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
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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 around the table
Speaker 1: and everyone just say their name.
Speaker 2: I'm starting with your.
Speaker 3: Doors White from Alma, Alma United.
Speaker 4: Ian Rankin from Knox Presbyteria.
Speaker 1: John Carston's Gail Presbyterian Church in Elmira, and.
Speaker 5: I'm Lilianda Rankin, married to Ian rank.
Speaker 3: I'm Joyce Gladwell and unfortunately my husband is no long living,
Speaker 3: but he was very active. I'll be from Elmara in
Speaker 3: Gail Church.
Speaker 1: I went home to Canada to visit my mother a
Speaker 1: while back, and I asked her to invite a group
Speaker 1: of her friends over, so she did. They all showed
Speaker 1: up on a March afternoon. Three school teachers, a flight attendant,
Speaker 1: a family therapist, all somewhere between their late seventies and
Speaker 1: early nineties, all long retired. They sat drinking my mother's
Speaker 1: tea around her dining room table and tried to remember
Speaker 1: the time three strangers arrived in our little town in
Speaker 1: southern Ontario. You know the famous story about my father
Speaker 1: picking people up in Ordle make this up and driving
Speaker 1: so quickly from the airport that they were terrified by
Speaker 1: the time they rock. He was a man of a
Speaker 1: heavy foots, 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.
Speaker 6: I think people stepped up when they felt there was
Speaker 6: something that they could do. And that's why, to go
Speaker 6: back to your other question, who helped? A whole bunch
Speaker 6: of people helped me, and they came up because they felt, oh,
Speaker 6: I can do it that I had.
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 o King, and a young woman
Speaker 1: named Lelan. Three strangers who showed up on our doorstep
Speaker 1: one day.
Speaker 2: How many people were in your group in total?
Speaker 6: That's almost an impossible question to ask, because if you
Speaker 6: look at it, when we would have a meeting, what
Speaker 6: we might have ten people at the most.
Speaker 2: But he's the people who.
Speaker 6: Were out behind giving the money.
Speaker 2: The people who were there.
Speaker 6: When they came were totally different people.
Speaker 1: Their group didn't have a name. It wasn't a legal entity.
Speaker 1: Everyone said. The minister of my parents' church, a man
Speaker 1: named Jack Boyne, was one of the ringleaders. But Jack
Speaker 1: Boyne didn't do the paperwork acquired by the government. That
Speaker 1: was someone else, and lots of other churches were involved
Speaker 1: as well. Around my mother's dining room, the details were
Speaker 1: vague because they were vague back then. These were ordinary
Speaker 1: people going about a big task by ordinary means.
Speaker 7: And the potlarks and pot larks, and there were a
Speaker 7: lot of people there.
Speaker 1: In the small towns of southern Ontario. Nothing of any
Speaker 1: consequence is accomplished without potlocked dinners. There are an estimated
Speaker 1: twenty million refugees in the world whose lives had been
Speaker 1: uprooted by one crisis after another, the Russian war against Ukraine,
Speaker 1: the US retreat from Afghanistan, the obliteration of Syria. Every
Speaker 1: era has its own humanitarian crises, and in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, the attention of the world was on Southeast Asia.
Speaker 1: After the end of the Vietnam War, when the Communists
Speaker 1: took over what had been South Vietnam, the new government
Speaker 1: turned on the country's ethnic Chinese. Eight hundred thousand people
Speaker 1: fled Vietnam, escaping across the Gulf of Thailand in overcrowded boats.
Speaker 1: Somewhere between two hundred and four hundred thousand of them
Speaker 1: died at sea. The survivors were called boat people. In response,
Speaker 1: a group of Canadian religious organizations approached the Canadian government
Speaker 1: with an idea. The pool of people the Canadian refugee
Speaker 1: system deemed worthy of resettlement was clearly much larger than
Speaker 1: the pool of people the government was actually willing to
Speaker 1: let in. So why not let private citizens handle the overflow,
Speaker 1: Let small groups of people get together bring refugees into
Speaker 1: their communities and take responsibility for finding them homes and jobs.
Speaker 1: The idea wasn't to replace the government's own formal refugee system,
Speaker 1: but too augmented.
Speaker 8: That was a real sticking point in the early years.
Speaker 8: A lot of groups said, we don't want to do
Speaker 8: something that we think the government should be doing.
Speaker 1: That's Brian Dyke, who works with the Mennonite Central Committee
Speaker 1: and the Refugee Hub at the University of Ottawa.
Speaker 8: So they talked about what we often call additionality. This
Speaker 8: has to be in addition to what the government is
Speaker 8: doing already. It's a principle I think the Government of
Speaker 8: Canada continues to hold you.
Speaker 1: The result is that in recent years, the number of
Speaker 1: refugees who come to Canada with private support dwarfs the
Speaker 1: number who come in through official channels, and Canada currently
Speaker 1: resettles more refugees on a per capita basis than almost
Speaker 1: any other country in the world. The Vietnamese refugees who
Speaker 1: came to my hometown, Kang Vaughan and Lelan, were both
Speaker 1: people in nineteen seventy nine. They were all in a
Speaker 1: camp on a tiny island off the coast of Malaysia.
Speaker 9: This is about one kilomeda square and about forty thousand
Speaker 9: Vietnamese refuge I live in that island, so very small.
Speaker 1: That's Vaughan Wuyn remembering this story. How long were you
Speaker 1: in that camp.
Speaker 4: As?
Speaker 9: Then that came for ten months, from January until October.
Speaker 1: Then in the fall they got word they'd been accepted
Speaker 1: to Canada through the private route sponsored by the Rankins.
Speaker 1: Doris White, Joan Carstan's and my parents and all the
Speaker 1: others who came to the potluck dinners in our little
Speaker 1: town in southern Ontario. Tell me about arriving in Canada.
Speaker 1: What was that like?
Speaker 9: Happy, sad, loneley, and worry. Happy because I have a
Speaker 9: contree to accept me. So they opened the door and
Speaker 9: accept a refugee, and I can stack a new life, freedom,
Speaker 9: so I don't have to worry about my past in
Speaker 9: Vietnam or I live in the Kim Sad because I
Speaker 9: still help my father and my auther brothers and to
Speaker 9: assist those there and Vietnam.
Speaker 1: Happy, sad, lonely and worry. I remember Vaughn and his
Speaker 1: brother from that year. They ended up at my high
Speaker 1: school walking the halls in clothes they had been given
Speaker 1: for the unimaginably cold Canadian winter, both of them thin
Speaker 1: and quiet, trying to get an education in a language
Speaker 1: they had only started learning a few months before. King
Speaker 1: and Vaughan ended up going to one of the best
Speaker 1: universities in Canada got good jobs. Their friend the Land meanwhile,
Speaker 1: met another Vietnamese refugee while playing musical chairs at an
Speaker 1: event organized by one of the sponsoring churches. The two
Speaker 1: got married, had children who grew up Canadian.
Speaker 10: I think one of the most fondest memories we have
Speaker 10: with our mom was just a trip that we took
Speaker 10: with her to Ottawa.
Speaker 1: That's Leland's son, David Haw, who teaches at the University
Speaker 1: of Waterloo.
Speaker 10: So back in twenty twelve we went to celebrate Canada
Speaker 10: Day with her and just as a family, and she
Speaker 10: never stopped talking about that trip. So a year after years,
Speaker 10: shard to say, hey, do you remember that time when
Speaker 10: we visited the capital just to enjoy the fireworks and
Speaker 10: just to be with others that are just proud to
Speaker 10: be with Canada.
Speaker 1: I'm sharing all this not just because it's an immigration
Speaker 1: story with a happy ending. This is a certain kind
Speaker 1: of story, a kind that I think we too often overlook.
Speaker 1: I have an older brother named Jeffrey, who lives in
Speaker 1: a town very close to where we grew up. In
Speaker 1: case you're wondering, my brother and I are very different.
Speaker 1: I like to talk about how to fix things. He
Speaker 1: actually fixes things. In a crisis, I waved my hands
Speaker 1: in the air. Jeffrey disappears for an hour and emerges
Speaker 1: with a solution on a desert island. Given the choice,
Speaker 1: you might pick me for company because I could amuse
Speaker 1: you for an afternoon with my theories. But when the
Speaker 1: sun starts to set and you're hungry and thirsty and
Speaker 1: have nowhere to sleep, you realize, oh, I picked a
Speaker 1: wrong Gladwell. Jeffrey was for many years the principal of
Speaker 1: an elementary school in a city called Kitchener. The school
Speaker 1: had four hundred students. If you're an elementary school principal
Speaker 1: in a country that lets in lots of refugees, chances
Speaker 1: are you'll have some of them as students in your school,
Speaker 1: and he did. I called up my brother to ask
Speaker 1: him about it.
Speaker 4: At one point we had I think twenty percent of
Speaker 4: our school population were Syrian refugees.
Speaker 1: You had, so if you had foreigner students are you
Speaker 1: saying you had eighty Syrian refugees in your school.
Speaker 4: Eighty Yeah, eighty Syrian refugees on top of probably another
Speaker 4: seventy to eighty ESL students, immigrants, refugees from other places.
Speaker 4: I think the biggest thing the first thing we saw
Speaker 4: was was trauma Like that was really where it kind
Speaker 4: of hit the idea of a trauma informed approach. So
Speaker 4: when kids are acting out, when they're being violent, or
Speaker 4: when they're crying, or they're withdrawing or you know, maybe
Speaker 4: stealing things, you have to look at their experience from
Speaker 4: camps or from war and say, Okay, maybe these learned responses,
Speaker 4: Maybe these are survival responses, and we have to look
Speaker 4: at them that way rather than looking at them as
Speaker 4: undesirable behaviors that you have to suspend somebody for or
Speaker 4: something like that.
Speaker 1: This makes sense. You're taking kids from troubled parts of
Speaker 1: the world. You have the obligation to deal with the consequences.
Speaker 1: Jeffrey said that when a Canadian kid and a refugee
Speaker 1: kid will get into a fight on the playground, you'd
Speaker 1: have to figure out how to make sense of what
Speaker 1: happened because only one of them spoke English. That was
Speaker 1: a little tricky, but not that tricky. The school board
Speaker 1: gave him lots of resources. He says, there was a
Speaker 1: really brilliant ESL teacher at his school. Plus these refugees
Speaker 1: were little kids.
Speaker 4: They adapted, They learned English incredibly quickly for the most part,
Speaker 4: and then you started to see their personalities coming through
Speaker 4: and it really enriched the school in that way. We
Speaker 4: had an incredible remembrance Day service with students who had
Speaker 4: experienced war and talking about what it means to experience
Speaker 4: war and showing their pictures of what it really is
Speaker 4: like to experience and this is my house, this is
Speaker 4: my house before it was bombed, this is my house
Speaker 4: after it was bombed. I mean, that was incredibly, incredibly
Speaker 4: moving and really sort of brought the whole experience that
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 4: No, again, you don't go to that school. That's not
Speaker 4: what you want to do. My job was to say
Speaker 4: to these teachers, look, you need to just get these
Speaker 4: kids into the classroom. You need to make them feel
Speaker 4: at home. You need to make them feel loved, to
Speaker 4: feel welcome in the community, and we'll get around to
Speaker 4: learning when they're ready. That's that's the message you have
Speaker 4: to give, not you know, worrying about whether these kids
Speaker 4: can fit in or not.
Speaker 1: You need to make them feel loved, not worry about
Speaker 1: whether they'll fit in. Jeffrey didn't think that dealing with
Speaker 1: the refugee children required any heroics. It just required lots
Speaker 1: of people doing their bit. A generous school board, a
Speaker 1: really good eesl teacher, and parents who believe that seeing
Speaker 1: a picture of a classmate's bombed out house is a
Speaker 1: valuable learning experience. You open your mind, you open your heart.
Speaker 1: Once you start looking for this pattern of many small
Speaker 1: acts of kindness adding up to a lot, you start
Speaker 1: to see it in all kinds of places. I'm thinking
Speaker 1: about a very moving account that I stumbled across in
Speaker 1: the archives of the United States Holocaust Museum.
Speaker 9: What kind of clothes did you wear?
Speaker 5: I was wearing ordinary. They smelled, stink terrible. I didn't
Speaker 5: have anything except I was veering.
Speaker 1: It's the oral history of a man named chio Reichmann,
Speaker 1: who escaped the Treblinka concentration camp in nineteen forty three.
Speaker 1: He was part of a group that set fire to
Speaker 1: the camp and he slipped out in the chaos, which
Speaker 1: put him and a small band of other escapees in
Speaker 1: the middle of Nazi occupied Poland. Fugitives huddling in a forest.
Speaker 5: I looked like a living skeleton.
Speaker 1: Now listen to what happened next.
Speaker 5: And we decided during deny it to go to a farm,
Speaker 5: to a peasant and ask for food. Some decent people
Speaker 5: helped us.
Speaker 1: They were starving and someone gave them food. Reikmann decided
Speaker 1: that their best hope of survival was to walk to Warsaw,
Speaker 1: which was more than fifty miles away. He meets a
Speaker 1: second farmer who feeds him and give some directions to Warsaw.
Speaker 1: On the way, he runs into a third man.
Speaker 5: The men passed and asked me, are you a Jew?
Speaker 5: I said yes. This Christian man, who was working in
Speaker 5: the opposite direction from where I came, turned back and said,
Speaker 5: I'm taking you to my home. His wife looked at me.
Speaker 5: She ordered me to take off my shild shirt and
Speaker 5: gave me a clean one. You know what she said
Speaker 5: to me, this is my husband only extra sheild. They
Speaker 5: gave it to me. They gave me a hurty meal
Speaker 5: and inquired about my plans.
Speaker 1: Reichman stayed with the family for two weeks. Gaining strength,
Speaker 1: he left them and met a smuggler. The smuggler gave
Speaker 1: him a ride. He got to Warsaw, went to see
Speaker 1: someone he knew from before the war who was in
Speaker 1: the Polish resistance. His old friend was petrified.
Speaker 5: He wasn't able to sleep or even because of fear
Speaker 5: that he is hiding a jewel.
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.
Speaker 5: This document saved my life. I used it all the time.
Speaker 1: The story keeps going on and on. A woman and
Speaker 1: her husband let him sleep under their bed. Someone else
Speaker 1: had a fallen down shack where Reikman stayed for a bit.
Speaker 1: Someone else knew an empty apartment in Warsaw and let
Speaker 1: him stay there. He met a watchman befriended him. The
Speaker 1: guard invited him home for dinner, gave him a job
Speaker 1: a place to stay. It was winter, freezing cold the
Speaker 1: final days of the war. Warsaw was in chaos. Reikman
Speaker 1: was huddled with a group of people in an abandoned building.
Speaker 5: We almost did not survive. We were hungry, cold, desplendent.
Speaker 5: But one a night a men discovered a hiding place.
Speaker 1: The man asked them, are you hungry? He took them
Speaker 1: to a warehouse and opened the door.
Speaker 5: And we cared of a couple of hundred pounds of
Speaker 5: food and clothes that lasted this until the day of liberation.
Speaker 1: By my count Cheo. Reichman survived the war because of
Speaker 1: eleven acts of kindness. The keyword here is kindness. The
Speaker 1: biggest act we can perform for another is sacrifice, where
Speaker 1: we surrender something important for someone else, where we take
Speaker 1: a 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 Samartan doesn't fight off a band of hoodlum's
Speaker 1: single handedly or sneak the injured man past an enemy checkpoint.
Speaker 1: He's kind, not brave. Of the eleven acts that saved
Speaker 1: Chio Reichman'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. Reikman 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 Samaritant 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 them in.
Speaker 11: There's a grave concern that people are going to be
Speaker 11: brought over here and they're not going to be supported
Speaker 11: the way that we would want people to be supported
Speaker 11: in the United States.
Speaker 1: That's David Beer, an immigration policy analyst with a Cato
Speaker 1: Foundation in Washington, d c.
Speaker 11: That they would be you know, living in squalor in
Speaker 11: somebody's basement, or you know, not have enough spoons for
Speaker 11: everyone in the family, so they be sharing spoons.
Speaker 1: You're serious. There is a regulation about the minimum number
Speaker 1: of spoons necessary for us.
Speaker 11: Yes, everything is very carefully monitored. And you know, God
Speaker 11: forbid that you are so lax. It's only to bring
Speaker 11: four spoons to a party of five.
Speaker 1: You can do things that way and tie yourself in
Speaker 1: knots 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 Leeland 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. Leeland 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.
Speaker 10: It was just to have the people around her like
Speaker 10: your parents, like Graham and Joyce, just to kind of
Speaker 10: welcome her in and to bring her to community events
Speaker 10: and help her learn the language and things like that.
Speaker 1: That's David Hoggin remembering what all those invitations meant to
Speaker 1: his mother.
Speaker 10: For me, you need just to hear stories from my
Speaker 10: mom of just the small things, those mundane things that
Speaker 10: really stood out to her that I don't think people
Speaker 10: would normally even talk.
Speaker 1: About little things, mundane things, not big things. But remember
Speaker 1: the lesson of ChIL Reichmann. Lots of people doing little
Speaker 1: things can very quickly add up to a lot. When
Speaker 1: King and Vaughan were finishing high school, my mom remembers
Speaker 1: that the guidance counselor called my dad.
Speaker 3: And he said, what are you doing with these boys?
Speaker 3: They are in grade twelve. They have to go to
Speaker 3: university because they have got eighty percent in calculus and
Speaker 3: we don't give marks away.
Speaker 1: Just so you know, eighty percent in calculus at my
Speaker 1: high school in those years put you near the top
Speaker 1: of the class.
Speaker 3: Well, Graham had the inside knowledge of where to get money.
Speaker 3: You see, you can get you can get bursaries, scholarships,
Speaker 3: things like that. You know where to look, and so
Speaker 3: he must have pulled a number of strings. Because they
Speaker 3: were both at Waterloo with Graham, and they got their bas.
Speaker 1: Graham had inside knowledge. But then again, Graham was a
Speaker 1: math professor at the University of Waterloo, and here his
Speaker 1: task was to help two young people who were really
Speaker 1: good at math get into the University of Waterloo. This
Speaker 1: was not a heavy lift. And before any of this,
Speaker 1: there was the problem of bringing Vaughan King and Leland
Speaker 1: to Canada in the first place. Someone had to do
Speaker 1: the paperwork. Now, if my mom had to do the paperwork,
Speaker 1: that would have been an act of courage. But Ian
Speaker 1: Rankin does the paperwork.
Speaker 6: I remember having to go down and interview or be
Speaker 6: interviewed by somebody in Duke Street.
Speaker 1: I'm sure it was a complicated process that took many,
Speaker 1: many hours. But my sense is that Ian Rankin is
Speaker 1: the kind of person for whom successfully navigating a complex
Speaker 1: bureaucracy is a of pleasure.
Speaker 6: None of that stuff was anything that's sort of the
Speaker 6: organizing committee delegated. It just was who could do it.
Speaker 3: I'm learning for the first time what your role is
Speaker 3: and I have wondered many times, how was this engineer?
Speaker 3: Do you know? And what were the links with the government?
Speaker 3: Now I'm learning for the first.
Speaker 1: Time if I can break in here. This is a
Speaker 1: very joyce glabal moment, her surprise discovery of some formal
Speaker 1: bureaucratic structure beneath what she thought was just people interacting
Speaker 1: with each other. And then my mom volunteered this.
Speaker 3: I was a stranger and I had to be taken
Speaker 3: in myself. So I know what I felt like, you know,
Speaker 3: going to England as a student and experiencing hospitality from
Speaker 3: churches and organizations like that. So the sense of being
Speaker 3: straight in another culture was something I understood very killing.
Speaker 1: My mother came from Jamaica to England in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: an unfamiliar place, a new culture. That phrase she used,
Speaker 1: I was a stranger and I had to be taken
Speaker 1: in myself is a reference to a Bible verse that
Speaker 1: everyone around that table knew very well, Matthew twenty five,
Speaker 1: Verse thirty five, for I was hungry and you gave
Speaker 1: me food. I was thirsty and you gave me something
Speaker 1: to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.
Speaker 1: Heroic rescues can have huge and dramatic effects, but they're
Speaker 1: very difficult to replicate. The group around my mother's dining
Speaker 1: room table were non heroic rescuers, and there is nothing
Speaker 1: they did that couldn't be done by any like minded
Speaker 1: group of ordinary people.
Speaker 3: So we give credit to those people. Jack Boy and Graham,
Speaker 3: Oh definitely.
Speaker 1: Yes. And you I want you to do all of
Speaker 1: us to read in unison like.
Speaker 2: Chips.
Speaker 7: I was hungry and you gave me food. I was
Speaker 7: thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was
Speaker 7: a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and
Speaker 7: you gave me clothing. I was sick and you took
Speaker 7: care of me. I was in prison and you visited me.
Speaker 7: Then the righteous will answer him.
Speaker 1: Lord, tell me the story about that girl.
Speaker 2: Do you remember? Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know if I can tell that story
Speaker 4: and hold it together.
Speaker 1: When my brother Jeffrey was principal of the elementary school
Speaker 1: in Kitchener, one of his youngest students, a Syrian refugee,
Speaker 1: was inconsolable.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she was. This little girl came in to kindergarten
Speaker 4: and she came in on the first day and she
Speaker 4: was just wailing, like just wailing like crazy, and the
Speaker 4: parents didn't seem to know what to do with her
Speaker 4: because they were just at a loss. What's going on.
Speaker 4: We don't understand, and we did, as we do with
Speaker 4: any child who's crying in kindergarten. We work with the parent,
Speaker 4: we'll look after child. It's okay, So we give them
Speaker 4: encouragement and usually they come in. Five minutes later, they
Speaker 4: stopped crying and they're fine, except that didn't happen with her.
Speaker 4: She just kept wailing and it was heart heart wrenching.
Speaker 4: So we went into class and my ESL teacher was there, Tracy,
Speaker 4: and I just said, look, just hold her, and so
Speaker 4: she held her on her lap and she was still
Speaker 4: just crying, and I thought, okay, what am I going
Speaker 4: to do? So I just knelt down in front of her,
Speaker 4: and I just started to hum and I was humming
Speaker 4: that the Universal lullaby and stopped. She stopped crying. She
Speaker 4: was looking at me, just just looking right through me.
Speaker 4: She stopped, She got off Tracy's lap. She took my
Speaker 4: hand and she didn't let go for an hour. She
Speaker 4: walked with me around the school and she had a
Speaker 4: death grip on my finger, and she kept up with me.
Speaker 4: She just ran beside me and kept going and we
Speaker 4: walked around the school. We visited all the classroom and
Speaker 4: then we sat in another little conference room and she
Speaker 4: drew pictures for me, and I was drawing pictures for her,
Speaker 4: and she was talking to me and I was talking
Speaker 4: to her, and we didn't understand what.
Speaker 2: We were saying.
Speaker 4: And then I Finally, about an hour and a half later,
Speaker 4: I took her back to her class and she was fine.
Speaker 4: And the next day the real kid arrived to me.
Speaker 4: She walked into the school and she just strode into
Speaker 4: the classroom like she was ready to take on the world.
Speaker 4: And that was the kid the parents knew. Every time
Speaker 4: I was in the primary hall, in that kindergarten hall,
Speaker 4: and I went there a lot, just wandering around, she
Speaker 4: would be looking at the door, and if I came
Speaker 4: into the classroom, she would launch herself across the room
Speaker 4: and give me a hug. Every time for the rest
Speaker 4: of the year.
Speaker 1: Our parents and their friends open their hearts to three
Speaker 1: refugees in need. My brother witnessed that act and then
Speaker 1: forty five years later, opens his heart to another in need.
Speaker 1: Kindness leads to kindness working.
Speaker 4: With that child and seeing what you can do when
Speaker 4: you show love and support and welcome to somebody. And
Speaker 4: and yeah, that that that that was, I mean, the
Speaker 4: pinnacle of my career. I think in many ways, I'll
Speaker 4: never forget her.
Speaker 1: I was a stranger and you welcome me.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Revisionist History is produced by Elobie's Leeman Gesteu and Jacob Smith,
Speaker 1: with Tolly Emlin and Harrison vj Choi. Our editor is
Speaker 1: Julia Barton. Our executive producer is miel Label. Original scoring
Speaker 1: by Luis Karra, mastering by Flon Williams and engineering by
Speaker 1: Nina Lawrence. Fact checking by Keishaw Williams. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Sasha Matthias and Salmana had Khan for production help on
Speaker 1: this episode. I'm Malcolm Glava.