The following is a reflection written by Joe Ahlers, one of this year's North House Volunteers. He shared this as a part of the North House community's Pentecost Reflections, which took place May 20th.
When I walk into the Marjorie Kovler Center, I’m immediately
surrounded by individuals who truly know what it means to grieve for the old
but wait hopefully for the new. The
clients of the Kovler Center have experienced and survived the worst sort of
cruelty that humankind can inflict on one another; physical and psychological
torture. Even after almost a year of
having been exposed to a darker world that I didn’t even really know existed, the
shock and hopelessness I feel when I hear or read a client’s torture experience
has not worn off. But there are certain
individuals’ stories that really spoke to me when I thought about waiting in
anticipation of the ascension.
One such experience belongs to a survivor that I’ll call “Sean”. I first met him when he walked into the
Kovler Center a few days after I first started there. Like many of the Kovler Center’s clients, Sean
comes from Sub-Saharan Africa; more specifically from the former British colony
of Nigeria. When Sean first came walked
in, I will admit that I was more than just a little intimated by him. To put it mildly, Sean is a “big man”, tall
and built in such a way that I wouldn’t doubt him if he introduced himself as
the 3rd string middle linebacker of the Chicago Bears. But when I started talking to Sean about his
experience in his homeland, what really caught me by surprise about him was not
his physique, but rather how soon into our conversation he started to break
down and cry. Sean explained to me that
this was the first time that he had talked about the horrific events in his
homeland and he simply could not contain the flood of emotions that he was
experiencing. He went on to say that he was
a middle class laborer in his native city in Northern Nigeria, with a new wife
and a 1 year old daughter. He said the
trouble started when an Islamic extremist group, Boko Haram, started to become
active in and around the area in which he lived. Sean told me that he was a practicing
Christian in a part of the country where very few did. He told me that one night five armed men came
to house and started to threaten his family if they would not convert to
Islam. To further scare him, they threw
his baby daughter in a tub of water and would not let him rescue her. Sean said he’s never been terrified or
helpless in his life. The armed men let
him go to his daughter after 30 terrifying seconds, where he found her shaken
up but alright. The men then left but
warned that they would return. Sean
immediately took his wife and daughter and fled to Chicago to live with his
mother in law, where he learned about the Kovler Center a few weeks later.
Sean left his entire life, culture, customs, and anyone he’s
ever known behind, and was severely traumatized by his experience. But with the help of his family, the Kovler
Center, and his own resilience and hopefulness, Sean was able to start to feel whole
again. A few months after I first met
him, he told us that his wife was pregnant.
A few weeks ago, his wife gave birth to a healthy baby boy with a huge
mop of thick black curly hair that looks like he’ll be just as big as his father
one day.
This is just one example to me of grieving the old and
waiting hopefully for the new. Although
I can never imagine what it feels like to leave behind everything and start
over in a new world like our clients do, I’d like to think like that serving
for two years has been a small taste of their experience. I think we all feel some sort of grief for
the friends, family, and lives we left behind when we entered this weird and
wonderful experience called Amate House. I for one still miss times where the world seemed so much simpler and
pure. Although I still find myself
fairly anxious when I think about the impending storm of what staff likes to
call “life after Amate”, I know that I will have the countless stories of
strength and resilience of people like Sean and the support of eight other
housemates to help guide me through whatever comes next.
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