12/30/2023
Waiting for Stalin at the Harriet Tubman Memorial, day 2.
Whatever joy I experienced during yesterday's encounter with Stalin was gone by the time we met up today to finish the project we started yesterday. Stalin, you will recall, is the young twenty-one-year-old asylum seeker from Ecuador who came from nowhere, it seemed, to help me plant over three thousand daffodil bulbs at the Harriet Tubman Memorial. Today's encounter was a lot different from yesterday's.
That difference had everything to do with my understanding that giving this young man so daywork work solve many of the insurmountable challenges that he would face as a migrant with little to no access to basic resources to survive. During our first meeting, I avoided any conversation about his problems I could not fix, like where do you live? I assumed lived somewhere: 1) on the streets, God forbid; or 2) living with family or friends, as I had hoped; or lived at a shelter under the threat of eviction after 15 days of occupancy there. When I finally asked, I learned it was the latter and the was living there on borrowed time having exhausted two of the fifteen days the Adams administrated had given him. His predicament caused me to have a total reversal of judgment on the city's right to shelter law. Before meeting Stalin, I held the tacit judgment that the city's right to shelter regulation was not intended for situations like the migrant crisis because, I believed that the original intent of the law was to address the needs of residents, not asylum seekers.
After Stalin cleared the area for us to plant more bulbs, I agreed to meet with him tomorrow to offer him more work, but this time there is really no work and I am choosing to rob Peter and Paul to provide Stalin with money to get "cheap food," pay for transportation when he forced to do so, and pick whatever needs to survive until I can get him on firmer footing.
Since I didn't have to live with the guilt of sending a Gen Z into the streets to sleep, I looked at him and said, "Come with me," and he followed me, and as we were walking he began communicating with me through his dumb smartphone. He told me about politics in Ecuador, he told me about his mother and how much he misses her and his family, and he laid out his plan for the future that didn't include being a freeloader in the United States. What resonated with me the most was his description of America as a place that has "security." That he felt "safe" here, even though I perceived he was in the most vulnerable position. After all, how did he know I wasn't bringing him to a s*x trafficker, as is done so often I am told.
Today was different from yesterday. We didn't even bother to take a stupid selfie. What we did instead was more important: I walked him from the Tubman Memorial over to Jimbo's, the hamburger joint. I figured out the men there would be able to help him in ways I could not and they did, God bless them. They told him to come back on Tuesday to speak with the boss about work, and they told him he could come there for food when he needed something to eat. I think my street cred with the workers at Jimbo's skyrocketed, and their credibility as a source of assistance for those in need had been affirmed.
There's so much more to tell: There's the South Asian mother visiting and her immigrant son who figured out Stalin's predicament after observing us for two days on the second day who offered to offer him help before she left town; There were two female couples, one couple from Harlem and the other couple from Italy who asked Stalin what he was planting and he pulled out his dumb smartphone and commenced to tell his story. Both couples warmed me that I was no longer stewarding a public space. I was not stewarding the future of a human being, and they reminded me who I was trained to be and do. They reminded me that I am the one who claims to do who I am.
I am hoping that Stalin will text in the morning saying that he found a job, found housing, and found the security here that he so prized that was evading him. But if he doesn't, I have already committed to the assignment.
City Council Member Shaun Abreu Congressman Adriano Espaillat, I need your help.
