Speaker 1: Pushkin, Hey, Revisionist History listeners, I have something I want
Speaker 1: to tell you. This season, we're trying something different and
Speaker 1: releasing revisionist history episodes in two batches. You're about to
Speaker 1: hear the sixth and final episode of the first batch.
Speaker 1: Then we'll be taking a little break so you can
Speaker 1: enjoy your August vacations in peace. The last few episodes
Speaker 1: of the season will be released starting in September, but
Speaker 1: if you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber, which you should be,
Speaker 1: you'll get the last few all at once. Subscribe now
Speaker 1: on the Pushkin channel in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin
Speaker 1: dot fm, Slash plus. Can we go over on the
Speaker 1: table and everyone just say their name, string with you.
Speaker 1: Doris White from Alma Alma United, Ian Rankin from Knox Presbyteria,
Speaker 1: John Carston's Gail Presbyterian Church and Almira and I'm Linda
Speaker 1: rank and married to Ian Rankin. I'm Joyce Gladwell and
Speaker 1: unfortunately my husband is no long living, but he was
Speaker 1: very active. I'll be from Elmira in Gail Church. I
Speaker 1: went home to Canada to visit my mother a while back,
Speaker 1: and I asked her to invite a group of her
Speaker 1: friends over, so she did. They all showed up on
Speaker 1: a March afternoon. Three school teachers, a flight attendant, a
Speaker 1: family therapist, all somewhere between their late seventies and early nineties,
Speaker 1: all long retired. They sat drinking my mother's tea around
Speaker 1: her dining room table and tried to remember the time
Speaker 1: three strangers arrived in our little town in southern Ontario.
Speaker 1: You know the famous story about my father picking people
Speaker 1: up in or did they make us up and driving
Speaker 1: so quickly from the airport that they were terrified by
Speaker 1: the time they arrived. He was a man of a
Speaker 1: heavy foot, this crazy englishman. We were talking about December
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine, when my brothers and I were teenagers,
Speaker 1: too young at the time to truly understand acts of
Speaker 1: kindness and how they work. I think people stepped up
Speaker 1: when they felt there was something that they could do.
Speaker 1: And that's why, to go back to your other question,
Speaker 1: who helped? A whole bunch of people helped wasn't and
Speaker 1: they came up because they felt, oh, I can do that.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
Speaker 1: about the time my parents and a group of their
Speaker 1: friends agreed to sponsor three refugees from Vietnam, a teenager
Speaker 1: named Vaughan, his older other king, and a young woman
Speaker 1: named Lilian. Three strangers who showed up on our doorstep
Speaker 1: one day. How many people were in your group in total?
Speaker 1: That's almost an impossible question to ask, because if you
Speaker 1: look at it, when we would have a meeting, what
Speaker 1: we might have ten people at the most. But he's
Speaker 1: the people who were out behind, yeah, giving the money.
Speaker 1: The people who were there when they came were totally
Speaker 1: different people. Their group didn't have a name. It wasn't
Speaker 1: a legal entity. Everyone said. The minister of my parents church,
Speaker 1: a man named Jack Boyne, was one of the ringleaders.
Speaker 1: But Jack Boyne didn't do the paperwork acquired by the government.
Speaker 1: That was someone else, and lots of other churches were
Speaker 1: involved as well. Around my mother's dining room table, the
Speaker 1: details were vague because they were vague back then. These
Speaker 1: were ordinary people going about a big task by ordinary means.
Speaker 1: And the potlarks potlarks, and there were a lot of
Speaker 1: people there in the small towns of southern Ontario. Nothing
Speaker 1: of any consequence is accomplished without potlock Dinners. There are
Speaker 1: an estimated twenty million refugees in the world whose lives
Speaker 1: had been uprooted by one crisis after another, the Russian
Speaker 1: war against Ukraine, the US retreat from Afghanistan, the obliteration
Speaker 1: of Syria. Every era has its own humanitarian crises, and
Speaker 1: in the late nineteen seventies, the attention of the world
Speaker 1: was on Southeast Asia. After the end of the Vietnam War,
Speaker 1: when the Communists took over what had been South Vietnam,
Speaker 1: the new government turned on the country's ethnic Chinese. Eight
Speaker 1: hundred thousand people fled Vietnam, escaping across the Gulf of
Speaker 1: Thailand in overcrowded boats. Somewhere between two hundred and four
Speaker 1: hundred thousand of them died at sea. The survivors were
Speaker 1: called boat people. In response, a group of Canadian religious
Speaker 1: organizations approached the Canadian government with an idea. The pool
Speaker 1: of people the Canadian refugee system deemed worthy of resettlement
Speaker 1: was clearly much larger than the pool of people the
Speaker 1: government was actually willing to let in. So why not
Speaker 1: let private citizens handle the overflow. Let small groups of
Speaker 1: people get together bring refugees into their communities and take
Speaker 1: responsibility for finding them homes and jobs. The idea wasn't
Speaker 1: to replace the government's own formal refugee system, but too augmented.
Speaker 1: That was a real sticking point in the early years.
Speaker 1: A lot of groups said, we don't want to do
Speaker 1: something that we think the government should be doing. That's
Speaker 1: Brian Dyke, who works with the Mennonite Central Committee and
Speaker 1: the Refugee Hub at the University of Ottawa. So they
Speaker 1: talked about what we often call additionality. This has to
Speaker 1: be in addition to what the government is doing already.
Speaker 1: It's a principle I think the Government of Canada continues
Speaker 1: to hold you. The result is that in recent years,
Speaker 1: the number of refugees who come to Canada with private
Speaker 1: support dwarfs the number who come in through official channels,
Speaker 1: and Canada currently resettles more refugees on a per capita
Speaker 1: basis than almost any other country in the world. The
Speaker 1: Vietnamese refugees who came to my hometown, Kang Vaughan and
Speaker 1: Lelan were both people in nineteen seventy nine. They were
Speaker 1: all in a camp on a tiny island off the
Speaker 1: coast of Malaysia. This is about one kilomeda square and
Speaker 1: about forty thousand Vietnamese refugee. I live in that island,
Speaker 1: so very small. That's von Huen remembering this story. How
Speaker 1: long were you in that camp as then that came
Speaker 1: for ten months, whom January until October. Then in the
Speaker 1: fall they got word they'd been accepted to Canada through
Speaker 1: the private route sponsored by the Rankins. Doris White, Joan
Speaker 1: Carstons and my parents and all the others who came
Speaker 1: to the potluck dinners in our little town in southern Ontario.
Speaker 1: Tell me about arriving in Canada. What was that like? Happy, sad,
Speaker 1: lonely and worry. Happy because I have a country to
Speaker 1: accept me, so they opened the door and accept refugee,
Speaker 1: and I can stack a new line freedom, so I
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about my past in Vietnam or
Speaker 1: Alluvian and the camp. Sad because I still help my
Speaker 1: father and my other brothers and two sistos now and Vietnam. Happy, sad,
Speaker 1: lonely and worry. I remember Vaughan and his brother from
Speaker 1: that year. They ended up at my high school walking
Speaker 1: the halls enclosed they had been given for the unimaginably
Speaker 1: cold Canadian winter, both of them thin and quiet, trying
Speaker 1: to get an education in a language they had only
Speaker 1: started learning a few months before. King and Vaughan ended
Speaker 1: up going to one of the best universities in Canada
Speaker 1: got good jobs. Their friend, the Land, meanwhile, met another
Speaker 1: Vietnamese refugee while playing musical chairs at an event organized
Speaker 1: by one of the sponsoring churches. The two got married
Speaker 1: had children who grew up Canadian. I think one of
Speaker 1: the most fondest memories we have with our mom was
Speaker 1: just a trip that we took with her to Ottawa.
Speaker 1: That's the Land's son, David Hall, who teaches at the
Speaker 1: University of Waterloo. So back in twenty twelve we went
Speaker 1: to celebrate Canada Day with her and just as a family,
Speaker 1: and she never stopped talking about that trip. So year
Speaker 1: after year she would just say, hey, do you remember
Speaker 1: that time when we visited the Catholital just to enjoy
Speaker 1: the fireworks and just to be with others that are
Speaker 1: just proud to be with Canada. I'm sharing all this
Speaker 1: not just because it's an immigration story with a happy ending.
Speaker 1: This is a certain kind of story, a kind that
Speaker 1: I think we too often overlook. I have an older
Speaker 1: brother named Jeffrey, who lives in a town very close
Speaker 1: to where we grew up. In case you're wondering, my
Speaker 1: brother and I are very different. I like to talk
Speaker 1: about how to fix things. He actually fixes things. In
Speaker 1: a crisis, I waved my hands in the air. Geoffrey
Speaker 1: disappears for an hour and emerges with a solution on
Speaker 1: a desert island. Given the choice, you might pick me
Speaker 1: for company, because I could amuse you for an afternoon
Speaker 1: with my theories. But when the sun starts to set
Speaker 1: and you're hungry and thirsty and have nowhere to sleep,
Speaker 1: you realize, oh, I picked the wrong Gladwell. Geoffrey was
Speaker 1: for many years the principle of an elementary school in
Speaker 1: a city called Kitchener. The school had four hundred students.
Speaker 1: If you're an elementary school principle in a country that
Speaker 1: lets in lots of refugees, chances are you'll have some
Speaker 1: of them as students your school, and he did. I
Speaker 1: called up my brother to ask him about it. At
Speaker 1: one point we had I think twenty percent of our
Speaker 1: school population were Syrian refugees. Where you had it, So
Speaker 1: if you had foreigned to students, are you saying you
Speaker 1: had eighty Syrian refugees in your school. Eighty Syrian refugees
Speaker 1: on top of probably another seventy to eighty ESL students, immigrants,
Speaker 1: refugees from other places. I think the biggest thing, the
Speaker 1: first thing we saw was trauma like that was really
Speaker 1: where it kind of hit the idea of a trauma
Speaker 1: informed approach. So when kids are acting out, when they're
Speaker 1: being violent, or when they're crying, or they're withdrawing or
Speaker 1: you know, maybe stealing things, you have to look at
Speaker 1: their experience from camps or from war and say, Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe these learned responses, Maybe these are survival responses, and
Speaker 1: we have to look at them that way rather than
Speaker 1: looking at them as undesirable behaviors that you have to
Speaker 1: suspend somebody for something like that. This makes sense. You
Speaker 1: take in kids from troubled parts of the world, you
Speaker 1: have the obligation to deal with the consequences. Jeffrey said
Speaker 1: that when a Canadian kid and a refugee kid will
Speaker 1: get into a fight on the playground, you'd have to
Speaker 1: figure out how to make sense of what happened because
Speaker 1: only one of them spoke English. That was a little tricky,
Speaker 1: but not that tricky. The school board gave him lots
Speaker 1: of resources. He says, there was a really brilliant ESL
Speaker 1: teacher at his school. Plus these refugees were little kids.
Speaker 1: They adapted, They learned English incredibly quickly for the most part,
Speaker 1: and then you started to see their personalities coming through
Speaker 1: and it really enriched the school in that way. We
Speaker 1: had an incredible remembrance Day service with students who had
Speaker 1: experienced war and talking about what it means to experience
Speaker 1: war and showing their pictures of what it really is
Speaker 1: like to experience them. This is my house, this is
Speaker 1: my house before it was bombed, this is my house
Speaker 1: after it was bombed. I mean, that was incredibly, incredibly
Speaker 1: moving and really sort of brought the whole experience that
Speaker 1: these students had home for the students in the school.
Speaker 1: What about the teachers. Did you have any kind of
Speaker 1: interesting or unexpected reactions from the teachers who were teaching
Speaker 1: these kids. No, again, you don't go to that school
Speaker 1: if that's not what you want to do. My job
Speaker 1: was to say to these teachers, look, you need to
Speaker 1: just get these kids into the classroom. You need to
Speaker 1: make them feel at home, you need to make them
Speaker 1: feel loved, to feel welcome in the community, and we'll
Speaker 1: get around to learning when they're ready. That's that's the
Speaker 1: message you have to give, not you know, worrying about
Speaker 1: whether these kids can fit in or not. You need
Speaker 1: to make them feel loved, not worry about whether they'll
Speaker 1: fit in. Jeffrey didn't think that dealing with the refugee
Speaker 1: children required any heroics. It just required lots of people
Speaker 1: doing their bid. A generous school board, a really good
Speaker 1: esl teacher, and parents who believe that seeing a picture
Speaker 1: of a classmate's bombed out house is a valuable learning experience.
Speaker 1: You open your mind, you open your heart. Once you
Speaker 1: start looking for this pattern of many small acts of
Speaker 1: kindness adding up to a lot, you start to see
Speaker 1: it in all kinds of places. I'm thinking about a
Speaker 1: very moving account that I stumbled across in the archives
Speaker 1: of the United States Holocaust Museum. What kind of clothes
Speaker 1: did you wear? I was wearing ordinary laws. They smelled, stank, terrible.
Speaker 1: I didn't have anything except I was veering. It's the
Speaker 1: oral history of a man named Chile Reichmann, who escaped
Speaker 1: the Treblinka concentration camp in nineteen forty three. He was
Speaker 1: part of a group that set fire to the camp,
Speaker 1: and he slipped out in the chaos, which put him
Speaker 1: and a small band of other escapees in the middle
Speaker 1: of Nazi occupied Poland. Fugitives huddling in a forest. I
Speaker 1: looked like a living skeleton. Now listen to what happened next.
Speaker 1: And V decided during deny it to go to a farm,
Speaker 1: to a peasant and ask for food. Some decent people
Speaker 1: helped us. They were starving, and someone gave them food.
Speaker 1: Reichman decided that their best hope of survival was to
Speaker 1: walk to Warsaw, which was more than fifty miles away.
Speaker 1: He meets a second farmer who feeds him some directions
Speaker 1: to Warsaw. On the way, he runs into a third man.
Speaker 1: The men paused and asked me, are you a Jew?
Speaker 1: I said yes. This Christian man, who was working in
Speaker 1: the opposite direction from where I came, turned back and said,
Speaker 1: I'm taking you to my home. His wife looked at me.
Speaker 1: She ordered me to take off my child's ship and
Speaker 1: gave me a clean one. You know what she said
Speaker 1: to me, this is my husband only extra ship. They
Speaker 1: gave it to me. They gave me a hurt and
Speaker 1: meal and inquired about my plans. Rykman's stayed with the
Speaker 1: family for two weeks. Gaining strength, he left them and
Speaker 1: met a smuggler. A smuggler gave him a ride. He
Speaker 1: got to Warsaw, went to see someone he knew from
Speaker 1: before the war who was in the Polish resistance. His
Speaker 1: old friend was petrified. He wasn't able to sleep or
Speaker 1: eve because of fear that he is hiding a jew.
Speaker 1: Reikman told his friend, I can't blame you, But as
Speaker 1: he was leaving, his friend gave him papers identifying him
Speaker 1: as an employee of the railroad. Now Reichman could pretend
Speaker 1: he wasn't Jewish. This document saved my live. I used
Speaker 1: it all the time. The story keeps going on and on.
Speaker 1: A woman and her husband let him sleep under their bed.
Speaker 1: Someone else had a fallen down shack where Reykman stayed
Speaker 1: for a bit. Someone else knew an empty apartment in
Speaker 1: Warsaw and let him stay there. He met a watchman,
Speaker 1: befriended him. The guard invited him home for dinner, gave
Speaker 1: him a job a place to stay. It was winter,
Speaker 1: freezing cold the final days of the war. Warsaw was
Speaker 1: in chaos. Reikman was huddled with a group of people
Speaker 1: in an abandoned building. Almost did not survive. We were hungry, cold,
Speaker 1: the splendent, but one and eight the men discovered our
Speaker 1: hiding place. The man asked them, are you hungry? He
Speaker 1: took them to a warehouse and opened the door and
Speaker 1: be cared off a couple of hundred ponds of food
Speaker 1: and claws that lestedness until the day of liberation. By
Speaker 1: my account, chill Rykman survived the war because of eleven
Speaker 1: acts of kindness. The keyword here is kindness. The biggest
Speaker 1: act we can perform for another is sacrifice, where we
Speaker 1: surrender something important for someone else, where we take a
Speaker 1: risk for someone else. The step below that is generosity,
Speaker 1: where we surrender some share of our time or resources
Speaker 1: for another. Kindness is entry level caring. Kindness is just
Speaker 1: a temporary suspension of indifference. The biblical story of the
Speaker 1: Good Samaritan is a story about kindness. The good Samaritan
Speaker 1: finds an injured man by the side of the road, stops,
Speaker 1: bandages him up, and takes him on the back of
Speaker 1: his donkey to a nearby inn, where he gives him
Speaker 1: to the innkeeper with some money to pay for his care.
Speaker 1: The good samaritan doesn't fight off a band of hoodlum's
Speaker 1: single handedly, or sneak the injured man pass an enemy checkpoint.
Speaker 1: He's kind, not brave. Of the eleven acts that saved
Speaker 1: chio Reichmann's life, almost all are of the good Samaritan variety.
Speaker 1: His rescuers aren't brave. They're terrified. They give him some
Speaker 1: food and a temporary place to stay because they think
Speaker 1: it's too risky to do anything more. This is why
Speaker 1: I think it's so easy to feel underwhelmed by kindness.
Speaker 1: It feels so inadequate, so random. Reichman sounds like he
Speaker 1: just got lucky. When it comes to helping people in
Speaker 1: dire need, we prefer organized, big time, high commitment acts
Speaker 1: of generosity, where we don't leave things to chance. For example,
Speaker 1: America's refugee policy, which is the perfect illustration of the
Speaker 1: anti good Samaritan approach. Nothing is left to chance. Helping
Speaker 1: isn't informal and personal, it's systematized in order to ensure
Speaker 1: that only the most deserving of displaced people come to
Speaker 1: the US. The American Refugee Resettlement program mandates a health check,
Speaker 1: a background check, an eligibility check and multiple interviews the
Speaker 1: Department of Homeland Securities involved, the State Department, the Intelligence community,
Speaker 1: all of whom weigh in. The parents get interviewed, then
Speaker 1: the child separately to make sure their stories match. And finally,
Speaker 1: for those few refugees who do trickle through this process,
Speaker 1: there's another layer of bureaucracy to protect them against the
Speaker 1: potentially nefarious intentions of whatever group may be taking him in.
Speaker 1: There's a grave concern that people are going to be
Speaker 1: brought over here and they're not going to be supported
Speaker 1: the way that we would want people to be supported
Speaker 1: in the United States. That's David Beer, an immigration policy
Speaker 1: analyst with a Cato Foundation in Washington, DC. That they
Speaker 1: would be you know, living in squalor in somebody's basement,
Speaker 1: or you know, not have enough spoons for everyone in
Speaker 1: the family, so they be sharing spoons. I mean, you're serious.
Speaker 1: There is a regulation about the minimum number of spoons
Speaker 1: necessary for us. Yes, everything is very carefully monitored. And
Speaker 1: you know, God forbid that you are so lax. It's
Speaker 1: only to bring four spoons to a party of five.
Speaker 1: You can do things that way and tell yourself in
Speaker 1: nuts and end up barely letting in any refugees at all,
Speaker 1: or you can just have faith in the good that
Speaker 1: can come out of the other end of the generosity scale,
Speaker 1: the way it did back in my hometown. When Kang, Vaughan,
Speaker 1: and Leyland arrived, someone with a big house and lots
Speaker 1: of empty bedrooms took the three of them in for
Speaker 1: a few weeks. An apartment was found for them in Elmira,
Speaker 1: a little town where I grew up. Leyland said she
Speaker 1: wanted to get a job, so Joan got her job
Speaker 1: at a local clothing factory. Everyone, including my own family,
Speaker 1: took turns in the early years inviting them over for dinner.
Speaker 1: Was that sacrifice? Please? My father had an endless stream
Speaker 1: of grad students from overseas who were always coming over
Speaker 1: for dinner on the weekends. It was just to have
Speaker 1: the people around her like your parents, like Graham and Joyce,
Speaker 1: just to kind of welcome her in and took to
Speaker 1: bring her to community events and help her learn the
Speaker 1: language and things like that. That's David Hogan remembering all
Speaker 1: those invitations meant to his mother. For me, isn't it
Speaker 1: just to hear stories from my mom of just the
Speaker 1: small things, those mundane things that really stood out to
Speaker 1: her that I don't think people would normally even talk
Speaker 1: about little things, mundane things, not big things. But remember
Speaker 1: the lesson of Chile Reichmann. Lots of people doing little
Speaker 1: things can very quickly add up to a lot. When
Speaker 1: Kang and Vaughan were finishing high school, my mom remembers
Speaker 1: that the guidance counselor called my dad and he said,
Speaker 1: what are you doing with these boys? They are in
Speaker 1: grade twelve. They have to go to university because they
Speaker 1: have got eighty percent in calculus and we don't give
Speaker 1: marks away. Just so you know, eighty percent in calculus
Speaker 1: at my high school in those years put you near
Speaker 1: the top of the class. Well, Graham had the inside
Speaker 1: knowledge of where to get money. You see, you can
Speaker 1: get you can get bursary scholarships, things like that. You
Speaker 1: know where to look, and so he must have pulled
Speaker 1: a number of strings. Because they were both at Waterloo
Speaker 1: with Graham and they got their ba's. Graham had inside knowledge.
Speaker 1: But then again, Graham was a math professor at the
Speaker 1: University of Waterloo, and here his task was to help
Speaker 1: two young people who were really good at math get
Speaker 1: into the University of Waterloo. This was not a heavy lift.
Speaker 1: And before any of this, there was the problem of
Speaker 1: bringing Van Kang and Leyland to Canada in the first place.
Speaker 1: Someone had to do the paperwork. Now, if my mom
Speaker 1: had to do the paperwork, that would have been an
Speaker 1: act of courage. But Ian Rankin does the paperwork. I
Speaker 1: remember having to go down and interview or be interviewed
Speaker 1: by somebody in Duke Street. I'm sure it was a
Speaker 1: complicated process that took many, many hours. But my sense
Speaker 1: is Idian Rankin is the kind of person for whom
Speaker 1: successfully navigating a complex bureaucracy is a form of pleasure.
Speaker 1: None of that stuff was anything that's sort of the
Speaker 1: organizing committee delegated. It just was who could do it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm learning for the first time what your role is.
Speaker 1: And I have wondered many times how was this engineered?
Speaker 1: You know? And what were the links with the government?
Speaker 1: Now I'm learning for the first time if I can
Speaker 1: break in here. This is a very joyed global moment,
Speaker 1: her surprise discovery of some formal bureaucratic structure beneath what
Speaker 1: she thought was just people interacting with each other. And
Speaker 1: then my mom volunteered this. I was a stranger and
Speaker 1: I had to be taken in myself. So I know
Speaker 1: what it felt like, you know, going to England as
Speaker 1: a student, and I'm experiencing hospitality from churches and organizations
Speaker 1: like that. So the sense of being strange in another
Speaker 1: culture was something I understood very kill. My mother came
Speaker 1: from Jamaica to England in the nineteen fifties, an unfamiliar place,
Speaker 1: a new culture. That phrase she used, I was a
Speaker 1: stranger and I had to be taken in myself is
Speaker 1: a reference to a Bible verse that everyone around that
Speaker 1: table knew very well, Matthew twenty five, Verse thirty five,
Speaker 1: for I was hungry and you gave me food. I
Speaker 1: was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I
Speaker 1: was a stranger and you welcomed me. Heroic rescues can
Speaker 1: have huge and dramatic effects, but they're very difficult to replicate.
Speaker 1: The group around my mother's dining room table were non
Speaker 1: heroic rescuers, and there is nothing they did that couldn't
Speaker 1: be done by any like minded group of ordinary people.
Speaker 1: So you give credit to those people, Jack bo and Graham, Oh,
Speaker 1: definitely yes. And you I want you to all of
Speaker 1: us to read in unison. It's like chips job. I
Speaker 1: was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty
Speaker 1: and you gave me something to drink. I was a
Speaker 1: stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you
Speaker 1: gave me clothing. I was sick and you took care
Speaker 1: of me. I was in prison and you visited me.
Speaker 1: Then the righteous will answer him. Lord, tell me the
Speaker 1: story about that girl. Do you remember? Oh? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know if I could tell that story and hold
Speaker 1: it together. When my brother Jeffrey was principal of the
Speaker 1: elementary school and kitchener, one of his youngest students, Assyrian refugee,
Speaker 1: was inconsolable. Yeah, she was. This little girl came in
Speaker 1: to kindergarten and she came in on the first day
Speaker 1: and she was just wailing, like just wailing like crazy.
Speaker 1: And the parents didn't seem to know what to do
Speaker 1: with her because like they were just at a loss,
Speaker 1: what's going on? I don't we don't understand. And we
Speaker 1: did as we do with any child who's crying in kindergarten.
Speaker 1: We worked with the parent, we'll look after child, it's okay,
Speaker 1: So we give them encouragement and usually they come in.
Speaker 1: Five minutes later, they stopped crying and they're fine. Except
Speaker 1: that didn't happen with her. She just kept wailing and
Speaker 1: it was it was heart heart wrenching. So we went
Speaker 1: into class and my ESL teacher was there, Tracy, and
Speaker 1: I just said, look, just hold her, and so she
Speaker 1: held her on her lap and she was still just crying,
Speaker 1: and I thought, okay, what am I going to do?
Speaker 1: So I just knelt down in front of her and
Speaker 1: I just started to hum and I was humming that
Speaker 1: the Universal lullaby, and she stopped. She stopped crying. She
Speaker 1: was looking at me, just looking right through me. She stopped,
Speaker 1: She got off Tracy's lap. She took my hand and
Speaker 1: she didn't let go for an hour. She walked with
Speaker 1: me around the school and she had a death grip
Speaker 1: on my finger, and she kept up with me. She
Speaker 1: just ran beside me and kept going and we walked
Speaker 1: around the school. We visited all the classroom and then
Speaker 1: we sat in another little conference room and she drew
Speaker 1: pictures for me, and I was drawing pictures for her,
Speaker 1: and she was talking to me and I was talking
Speaker 1: to her, and we didn't understand what we were saying,
Speaker 1: and then I finally, about an hour and a half later,
Speaker 1: I took her back to her class and she was fine.
Speaker 1: And then next day the real kid arrived. I mean
Speaker 1: she walked into the school and she just strode into
Speaker 1: the classroom like she was ready to take on the world.
Speaker 1: And that was the kid the parents knew. Every time
Speaker 1: I was in the primary hall, in that kindergarten hall,
Speaker 1: and I went there a lot, just wandering around, she
Speaker 1: would be looking at the door, and if I came
Speaker 1: into the classroom, she would launch herself across the room
Speaker 1: and give me a hug. Every time for the rest
Speaker 1: of the year, our parents and their friends open their
Speaker 1: hearts to three refugees in need. My brother witnessed that
Speaker 1: act and then forty five years later, opens his heart
Speaker 1: to another. Indeed, kindness leads to kindness working with that
Speaker 1: child and seeing what you can do when you show
Speaker 1: love and support and welcome to somebody. And and yeah,
Speaker 1: that that that, that to me was I mean the
Speaker 1: pinnacle of my career. I think in many ways, I'll
Speaker 1: never forget her. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Revisionist History is produced by Eloi's Linton Leaving Gistu and
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith with tali Emlyn and Harrison vj Choi. Our
Speaker 1: editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is Mia la Belle.
Speaker 1: Original scoring by Luis Kara, mastering by Flawn Williams and
Speaker 1: engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact checking by Keisha Williams. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Sasha Matthias and SALMANA hod Khan for production
Speaker 1: help on this episode. Him Malcolm Glauba