Mary Pipher, renowned writer of Reviving Ophelia, is a typical resident of Nebraska’s capitol city of Lincoln. She is a married, middle-aged mother, clinical psychologist and white native who had never had anything to do with refugees until she started preparing for her 2002 book, The Middle of Everywhere. Though she finished writing it shortly before the 9/11 attacks, she added the observation that Americans have become like refugees now, exiled from a country that felt safe and now is filled with fear. ( Refugees are actually people fleeing their country and not really displaced citizens, so Americans may better be described as refugees in their minds.)

This fascinating, moving book takes place in my town. I may not be a Lincoln native, but I’ve made it my home for almost a decade and am a Nebraska native. It’s a state where you don’t see much other than white skin unless you’re in Omaha or Lincoln and refugees are people you only see on TV, until recently. Lincoln has become home for many of them because the government (U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement) considers it a safer, more desirable place for them.

Pipher writes:

I have celebrated Eid-al-Adha with northern Sudanese, the Holi festival with my friends from India, and attended a Latina girl’s quinceanera. I have done family therapy with refugees from Macedonia or Romania, gone to a Southeast Asian Buddhist Parents Day festival, and still slept in my own bed at night. Pp 11

She thinks that Lincoln has become the middle of everywhere. Our markets and schools ’are bursting with refugees from Russia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Hungary and Ethiopia.’ Kurds, Sudanese, Somalians, Afghanis, Iraqis, Liberians and Sierra Leoneans are making our population swell. Our nonwhite population (in 2001) has jumped 128 percent since 1990. It’s looking like East Harlem. Yikes!

The Middle of Everywhere has three parts. In the first part, she writes candidly about hoping to pique Americans’ curiosity about who our refugees are and how extraordinarily different their perspectives are, as well as what survivors they are. She has an absorbing chapter about “the beautiful laughing sisters” from Pakistan whose friend and cultural broker she was. This introduces her and us to the horrific refugee experience. In the second part, she describes her year-long involvement with refugee kids in English As Learned Language class, with teenaged refugees in a cultural orientation class, with young adults who are less adept at ‘cultural switching’ and disadvantaged educationally and with families who must adjust to our culture and often the parents lose their authority to their more educated kids.

The third section, called The Alchemy of Healing--Turning Pain Into Healing, starts out talking about refugees from Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya: Martha, Joseph, Abraham and Paul. Pipher says the story of such refugees by now is well-known, but it wasn’t to me. I learned so much about what’s going on in the world and refugees became much easier to understand and like. I lived in Chicago as a missionary for a year, which was my own introduction to refugees.

Pipher points out that refugees would much rather have practical help than psychological analysis, so that’s what she gave them and they taught her about identity, how in one global village like the world is becoming we need the resiliency of refugees, a community of friends and a solid set of values. It is our refugees, she says, that believe so fervently in the American Dream and it is refugee children who stay in school and often get better grades than less-motivated Americans.

I enjoyed The Middle of Everywhere very much. Pipher held my attention fast with the plethora of information, her emotional connection to the refugees and her personable, accessible style of writing. She believes in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Appendix 3) formed by the U.N. in 1948 and addresses those of us with ‘just plain ignorance’ who uphold ten myths about refugees.

She also includes an appendix to help you become a cultural broker for new refugees and a bibliography, making 371 excellent pages. Her purpose in writing the book is to share her experience and encourage us to treat refugees a whole better than we treated the Native Americans. We’re becoming a world without boundaries, with a global sense of identity and I applaud her for writing this book so honestly and intelligently, though without much thought on the long-term. If you are not a racist and have never read a book about getting to know refugees or have and would enjoy reading another, this is the book for you.

Unfortunately since this was published, one of the two missions in town closed. So much for welcoming refugees! Pipher is giving a talk about this hopeful, somewhat idealistic, book next month for the Lincoln Arts Council and I’m planning to attend. It should be quite interesting.

Recommended: Yes