A clinician shares one child's story
I'd like to share with you a story of a boy named Haroon.
Haroon is a 14 year-old boy in our program. If you ran across him in school you might see him playing basketball, listening to music, or just hanging out with a group of friends. A little gangly, a shy smile, big eyes. This is what you'd see. But I want to tell you a little bit about what you don't see. Haroon is a refugee from Somalia. He was born in Somalia and then lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for most of his childhood. When he was 10, he came to the U.S., finally settling in Massachusetts where his older brother and new sister-in-law agreed to be the parents that he'd lost. But agreeing to be parents, and being parents, are two different things. Haroon felt incredibly alone at home. His brother worked long hours as a parking valet to support the family, and Haroon was left alone with his new sister-in-law. She was formal and distant with him; in a culture that frowns on in-laws being too intimate she found it hard to assume the role of mother. Haroon describes feeling like a visitor in his own home.
Let me tell you a little bit about what the teachers saw. Here was a bad kid. He got F’s in his classwork. He skipped school and when he did show up got into fights with other students. He was constantly being suspended. In desperation the school called in a home-based therapy team to meet with Haroon and his brother and sister-in-law in order to help him. The therapists and Haroon's family looked at each other across the living room and across an enormous cultural divide. Haroon's brother cancelled the next appointment, and the one thereafter. The therapists stopped calling. Not long after this, a social worker at the school noticed Haroon intently working at a computer. After he left she noticed he'd been surfing the internet, and, concerned about what he might have been looking at, she checked the websites he'd been to. Here is what he'd Googled: How can teenagers talk with their parents?
How can teenagers talk with their parents. Such a simple wish. But for Haroon, perhaps a more accurate question would be 'How can a Somali teenager living in America talk to his older brother and his wife about what it means to have lost your parents, to live between two cultures, to be branded a bad kid by your teachers and community, and to just want to belong.
This is the question our team has worked with Haroon to answer. Home-based therapists went back to the family, but this time with a cultural broker who could help explain to the family how these meetings might help. The therapists learned that is was a cultural expectation that female in-laws not be intimate with other men in the family, and as the expectation that his aunt could be his mother abated, so did Haroon's disappointment and sense of rejection. He began to feel at home in his home.
And at school? The reputation of being a bad kid doesn't get undone in a day. Again, our team worked to answer the question: how do you help a kid branded as bad by his school, and who just wants to belong? This time the cultures we needed to bridge were those of school culture and mental health. We worked with the teachers within the school to share how trauma works, how being made to wait in line in the cafeteria brings back echoes of being hungry in a refugee camp. Gradually the school perspective shifted and the image of bad kid was replaced by a truer picture of a teenage boy struggling to move beyond the past and to find a place for himself in this new country.
And Haroon? He’s come to understand trauma, too. He has learned to know when the past is creeping up on him, and how to manage the feelings it brings with it. He has learned how to talk to his brother when he needs support. And last June, when he walked across the stage in the school gymnasium to collect his 8th grade diploma, his smile wasn't shy.
