Scoop

“Do Afghanis eat ice cream?” I ask.
Her muscled biceps chaff inside regulation short sleeves as we tour the distribution point. “Yep, they love it.”
I'm unconvinced. Actually, I am not sure of anything here. I've left my assumptions at the front gate, beside the green wire fence being built around the refugee camp perimeter.
“Do they even know what an ice cream scoop is?”
We leave the open boxes of ice cream scoops and she swaggers, walkie-talkie on hip (I walk) past boxes of spatulas and cutlery sets and wooden spoons and serving spoons. I peer at the saucepan sets and chopping boards and springform cake tins as we pass those too, and stare open-mouthed at the walls of electric kettles and toasters and drinking glasses and tea towels stacked opposite.
But those ice cream scoops call me.
“What about the other groups coming here?” I ask. “Were they asked what they wanted in these houses?”
She turns and looks at me, like I'm a noisy beacon suddenly on her radar.
“They've been living in motels and barracks, some for more than a year,” she says, as if I'm an Introduction to Refugees student at the local community college. “They'll get their own houses here and they're gonna love it.”
I look at the set of her chin. And decide now is not the time to suggest, in my Activities Coordinator role, that I take them shopping for kitchen utensils they might really use.

Congratulations

Called out five minutes ago, her eyes now shine like bright currants and her round, soft, scarf-shrouded face creases as tears fall. Two women, both Persian, hug their Afghani friend, as excited for her (almost) as they would be for themselves.
You have your visa , she has been told moments earlier. She can leave the camp – soon – and start a new chapter.
Actually, it's not a ‘camp' at all, but a gated, fenced-in collection of recommissioned army houses, other buildings, and transportables trucked cross-country to sit on grey pylons dug into the hillside.
But English lessons are taught – by me – in a tent. ( For now , so I'm told.)
The three women rejoice in Farsi, while others – this is my top class – look on. They are Afghani and Persian too, and Iraqi, and Tamils from Sri Lanka.
She is so sweet in her emotion, and probably has the best English of all my students. But an impending departure always leaves a lump in my throat.
I wipe my eyes.
But the others' blank stares and forced smiles: their disappointment hangs in the tent like a bleak fog and funks on the tables and chairs and books and worksheets.
“Congratulations,” they say, even the Farsi-speakers.
My heart lobs in my mouth: they all think Congratulations is the oddest-sounding greeting. But their own fates – rejected visas, appeals in process, time-filling day-after-week-after-month – swirl cyclonically in the air.
She sits down between her friends, and with hearts and heads anywhere but here, our class resumes.

Plan B

“Put it down to experience,” Tess says, beginning our next ascent.
Our glockenspiels glint in the sun. Ahead of us: eight more glockenspielers. Ahead of them: Wanda our blonde-bobbed Manager, high-stepping in leatherette boots and cowgirl fringing, waving a baton in the refugee camp breeze.
Booooooooooompppp sounds the tuba, wrapped around a lumpen guard bringing up the rear. Any slower and he'd be marching backwards.
The Happy Times Elevenette is the camp's official cheer-up squad, marching the hilly streets dispensing goodwill. Tess and I are seconded from our English-teaching positions.
Clunk , ting , ping , sounds my hammer on the gleaming keys. One more bum note and I'll be struck down by lightning.
“Wouldn't it be easier if Wanda just learned to do her job?” I say, spying refugee residents (‘clients' in the official parlance) curtain-twitching at their windows.
In over her head managing the camp's education and activities programme, Wanda has morphed her job into something she can do: a weekday version of her weekend brass band-conducting hobby.
Wanda high-steps aside as we crest a curve, evil-eyeing me through Jersey-cow-length false eyelashes, and waves her baton: dispensing rhythm or casting a curse, I can't tell.
I hammer a high C.
“It'll look good on your C.V.,” Tess whispers.
Marching down the hill, I think of verbs I could be declining in my classroom-tent. And of my growing bank balance, each jolting step, each clunking hammer-dong more money towards the hitman I'm paying to release us from this tinkling hell.