internet at our houses, we share a car, and we're asked to be mindful of how we spend our time. This isn't too awfully hard for me, though I do like to spend my free time reading and listening to music—which is a good use of time—but can sometimes serve as a distraction from problems or just from living life in the present moment. The part that is hard is not being able easily look things up on the internet.

What's hard is that my life has been complicated by things such as health insurance, a car that seems to get a lot of flat tires and has a few other problems, my gym closing not long after I finally found one, all the computer issues I've had, and my student loans (which were supposed to go into deferment this year) haunting me.

So far, of the three lenders I have student loans with, only one has granted me forbearance, another is still pending (for three months), and another was denied. I sent an official AmeriCorps letter from the myAmericorps website, but they didn't accept that.

When I called the lender and explained that I'm in AmeriCorps and am living on a very small stipend, the woman said in a condescending tone, “oh, we don't work with AmeriCorps.” She said it as if AmeriCorps is some shady organization that's under investigation for human trafficking and tax evasion.

In the past week, I've gotten two letter and three phone calls from the lender about an unpaid bill (even though it was, in fact, paid). Two of the calls were within ten minutes of each other. My parents have also been getting these letters and phone calls because they're co-signers. I wasn't surprised at how rude everyone on the phone was, but I was surprised at how rude I was back. I'm usually pretty polite, but I certainly wasn't to them. I blame it on the stress and annoyance.

Being harassed by my lender has made me think about people who have late credit card payments and how the credit card companies call them. I feel annoyed and stressed out about these phone calls. I'm also very worried about this loan and the other loan that the forbearance request is still pending.

Another way we use the word simplicity in CCSC is to mean solidarity with the poor and the populations we serve. I certainly feel solidarity with the poor worrying about money all the time and getting annoying/harassing phone calls from the loan company. It's only been happening to me for a week and will hopefully end soon, but I know that for some people it goes on for years. Maybe they become indifferent about it after a while, but then again, maybe not.

What I hate about my job

I like my job, but there is one thing I hate about it and it's not even the paperwork (though I greatly dislike the paperwork). What I hate is telling people they can't bring a loved one to be with them in the United States. I had to do that this week.

There is a very sweet woman about my parent's age from Burma who arrived in Buffalo a few months ago. She left behind her husband and two daughters. She came to file for her family to come, but using the I-730 form (the only form someone without a Green Card can use) she can only bring a spouse and unmarried children under 21. This woman's two daughters are 20 and 23, so she can only bring one of them.

When she came to the office she showed me the pictures of her two beautiful daughters. She said, "I made a mistake in coming. I should not have come without my family." She told me that every day she is sick to her stomach without her children.

I am helping her apply for her younger daughter and husband, but she cannot apply for her older daughter until she has her green card. She will probably have her Green Card in a little less than a year (as long as there aren't any problems or hang-ups getting it). Once she has her Green Card she can file an I-130 for her older daughter. That application takes longer to process and is expensive (the I-730 is free). Hopefully, her daughter will join her and the rest of her family in the United States, but in the meantime she has to wait for potentially a few years.

I had to explain this to the woman and all I could do when she cried was listen and offer her a tissue. The daughter that she cannot bring is my age. I can't help but think about how it is for me to be away from my family and how it is for them to be away from me. I get to see them every few months and we're in the same time zone (not to mention the same country). If suddenly I was stricken with a homesickness that made me physically ill, I could go home. Sure, her daughter is an adult, but that doesn't mean she doesn't want to be with her mother and that her mother doesn't want to be with her.

In other news...

USCIS is now on twitter. I'm not sure what could possibly be exciting enough for them to twitter about. The new fee waiver --form I-912?

I took the practice citizenship test on the USCIS website and got a 96%. I'm in, yessssss.

Tomorrow (January 17th) is MLK day and "A Day On for Service." Most of my community members and I will be helping to winterize low-income housing.

Two Fire Alarms in One Day

I was going to write about how there wasn't much going on and I was too tired to reflect, but then things started getting exciting.

On Saturday morning one of my roommates was making scones when the fire alarm went off. The scones were not burning, but some stuff on the bottom of our old stove was smoking. Since the house we live in is owned by Canisius College, we cannot turn the alarm off by ourselves. Instead, we waited for the campus safety to come. We had all of the windows and the door open, but the smoke stayed around for a while.

Later that night, I decided to make myself an egg and some tea. We have a gas stove and I noticed smoke coming from the burner that had the tea kettle on it. I turned it off and opened the windows so that the fire alarm wouldn't go off again, but there was still a tall flame coming from it so I turned off all the burners, but the flame kept getting higher. I didn't know if there was some way to turn the pilot light off that I didn't know about, so I called my parents. My dad suggested I turn off the propane at the tank, but we don't have propane tank.

The flame kept getting higher so I used the fire extinguisher. I'd never used a fire extinguisher before so I wasn't expecting the huge mess or the toxic smell. The fire alarm started going off because of all the dust and white stuff that comes from the fire extinguisher. My poor roommate was in the shower and one of my other roommates was asleep.

When the campus safety came they told us to clean it up with soap and water, but one of my roommates had to clean up from a fire extinguisher before and she said the insurance company told her it was toxic and she needed something other than regular household cleaner to clean it.

Apparently, the best way to clean up all that white dust was with vinegar water. It took 16 collective hours (with three people cleaning) to clean the entire stove, oven, counters, everything on the counters that we didn't throw away, scrub the floor and do a lot of cleaning in the rest of the first floor in order to get all the toxic dust out. That description doesn't do it justice, but my recently-turned-23 knees sure know that they worked today and are well on their way to becoming old lady knees.

I was very happy to have two of my community members to clean with because, not only did it mean I didn't have to clean 16 hours totally on my own, but we also entertained each other while we worked. This is only one way that I'm finding out how good it is to live in community.

There is a silver lining in this dusty, toxic cloud: our entire kitchen is now probably the cleanest it's been since the house was built.