CARING FOR MIGRANTS WITH JOHN WEBB TRANSCRIPT (051)

TODD KENT: Hello everyone, this is Todd Kent, Director of the Program in Teacher Preparation at Princeton University, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. I’ve known Pete since he graduated from Princeton in 1997, the same year I came to work here at Teacher Prep. Pete and I have collaborated on several projects over the years, from working on revisions to the Teacher Prep curriculum to co-authoring a paper on student voice for the American Educational Research Association. I’m excited to introduce this particular episode of the podcast because Pete will be talking with John Webb, with whom I worked closely when he led Teacher Prep from 2000 to 2010. John is one of the finest educators I’ve ever met. They’ll be talking about John’s new book about the heroic response of one Greek village to the global refugee crisis, which unfortunately remains a pertinent issue. And knowing these two amazing educators very well, I’m sure they will get into several other fascinating topics related to teaching, learning, and keeping kids at the center of the work.

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, Dr. John Webb, who founded a program over 50 years ago to care for the Haitian students in the school where he was teaching. Just like today, Haitians were not eating cats then either, but there was still backlash:

JOHN WEBB: People came to me and said that I was ruining the school, because all of these people were coming and it was “changing the culture of the school,” and there was “body odor in the school,” and that there was “social tension,” and that if I hadn't founded this program, they wouldn't have come.

[VO]: John talks about what he needed to learn about these kids in order to be an effective teacher:

JOHN: How had they been raised? How had they been educated? What language did they speak? How did they feel about all of that? How did they really feel in their culture? What were they experiencing? I needed to get inside of that “bubble” that surrounds, I think, each individual, and come to understand what's in there. Otherwise, I couldn't effectively teach.

[VO]: And he’s got a respectful rebuke for anyone who jumps to conclusions about migrants:

JOHN: you don't know who they are! You don't know anything about them! You don't know who they are, why they're here, what they've experienced to get here, what talents they might bring, nothing! And yet you are judging them based on some kind of immediate appearance and reaction that may emanate from inside of you. But it may also be part of the Trumpian style propaganda that you hear: it's an easy place to go when you don't know.

[VO]: All that, and a discussion of John’s new book about the global refugee crisis as encountered by one Greek village—coming right up!

[3:21]

[VO]: As regular listeners and supporters especially are aware, I take my sweet time crafting podcast episodes to ensure that they showcase interesting ideas and sound as good as I can make them sound. By design, these shows are more evergreen than time-bound, because I want them to be edifying in case you’re checking them out years later (subtle plug for the back catalog there) but I can’t resist the coincidence of producing this episode that deals to some extent with my guest’s direct experience with Haitian migrants in the 1970s during a news cycle here in mid-September 2024 that is still partially consumed by the Trump campaign’s embrace of the internet rumor that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio are eating household pets. Intended to stoke the anti-immigration rancor that Trump believes redounds to his benefit, this particular lie—and I feel completely comfortable calling it a lie, given recent reporting that J.D. Vance’s aides who contacted Springfield officials the morning of the debate were told that there was zero foundation for the Facebook rumor—this particular Trump lie has had real personal and educational impacts for Springfield residents, especially Haitian kids, who plead to understand why they are being treated so badly by their classmates and neighbors. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine reported at least 33 bomb threats as of last weekend, which shut down city and school buildings as well as public celebrations. State troopers have been deployed to guard students going to school. As of this recording, classes at Wittenberg University and Clark State College, both in Springfield, are online to try to keep students safe. (As usual, custodians and other essential workers are expected to report to their regular duties.) I want to get to the show I’ve been working on—slowly—for some weeks now, but I encourage you to listen carefully for the ways that John’s experience working with Haitians more than 50 years ago resonates with our current moment.

[5:28]

[VO]: I’ve wanted to record an episode with Dr. John Webb for a long time, because there’s no one outside of certain colleagues at the school where I taught for 18 years with whom I’ve had so many conversations about what matters in education. John and I met 24 years ago, when he invited me to speak at a new University-wide convocation honoring the Program in Teacher Preparation at Princeton, and we hit it off immediately! An educator possessed of a deeply humane approach to kids, John strives to know each student as an individual—and has taught several generations of teachers to do the same. He began his career as a teacher of French in Spring Valley, New York, a suburban community in Rockland County, about an hour north of New York City. He began teaching teachers during his years at Hunter College High School in Manhattan, where he also served as Chair of World Languages. Later he led Princeton’s Program in Teacher Preparation for 10 years, during which time he co-founded the Princeton University Preparatory Program, or PUPP, a summer institute for bright high school students from families with low income. (I can vouch for PUPP’s power as its proud literature teacher for three summers back in the aughts.) And now John has written a book set in the Greek town of Molyvos on the northwest corner of the island of Lesvos closest to Turkey, through which an estimated 400 to 450 thousand refugees and migrants passed during a 16-month period from November 2014 to March 2016, as they fled war and famine and oppression in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After hundreds of hours of research and interviews, John has produced a deeply affecting book called Molyvos: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis, which personalizes and individualizes a humanitarian crisis that is usually too enormous to comprehend. He paints vivid pictures of the struggle to navigate the 4.1-mile expanse of the Aegean Sea separating this Greek hamlet from mainland Turkey, including the shoddy rubber crafts that were overloaded by smugglers, and the feeble outboard motors that were sometimes stolen by other profiteers before the desperate migrants reached the shore. His compelling narrative begins with a restaurant called The Captain’s Table, which became the unlikely epicenter of a massive relief effort that divided the town. Some community members pitched in immediately, but others refused, and some ignored the situation as much as they could. Anyone who cares about refugees, migrants, and immigration more broadly should read this book, which of course will be linked on the show page—but I was also very interested in exploring more with John his own experience in Spring Valley, in the early 1970s. There John, a relatively new teacher of French, found himself coordinating his school’s response to an influx of Haitian students, whose families were fleeing the tyrannical regime instituted by Haitian President Francois a.k.a. “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and his infamous undercover death squad, the Tonton Macoute. So there’s some of that, and plenty of talk about what I hold to be the center of effective teaching: the teacher-student relationship. John and I recorded this conversation in late March 2024 at his home in Cooperstown, New York, where he lives with his husband Nelson Mondaca, a retired Marine making a second act as an award-winning chef, and two gorgeous Golden Retrievers, Jersey and Dakota.

[9:18]

PETER: The book is called Molyvos: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis, and it documents the period between November 2014 and March 2016, when an estimated 400- to 450,000 migrants crossed the 4.1 miles of water between Turkey and the town of Molyvos on the northwest tip of Lesvos. One of the very helpful features of your book is the maps that you commissioned for it, so it's easy to see that this tiny town was certainly the closest Greek port from Turkey. You said that you wrote the book because it was a story that needed to be told. I'm here in your living room because I agree, but what's your connection to Molyvos, and how did you decide that you needed to write this book?

JOHN: Well, Nelson and I went to Molyvos for the first time in 2013 at the invitation of some friends, and we had an opportunity to really come to appreciate its beauty, the culture, the community, and the food, of course! So we had this affinity for it, and we met some very interesting people, not knowing at the time that these people were going to be the ones at the very epicenter of the refugee crisis. So in other words, for some reason, we felt a connection to them. We felt a closeness. We felt a warmth from them. And after the crisis had passed and we were visiting the next time in Molyvos, the very people who had befriended us the first time spent time sitting and talking with us about what had happened there. It was difficult to grasp it, because everything was peaceful; everything was quiet. And yet I could tell from the intensity of the conversation—both in terms of its content and in terms of its emotionality—that this was an event that had shaken the village to its very core, and that people like Melinda, whom we had come to know—

PETER: This is Melinda McRostie.

JOHN: Melinda McRostie.

PETER: She, with her husband, owned and operated this restaurant.

JOHN: That's right. They owned and operated The Captain's Table. They had been permanently impacted by this. And even though it was some three years later, Melinda grew emotional when she spoke about the events that had occurred. When she said to me that people turned against her for doing this, that people had blamed her for the crisis—that if she hadn't helped [the migrants], they wouldn't have come. That's what really struck me, because in Spring Valley, as the number of Haitian students began to increase in the school, and I had set up a program that would help to integrate them as well as provide them with instruction that would enable them to transition into the mainstream program, people came to me and said that I was ruining the school because all of these people were coming and it was “changing the culture of the school,” and there was “body odor in the school,” and that there was “social tension,” and that if I hadn't founded this program, they wouldn't have come.

PETER: Because this was Spring Valley, this was toward the start of your career.

JOHN: This was about 1971 or ‘72. My third year teaching.

PETER: So you were a few years in, and Haitian immigrants, who had been courted actually in the late ‘50s—that was the start of the Papa Doc Duvalier reign of terror in Haiti. But they had been courted by the nearby Ford plant, I believe—

JOHN: That's correct.

PETER: —to come and work. And so there was a little bit of a community of workers, but then when Haitians in large numbers needed to get out of Haiti, because there were people already in Spring Valley, they connected with other people in Spring Valley. So by the early ‘70s it started—I guess it was a decade of formidable influx in this area where you're teaching. And as a teacher of French, you found yourself connecting and working with a lot of these students and thereby kind of in between the Haitian community and some of the people there who were none too pleased about the changes going on.

JOHN: Yes.

PETER: And so in a similar way, you recognized that kind of either intransigence or hostility of the community as an echo in Greece of what you had faced just outside of New York City early on.

JOHN: And I recognized immediately what Melinda had gone and done in her effort to help the people feel respected and cared for, in the middle of tremendous trauma. And I was aware back in Spring Valley that these families—and many of my students—had seen people murdered in Haiti, or had disappeared and never come back. I remember one parent telling me about how the plane that they were on to fly to New York was unloaded and all of the luggage was placed on the tarmac, and each person had to identify their luggage because they suspected a specific enemy of the Duvalier government was on that flight. And indeed, they identified the person because he didn't have luggage, and they watched this person be taken away. And so even in what might appear to be a normal departure, there was terror. And then of course there was the whole issue of the Haitian “boat people.” And I had one student who had been put on a boat in the hands of a smuggler—a rowboat for all practical purposes—and headed for The Bahamas with this smuggler who was then supposed to hand him over to someone else in The Bahamas for the trip to Miami. And he came without a family! And of course, they were met by church groups or other people in Spring Valley who might have had an acquaintance with them from back in Haiti, but they were there almost as orphan children. Suddenly they were in my care because no one else seemed to know what to do with them. (And I think that that was an honest reaction.) And they honestly believed that being a French teacher, I would know what to do, which I didn't.

PETER: Because of the language.

JOHN: Because of the language. I didn't even know what Creole was!

PETER: But in terms of the people who were coming, they were just from all different strata of society who were trying to get out from Haiti?

JOHN: At that time, it was largely a professional crowd. It was very similar in that regard to the ones coming over from Syria and Afghanistan. They were an educated population. They held positions of serious professional responsibility. They were doctors and lawyers and scientists and nurses, and soldiers as well.

[VO]: Professionals not unlike the attorney Markenzy Lapointe, a Marine veteran who is now prosecuting Ryan Routh for the most recent Trump assassination attempt in the Southern District of Florida. Lapointe is the first Haitian-born U.S. citizen appointed to the office of U.S. Attorney.

JOHN: In other words, the population coming out of Haiti at that time and the population coming across to Molyvos were of similar socioeconomic strata.

PETER: What did you learn, or what did you take away from your experience with the Haitian refugees?

JOHN: What I took away had to do with pedagogy. I did not feel that as a teacher I could be truly effective in instructing period—but certainly in enabling a young person to integrate into another place and another culture and another language—if I didn't know about the students' experiences prior to meeting me. How had they been raised? How had they been educated? What language did they speak? How did they feel about all of that? How did they really feel in their culture? What were they experiencing? I needed to get inside of that “bubble” that surrounds, I think, each individual, and come to understand what's in there. Otherwise, I couldn't effectively teach. I couldn't provide any context for learning that would be meaningful if I didn't know these things about a child. And in fact, the parents as well: I needed to understand how they felt, how they viewed their children, how they viewed education, how they viewed school, how they viewed the learning process, what their hopes were for their children, what their fears were. And until I could understand that, there was no way that I could respond effectively to them either.

PETER: But then, it's something that you realized was a profound benefit for you as a teacher working with any student and any group of parents.

JOHN: Absolutely. All of a sudden, it was important for me to know that this kid didn't have breakfast because both of his parents worked in New York City and left the house before he even woke up. So there was nobody there to do anything for him, and there was nobody there when he got home. He was a latchkey kid, and that's why he was asleep in the morning in class. And so I would say to him, “Bring breakfast to class!” and he started to perk up! Or with the Cambodian children. Now that's another whole story, but there was this one little kid. He came from Cambodia. He was an orphan. He and his brother had been separated. His brother was somewhere in the South and he was in Rockland County in the care of a church group. And he was all eager, all ready to learn, an amazing young man. And then all of a sudden, about two months, three months, into his stay in the United States, things just stopped for him. He looked ashen, he was sad, he didn't do his work, he just completely fell apart. And I could communicate with him, and there was no one there who spoke Cambodian. And so it wasn't until the end of that school year when he had acquired enough English and he told me and his fellow students in class how he had gotten out of Cambodia: the story of the trip from his village to the seacoast where the landmines killed the elephants that they were traveling on, and he watched his grandparents die with a landmine. Ultimately, when they got to the coast, it was only him and his brother, and they had been separated when they left for the United States. And all of a sudden, this all hit him at one point, and we didn't know. And if we had known, we would have been able to—not necessarily lighten—well, maybe we would have lightened the burden, but we certainly could have provided more support for him and he wouldn't have had to suffer! So it existed in every range. Students with learning disabilities: if we figure out how they do learn—because they do have ways of learning … If we figure out how they learn, then we know how to teach. And so that's the solid pedagogical outcome of this whole experience.

[23:57]

PETER: It's fair to say that one way to describe your book is an extended meditation, with many painstakingly researched example,s on the question eloquently articulated by one of the writers about the crisis that you quote. Her name is Spyros Orfanos. And that is: How do we act as citizens of the world when another human being needs us? We're sitting here talking [in late March 2024], when immigration continues to loom large as one of the key issues of the 2024 election, just a few weeks after Donald Trump cowed his followers on Capitol Hill into killing the immigration legislation that Republican and democratic lawmakers had negotiated for months, because Trump believes chaos at the border is a political winner for him. I don't mean to sidetrack our conversation, but I found myself wishing as I read your book that anyone who cares about immigration would read it because I heartily endorse what someone said to you a few weeks ago: nobody who reads this book will think about immigration or migrants or refugees the same way. How much did the immigration debate in the U.S. inform either your approach to this book about the migration crisis in Greece, or your determination to finish the project once you had begun?

JOHN: I always thought about our southern border question in the same domain as I thought about the Haitian crisis because of the similarity that the Haitians were viewed as economic refugees, but that they could go home. Because they were considered economic refugees, it gave them less stature. And of course, that harks back to the whole “refugee” vs. “migrant” [designation].

PETER: Even though you have the Tonton Macoute slaughtering people?

JOHN: Exactly.

PETER: I just wasn't aware of this, that that was the classification …

JOHN: That's right. It really was. They were never classified as “refugees” and by all noremal standards—

PETER: Or “humanitarian refugees”—

JOHN: Because there is the United Nations definition of a refugee—

[VO]: According to the United Nations, a “refugee” is someone who has been forced to flee conflict or persecution and has crossed an international border to seek safety. They cannot return to their country without risking their life or freedoms. It is a legal term that carries with it certain formal protections. The term “migrant” does not have an international legal definition. However, it is commonly understood to refer to someone who has chosen to leave their home to start a new life in another country. A migrant can theoretically return home without risking their life or freedom.

JOHN: Certain conditions at home will determine whether people fleeing that a particular country qualify as refugees.

PETER: So for example, in the case of Greece, the Syrians were considered refugees.

JOHN: Yes. But maybe somebody just fleeing the Democratic Republic of Congo might not under a certain but the Syrians— And so some people did actually try to pass them off themselves off as Syrians if they weren't because they thought it might be easier to get [refugee status]. The United Nations had not declared anyone else to be refugees other than Syrians. And so the Afghans said, as did the Haitians, We’re fleeing from horrendous political turmoil where we're faced with death and hunger, but we don't have the same rights as the Syrians because the Syrians have been declared refugees. And that was true for the Sudanese and the people from the Republic of Congo and everything. And that was what was going on with the Haitians. And of course, the Haitians pointed to the Cubans, saying Cubans are considered refugees, and when they come into the United States, they are entitled to all of the rights of refugees under the Geneva Convention, but the Haitians weren't. So I saw it from that perspective, and I understood the migration that was taking place out of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala to the United States. I had encountered undocumented people from those countries in New Jersey. I was aware of their situation there and had the same sentiments for them as I did for the Haitians. But my real connection to this issue occurred in relationship to the refugees coming into Greece, because it was so immediate. It was now. And I knew people who had stepped forward to help them as I had the refugees—or the people from Haiti. And so all of a sudden there was a personal connection to it. I knew Melinda, I knew what kind of a person she was. I knew what she did. I knew why she did it and all that. And so all of a sudden, I really became maybe once again acutely aware, or it may be that after all these years, I had yet a more enhanced awareness of it than I did back in my twenties when I was working with the Haitian population.

PETER: When I asked the question, I realized that it may be just overdetermined: that this is a story that you needed to tell, and you saw it and you wanted to make sure that it was documented. I guess the U.S. immigration question kept coming to my mind when I was reading it because it's uncanny, some of the kinds of similarities: that there people who kind of resisted helping out, and then when they finally did help out, they were like, Wait a second, these people aren't spreading disease. These people aren't terrorists. But they had these myths: The migrants are here spreading disease. They're “poisoning the blood,” if you will—popular expression now—or they’re terrorists. They were saying exactly the same thing. It was as if they had heard some of our propaganda, but it happens everywhere, of course. This is an old story, and the parallel struck me so many times, but it's only by working hand in hand and seeing people face to face that you've come to realize that, well, this isn't the case at all!

JOHN: Well, I was just going to say a person I have known for a long time and who taught in Spring Valley, for God's sake—she ended up living along the Texas border and she was just rabidly anti-immigrant because she says, “You see these people crossing that border and going down the street and they don't have anything and they're coming in by the hundreds, and what are we going to do with them?” And of course, I couldn't help but think to myself, Well, that's the viewpoint you have, but you don't know who they are. You don't know anything about them! You don't know who they are, why they're here, what they've experienced to get here, what talents they might bring, you know nothing! And yet you are judging them based on some kind of immediate appearance and that reaction may emanate from inside of you, but it may also be part of the Trumpian style propaganda that you hear: it's an easy place to go when you don't know. It is very easy to assume that these people have nothing, that they're troublemakers. And if someone helps to confirm that, well then it's harder to stop and say, Well, who are these people? And to try to find out who they are. When I was teaching multicultural education, and this was the theme, of course, that you had to get to know who your students were and the students would inevitably say, “Well, how do I get to know all that stuff?” And I said, “You start asking questions.”

PETER: Sorry, these are your students who are teachers in training, right? Pre-service teachers?

JOHN: These are actually classroom teachers, or well, actually these were graduate students. They were teachers who were already experiencing it in their classroom. And what used to strike me as strange is that it never dawned on them that you really had to get to know your students! It wasn't really included in early teacher education. Get to know your students! [Rather the approach was:] Know your subject material, and this is the way you teach it, and the problem is all solved. And so many of them would come back after a few weeks in class and say, “Oh my God! What I just found out about so and so.” And I said, “Well, you ask questions and you just keep asking questions.” And I said, “As long as you keep asking questions, you are A. going to find answers, and B. you're going to approach that individual differently.

[34:32]

PETER: Since we're on the subject, would you tell the story—I just think it's so important and I'd like to document it—of the teacher who said—it was a heritage language classroom, and she realized that her students knew Spanish, most of them, quite a bit better than not only she did, but probably ever could. And the kind of tension she faced at first because she was still trying to do what “teachers” do, which is to be the prime knowers in the classroom. And when she realized that she didn't in fact know more about Spanish language than these kids who had grown up speaking Spanish all over the world, I think, what she recognized and how that changed things for her?

JOHN: Oh my goodness, that kind of, and that she had the courage to own it!

PETER: That's what I'm saying. That part I just feel is such a—

JOHN: Absolutely, I learned—I think that interacting with her was also a turning point in my own professional makeup, because she actually had the courage to do what no teacher I had ever seen, or knew of, had ever had the courage to do. And that was to recognize that the chaos in the classroom was unmanageable, and she was able to pinpoint the cause. And the cause was her—not the students. And that she had to say to them, “Look, I don't know as much Spanish as you do. You know a lot more Spanish than I do.” She said, “I don't know anything about your country; you know everything about it. But there are some things that I do know how to do. There are things that I know about the language that you don't, but I also know ways in which to teach. So let's work together. You teach me, and I'll teach you.” Problem resolved, in so many ways, because she said what the students already knew.

PETER: And she gave them the opportunity to wear the mantle of expert.

JOHN: That's right.

PETER: To show their expertise and to be proud of that, and to have that validated by her willingness to learn from them.

JOHN: She gave them a reason to be proud and an opportunity to express pride in who they were, and it was miraculous.

[37:31]

VANA ZERVANOS: Hello, this is Vana Zervanos, Associate Dean of the Hobbes School of Business at St. Joseph's University. I met Pete two years ago when we were serving as inaugural fellows in Democratic and Civic Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania, a new collaboration between Penn's Netter Center and the Graduate School of Education. I think I was talking to Pete for about four minutes before he mentioned that he had a podcast. I thought, You're a confident white guy in your forties. Of course you have a podcast! But then I listened to an episode and was like, Wait, this is actually pretty good. As far as appearing in this particular show about a village on the island of Lesvos, well, you might guess with a handle like Vana Zervanos that I've got Greek heritage, and you'd be right about that. I spent many summers visiting my grandparents' home in Lamia, a small town on the mainland in the most beautiful country on the planet. After listening to Point of Learning, I made the choice to contribute a one-time donation, and you can too. Pete says I might think about making a second one-time donation, but let's see how this episode turns out, shall we? If you want to, please consider clicking the button on the show page. I will also be considering it myself. But for now, back to the show!

PETER: The triumph of the book for me is that how can you compass a number like 400,000 or 450,000? What does that mean? What does it look like? But you get into the stories of these people and the volunteers who worked with them and what they reported and how they were moved and what they stumbled on and what they learned. And it just humanizes and personalizes the whole thing. 

JOHN: Well, Ilektra Pasxouli, who was a volunteer with Melinda for a long time and ended up working with her at Oxy, she said there was no way that I could help—really help—all these people, but she said, “They needed water, they needed something to eat, they needed dry clothing.” She said, “I could provide that for them and I could show them kindness.” And she said, “I hope that as they progressed on wherever they were going, that they would remember that they had been shown this act of kindness and that maybe someday they'll be doctors and they'll be lawyers and they'll have a beautiful home. But for right now, that's what I could do. And that's what they needed at the time.”

PETER: Oxy is a good example because it's the name of a club a little bit away from town where Melinda was able—I think it was Melinda. She had a friend of a friend or something who owned the place and knew that it was only open the summer—

JOHN: Only open June to August.

PETER: And so it had this parking lot that was available. There were people in town complaining about, these refugees are all over the place. She said, Well, look, let's find a location. She worked out this location, and so Oxy is one of the locations that you write about, and some of the stories are set there, including her moxie in dealing with the UNHCR. (This is the Refugee Aid Agency of the UN.) They had provided buses, and so she decided that in order to get the refugees there, she would just use all the buses that the UNHCR had provided, do it all at one time, load everybody up and take them out there. And UNHCR said, Wait, those are our buses! She's like, Well, you're not doing anything with them. You just got here. You provided some buses. This is what needed to be done. So I made this call—

JOHN: And you're not helping me load them!

PETER: But the things that people figured out, so this isn't an education book per se, but there's so many accounts of things that people feel figured out or realized, moments of ingenuity, even the scheme that she came up with, for example, realizing that if she wrote numbers for people to try to figure out how to load the buses in an orderly fashion—if she just wrote numbers, some people who were desperate would figure it out and be like, Alright, I can write numbers. So they'd write numbers and then you'd realize, This isn't working. So she finally came up with a system of colors and symbols. I think that really helped because you're talking about dozens and dozens and dozens of people on given at any given hour that you're trying to move at a particular situation. So I love those little anecdotes. But then also there are very touching examples of people interacting with kids, especially. You've got one of the helpers that you write about a lot, a friend of yours who volunteered, Robin. She has a supply of watercolors that she starts with, I think, and Ute as well, does some art projects with kids. And there's some pictures of the artwork that they make, very tender kinds of connections and possibilities for creativity and creation amidst all this pain and dislocation and personal and external chaos. Speaking of the helpers, many of the people who talked to you had some strong thoughts about those who did eventually come in to help, whether they were affiliated with a non-governmental organization or NGO, like the UN Refugee Agency or the Red Cross. Some were more helpful helpers than others were, and some of course were unaffiliated, as I said. I wanted to highlight, especially at this moment, one of the NGOs that was actually very effective and had a consistent record for really excellent work, which was Isra-Aid. I think I'm saying that right?

JOHN: Isra-Aid. Yes.

PETER: Isra-Aid. It's an organization I hadn't heard of before. Palestinian Muslim and Israeli Jewish doctors worked alongside each other, and the Palestinians helped quite a bit by speaking Arabic, which many of the migrants spoke. And then you describe at one moment that there were some times that Muslim patients would be dumbfounded to learn that they were being treated by Jewish physicians. It led to a very interesting cultural moment.

JOHN: Eric [Kempson] loved it.

PETER: Yeah. I didn't know if you had anything else about the people who helped, the mixed motivations. I mean, there were some crazy stories of religious, I assume they were Christian religious groups, just the way they behaved—

JOHN: Who wanted to convert the heathen!

PETER: They would wade out into the water and give people Bibles before their dinghy—their not even seaworthy, slowly capsizing dinghy that was getting a motor stolen off the back by somebody who was trying to repurpose it! They would give them Bibles before they had even landed, or they would let them land and get hungry and be kissing the beach or looking for Mecca to pray. And rather than offer food or water or blankets, they would preach to them that that's what they were doing. Like crazy stories about some of the things that went on. And I guess there were turf battles in some places. People fought each other.

JOHN: Eric Kempson referred to them as the religious wars.

PETER: Yeah, there you go! If you had any reflections on the helpers—

JOHN: The animosity towards the large NGOs became huge, with the exception of Doctors Without Borders, Isra-Aid—

[VO]: I looked it up! The third very helpful organization was Proactive Open Arms, a Barcelona-based group that was one of the earliest Non-Governmental Organizations to arrive.

JOHN: And the people who were part of those organizations were the ones who came and they were the ones who helped, and they administered. They did everything. And that extent of engagement earned the respect of the people who had already been helping because they were coming in and doing what Eric and Melinda and her husband and all of the other volunteers who worked for the whole project and for Starfish, what they were doing.

PETER: And also they asked. It’s my impression that they asked, What have you been doing? And they sought to learn what had been doing, as opposed to coming in and making assumptions about what people needed or what should be done, and just taking control of the situation.

JOHN: Right, exactly. And with Melinda and Eric, when the volunteers would come, they got trained by Melinda and Eric, and part of it was to understand the culture of the area and what people had already been doing so that they would have a level of respect for what had been going on before they arrived. Whereas the large NGOs came in, and because of their size, their international stature, and their wealth, they just assumed that they could do anything they wanted, because of who they were! And they didn't ask permission to do anything. They drove their cars onto people's property. They took over areas that didn't belong to them. And people learned that within the large NGOs, there were the administrators, there were the paid staff, and then there were the people who actually did the work. And the people who actually did the work were volunteers for those organizations who weren't being paid. And the staff members drove big cars. They had, as I described in the book, they had meals in the restaurants in the port when there were refugees hanging around or they wanted to do a publicity video, and they would actually go out to the beach and try to get the refugees to pose during the unloading of the boat so that they could get good footage! Now, there were things that I didn't dare say in the book, stories that were told about American celebrities who went over there and they were all over the place. These American celebrities brought in by the large NGOs to be a part of the publicity that got shown on TV as being their response to this crisis, once the world found out about it. And so certainly after September and then in October, there were a lot of celebrities over there and doing films and all that sort of stuff. At one point—I know I tell it in the book—Eric had been down on the beach and he was coming up with a group of refugees who had landed, and he was coming up the steep incline. It got to the top of the rise, and there were some people standing there with clothing with the insignia of their NGO, and he said, “Why aren't you down on the beach helping? There are people down there who need help.” And their response was “That's not a part of our protocol.”

PETER: That's not our department!

JOHN: And so it was that attitude that caused the dissension. Melinda was always very cautious when she spoke about the NGOs, because she said, “We needed their money. We were desperate for the money that they had to offer us.” Eric Kempson was less enthusiastic, because he said these major NGOs, the UNHCR and others would arrive there, but their volunteers had no supplies. And so they would have to go to Eric and Philippa’s place and get supplies, and yet they were working for a huge NGO that had all kinds of resources!

[VO]: At the end of our conversation, we returned to parallels with U.S. immigration.

JOHN: Everything is a parallel! The crisis itself, the political reaction to it, and then ultimately the outcome. It's like my cousin's son, John, my godson, who's working for this mission in El Paso, and that's what he's doing. He's dealing with refugees coming across the border. He's the head of a mission in the city of El Paso. They deal with about 250 people a night coming in. And some of them stay for a period of time, but he said they all need clothing, they all need food, they all need some kind of medical attention, and most of all, they need someone to care for them a little bit. And so he's helping them get jobs under the table so they can make money to get to wherever they're going. And he drives them to where they need to go to get there. And he says, “For God's sake, let them in! Let them in.” Because they go and they find jobs and that's all they want to do, is they want to work and be safe! He says, “They're not going to cause trouble.” But of course it is part of the American dilemma in a sense that they felt that we had to create a common culture because there was the War of 1812, and we got seriously threatened. It was important to have the Common School. The Common School wasn't because it was for commoners; it was to create a common culture, one that we could be patriotic about because we figured that if we have something to be patriotic about, we'll defend ourselves. And then of course, the whole business about religious freedom, that we had come for religious freedom and everybody came here to worship God in the way in which they wanted to. And because they were able to do that, somehow, we were the favorite nation of the world. God liked us better than anybody else! And so all of a sudden we were welcoming the wretched wretches from your teeming shores—

PETER: I think it’s “wretched refuse.”

JOHN: It's even worse! Wretched refuse from your teeming shores. And so we were better than everybody else. And that is so embedded in who we are. It's what the whole “MAGA” all about. It goes back to that.

[53:12]

[VO]:Am I really going to close the interview with “MAGA” as one of the last words? Yes, because the history of a half-century ago has something to teach us about MAGA too. Make America Great Again is a slogan co-opted from Ronald Reagan, who used it twice in a speech 44 years ago, campaigning against Jimmy Carter on Labor Day, 1980. I have never been a fan of Reagan, but I was heartened to look up what he was talking about when he said it. Turns out, he was literally standing a few hundred yards from the Statue of Liberty as he spoke in Jersey City that day. Here’s just 90 seconds from the beginning of the speech. He doesn’t use the term “immigrant,” nor does he name the institution of slavery as one of the “different ways” people came to America, but listen to what he does say:

GOV. RONALD W. REAGAN: Through this "Golden Door," under the gaze of that "Mother of Exiles," has come millions of men and women, who first set foot on American soil right there, on Ellis Island, so close to the Statue of Liberty. These families came here to work. They came to build. Others came to America in different ways, from other lands, under different, and often harrowing conditions. But this place symbolizes what they all managed to build, no matter where they came from or how they came or how much they suffered. They helped to build that magnificent city across the river. They spread across the land building other cities and other towns and incredibly productive farms. They came to make America work. They didn’t ask what this country could do for them but what they could do to make this—this refuge the greatest home of freedom in history. They brought with them courage, ambition and the values of family, neighborhood, work, peace, and freedom. We all came from different lands but we share the same values, the same dream.

I’ve got a link to full audio, video, and transcript of the 18-minute  speech on the show page. Here’s one more sentence from the middle:
REAGAN: I want to help Americans of every race, creed, and heritage keep and build that sense of community which is at the heart of America …

[VO]: And the last 50 seconds, where the author of “make America great again” seems to place a very different value on immigration than the party of Trump.

REAGAN: … let us send, loud and clear, the message that this generation of Americans intends to keep that lamp shining. That this dream—that this dream, this last best hope of man on earth, this nation under God, shall not perish from the earth. We will instead carry on the building of an American economy that once again holds forth real opportunity for all. We shall continue to be a symbol of freedom and guardian of the eternal values that so inspired those who came to this port of entry. Let us pledge to each other, with this Great Lady looking on, that we can, and so help us God, we will make America great again. Thank you very much.

[56:53]

That’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to John Webb for providing some additional context for his excellent new book, Molyvos: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis, which you can order right from the show page. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro musics. Credits for the interstitial Greek and Middle Eastern music sampled in this episode appear on the show page. Finally, thanks to you for listening, supporting, rating, and reviewing this show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you found it. If there’s even just one person you know who might enjoy this episode, please do share it with them. It will mean most coming from you. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered by me—gradually—here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you as soon as I can with another new episode all about what and how and why we learn. See you then!