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Hearing Truth

We met a local university professor of French at my neighbor's party last night. E is from DRC and has lived in our neighborhood for the last few years. A very unassuming man with a big smile, he is always easy to talk to. Given the times we live in, it was no surprise the conversation turned to events in Ukraine. There was an older gentleman B in the group whose grandparents escaped the Bolshevik revolution and arrived in New York. They were from an Ukrainian village close to a town that has been the news lately. While B has no family he knows of in that country, the war is more personal for him than it is for the average person with no connections there.

E said in his very quiet and polite manner, that his country has been in a war for decades and no one in the world knows or cares about what is going on there. Congo is irrelevant, makes no breaking news and does not garner the support of the world for its troubles. The number of deaths per day is not a number anyone wants to deal with so its not talked about. 

So it's just hard for him to understand the double standards and why the way that part of the world is responding to the current situation should come as a surprise. E had spoken some hard truths that were unsettling for potluck dinner in suburban America. The conversation moved on quickly to neutral and non-controversial topics like someone having just learned they would be a grandmother in summer and planning to baby-proof the house for when the grandbaby would visit. 

No one had the desire to learn from E what it meant to live in a war-torn country for decades or the struggles of his immigration story. It made the white South-African couple who were also there uncomfortable to talk about why they left that country. Then they committed the ultimate faux-pas - the told B ever so eagerly that they like him were from Africa too. We suddenly went from being a sleepy neighborhood where nothing interesting ever happens to a dinner table where the political tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife. 

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