It was Friday night and there were seventy-five people crowding the floor of the Mission Vista apartments clubhouse. The kids were drinking donated Pepsi, pumping their hands , and rolling on the floor, waiting their turn to pick a question about their culture (and a prize) out of a big pot. Adults clustered on couches, in corners, shushing the dull roar of children, and grinning. I was holding a big pot full of dish soap, toilet paper, and Dr. Seuss books. We were all there, ultimately, because of bedbugs.
If you haven’t been listening to daytime news in the past few months, you may not have heard that apparently there’s a bedbug pandemic here in the U.S. of A. At the refugee resettlement agency where I work, we’ve been getting calls from apartment managers, panicked with the new cases of bedbugs they report in their buildings. Unsettlingly, they have been implying that bedbugs are a refugee issue rather than an environmental health issue, or a general affordable housing issue.
The way my some of my coworkers and I tackled this problem was to develop some workshops about tenants rights and responsibilities, American cleaning styles…and bedbugs. We wanted to offer the workshops in apartment complexes with a large number of refugees. If our clients were better informed, went our line of thought, they would be less likely to shoulder the blame of bedbugs. We trialed some workshops in one apartment complex, and were met with a challenge we didn’t expect. American tenants also came to the workshops, specifically to voice their fears about refugees: that they were possibly bringing bugs and diseases from the countries they came from, straight into their new homes in Tucson.
Refugees go through a rigorous health screening process before they enter America and another round of screenings once they’re here. These tenants didn’t know that, and had barely interacted with any refugees. For this reason it seemed really important to engage with these them, and ultimately we collaborated with some tenants to organize an apartment-wide potluck and an informal teach-in of sorts. The main activity of the night centered around a brilliant idea that one of the potluck organizers had: put questions asking about aspects of people’s culture in a big pot along with a bunch of prizes, then have people pick a question to answer for the others in attendance. I didn’t know if people would buy this, but it ended up being a hit. We were passing around the pot and giving out prizes for about an hour and a half.
The potluck aspect of the evening was somewhat less successful. Not many people actually brought food, and we ended up ordering pizzas to supplement the fixings. The food highlight of the night was Ram Upreti’s Nepali tea, which he delivered chair to chair to anyone who would have it. Ram was also eager to spread the good word of how to make the tea, evidenced by the recipe below.
I don’t imagine that the potluck melted away all prejudice or misinformation, but there was something very magical about being in a room full of people of all kinds, so entertained by asking questions out of a pot. I can’t put why to words, but it’s more hopeful than anything I’ve experienced for quite awhile.
Ram Upreti’s Nepali Tea
3 cups milk
2 teaspoons loose black Assam tea
3 crushed cardamom pods, peeled and smashed
½ teaspoon of black pepper
Heat the milk until it boils. Turn the heat down to a simmer and add tea and spices. Let everything simmer together for 2 minutes or so. Strain out loose tea and spices and pour liquid into cups. Add sugar to taste. All the measurements here are approximate—play around and tailor it to your taste.
