Who are Newcomers?

Newcomers are children who were forced to flee to the U.S. because their parents, their war-torn country, or their extreme poverty forced them to. Newcomers are children who chose to flee to the U.S. and crossed beasts and borders to do so. Newcomers are recent immigrants with a past–sometimes traumatic, sometimes dangerous, sometimes grief-stricken, but always vivid, powerful, and haunting.

Who are Newcomers?

Newcomers are children who lost months or years of education. Years of no delicious books, of playground antics, of kind and knowledgeable teachers, of exposure to the arts, of childhood friendships… of normalcy. The loss sits with them as they try to write English words, often quite foreign from their home-language alphabets. It sits with them as they learn to meander through an 1800-student school, navigating between seven classes with a schedule clutched in their hands and a few English phrases on their lips. The loss rests behind their smiles, below their tears, inside the quietude that comes with the overwhelming dilemma it means to be a Newcomer.

They are boys and girls, young men and women. Some have left their entire families at home, their desperate search for freedom forcing them to live with distant relatives or foster parents. Relatives they may have never met, who often already have a house full of people, where they have to sleep on the floor and pile on top of four cousins and fight for a bit of food. Foster parents from different cultures than their own, different belief systems, different foods, and different languages.

Newcomers are delightful. They beg for extra work and practice new words every day. They love their teachers because, unlike back home, none of them beat them here. They love their teachers because they know their teachers have the knowledge and the key to living here. They love their classmates and support each other by listening to the others’ immigration stories, helping each other translate, and making new friends from all over the world.

Newcomers have seen things you would never want to see. They have scars from blasted glass or fires or untreated childhood diseases. Some have lost babies; some have lost mothers, fathers, friends. Some have seen the eye of a war between a government and its people or between the gangs that rule the streets. Some of them come from such beautiful places that you can feel the blue sky, the mountains rising up, taste the crisp air, engorge your ears with the sounds of people laughing and praying. But those places were taken from them, often so suddenly their families didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to all that beauty.

They are dedicated. They commit their lives to improving their lives. They have seen the worst and would never want to go back to that dark place. Yet they yearn to go back to that dark place, their childhood, their homelands, their people, only to improve it, to save the ones left behind. They will take two buses or three trains to trek to our school, to indulge in working with adult interpreters from their own countries, to partake in our glorious Giving Grocery, to survive and thrive with heavily-supported English education.

Who are Newcomers? They are the human beings you wish you could be, the royalty of second chances, the hope we have for the future of our world.

They are our students. And more than anything, they are our teachers.