Number of Day Officially Unemployed: 99
Hours Volunteered: 2
California Economic Development Department Check: $250 per week
Morning:
If we hadn't just left my girlfriend's apartment and driven east on El Cajon Boulevard from University Heights, I'd swear this wasn't San Diego. City Heights isn't the neighborhood tourists or transplants or residents come to "America's Finest City" to experience. In other words, it's not Seaport Village, Mission Bay, nor Pacific Beach.
Dark African women––dressed in colorful, flowing Muslim gowns that hide their heads and even their feet––seem to float down the streets. Old black men wearing taqiyahs, the round, embroidered Muslim hats, sit on crates and loiter in front of markets. The stores along this stretch of El Cajon Boulevard and the parallel University Avenue are a mishmash of Mexican carnicerías, Vietnamese Phở shops, Chinese salons and markets, and a couple African restaurants.
Etel and I arrive at the apartment building of the Bhutanese family we're tutoring in English, and I feel like I'm reliving a scene from Blackhawk Down. The two-story, orange-beige building is run down, the cement steps crumbling, and Somalian refugees walk the courtyard hallways or peak out of their apartments at the foreign visitors: us. When we came last week to meet the Bhutanese family for the first time, the International Rescue Committee, whom we're volunteering through, sent a Somalian woman to serve as our facilitator, though she didn't speak Nepali or Bhutanese. It was a nice, seventy-degree afternoon in San Diego that day, but the apartment was closed up and stuffy, feeling like, as my girlfriend described it, a "curry sauna."
Today, the window is open and the apartment is much cooler, though the smell of curry still dominates. The father, always sporting a beanie, and his fifteen-year-old son sit at the kitchen table and scoop a spicy rice dish from silver bowls into their mouths by hand, while the mother busies herself in the kitchen. A chubby man they say is a cousin sits next to the father and son but doesn't eat. The 82-year-old grandmother, her nose pierced by a small, golden sundial-like piece of jewelry, sits on the couch near another cousin, age 7, and nods and smiles at us. The oldest daughter, 21, who has inherited her father's crossed-eyes and speaks the most English (but lives elsewhere), has stopped by to say hello and eat. The son, 15, and youngest daughter, 11, will be participating in our tutoring sessions. By looking at the family side by side, you would swear that no one in this house is related (grandma and dad are taller and thin and almost look Afghan; mom is short and looks Native American; the oldest daughter, Indian; the son and younger daughter, possibly Latino).
The story of Bhutanese refugees is as confusing as the family's genetic expressions. The refugees are ethnically Nepali, and they historically moved from one small country sandwiched between China and India––Nepal––to another one––Bhutan––in the 1800s. Even though Bhutan is often listed as one of the happiest countries on earth (they even rate their wealth by a Gross National Happiness scale instead of a Gross National Product scale), the Buddhist majority decided they'd be much happier without the Hindu minority ethnic Nepalis, whom they imprisoned or sent to Nepal, a country who also doesn't want them. Enter refugee status. And Western efforts at resettling them.
The family has been here eight months, and while the children are in school and learning English quickly, the parents are struggling. (That's not to say the kids have it easy; the fifteen-year-old boy is experiencing the awkwardness that is high school, times ten. Even though he's handsome and dresses in hip clothing, he says kids make fun of his accent and can't understand him.) Etel and I decide she'll work with the kids while I work with the parents. I push them through two hours of awkward phonetics––they know the alphabet but not the sounds letters make––while Etel creatively has the kids doing word puzzles and playing a game naming body parts, animals, and other items based on a chosen letter: "L" leads to answers such as "leg" and "lion."
Though the family seems to have an endless supply of Cokes (they kindly offer us each one when we visit, and the dad has two today), the sparse furniture of their house speaks to their poverty. It's hard to imagine two worlds more different that the valleys and mountains of Bhutan, where the family had over 30 cattle, and the outer city of San Diego with their Somali neighbors. While we haven't bothered to ask the family if they have everything they need food-wise and whatnot (Etel and I decided they need a dictionary), they rely on their bond as a family to see them through this tough transition, and there's something very moving about that.
Afternoon:
Last weekend, while at a fortieth birthday party for one of Etel's Mexican friends, the family told us about an illegal restaurant a Mexican woman runs out of a home. And would we like to go sometime? How about "hell yeah" we said.
After our morning tutoring session with the Bhutanese family, Etel and I make the necessary arrangements to meet her friends at the house that "serves the best tacos in San Diego." While the east San Diego neighborhood is clearly poor, each house having a low chain-link or wrought-iron–fenced yard, people's perceived fears far outweigh the reality on the ground: it's not that bad. When I ask Etel's friend, who is from Mexico City, what neighborhood we are in, exactly, she whispers, "I don't know. We just call it 'the ghetto.'"
Though Etel and I park out in front of the house, we have to walk down the street and enter through a graffiti-tagged alley where an old black man and his younger, tougher-looking buddy work on an SUV's running board. Rob, the white husband of Etel's friend, meets us in the alley and walks us into the carport area, which is protected by a sliding, slatted chain-link gate. Inside, a Mexican family eats at a long picnic table. Rob ushers us into the back patio area of the house, where two more tables are shaded and hidden by worn, blue tarps that raise and lower in the soft breeze. Etel's friends speak a mixture of Spanish and English at the table, lending even more authenticity to the experience: it feels like we've crossed the border and are having lunch in Mexico.
Rob's sister-in-law gives us the rundown. We can order tacos, tostadas, sopes, or enchiladas with either potatoes, chicken, beef, or shrimp, and each costs only $1.25. The sister-in-law also tell us why, even though people bug the woman of the house to open a real restaurant, she prefers to keep her business off the grid. Besides the hassle of getting a business license, dealing with the health board, and paying taxes, payroll, and rent, she prefers to cook at home and keep the prices of her tacos inexpensive. She says she doesn't want her tacos to be $3 each, which she thinks they'd be if she went legit. She wants her food getting to the locals, the poor, and her ability to feed the neighbors has kept them quiet about her busy little home restaurant (sometimes there can be up to a 45 minute wait).
A few weeks ago, two cop cars rolled down the alley, and the woman became very nervous. She told everyone eating that if the cops should come inside, tell them it was her birthday party. And who wouldn't want to celebrate this place? The tacos and tostadas are wonderful, served watery with spoons, which Etel's friend claimed was "real Mexican style, spoons only!" I had already crammed most of my deep fried (duro) taco down with my hands before I realized the watery broth was there to soften the shell and cause you to use the spoon for eating.
It's a weird experience, because I want to proclaim the greatness of the food to everyone, to brag about the matron of the house being the Harriet Tubman of the underground taco world, but I have to keep the location secret and just admire this woman's ability to earn a living to feed her family while feeding the poor. Amen.
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