A few years ago, about the time Covid hit us all, I got a call from the Seacoast Interfaith Sanctuary Coalition (SISC), an organization that aids immigrants in the area. They asked if Holy Trinity would like to team with Portsmouth’s Temple Israel to “companion” a Cameroonian woman named Claudine who’d just been released from Strafford County Jail. Her “crime” was that she missed a legal meeting because she didn’t understand what or when it was, completely understandable when you learn that she was still in the process of learning English, which would be her fourth language. Holy Trinity and Temple Israel both agreed, and soon Pastor Tim, Ellen (the Temple rep) and I began to meet and plan.
Claudine was living in a home in Dover with a single mom and her teenage daughter. Ellen and I began regular visits. We learned that in her home country she’d been a paralegal, but that skill didn’t transfer to the American legal community. Needing work quickly, she’d taken a week-long introduction to being a nurses’ aid as soon as she arrived in the States.
“Team Claudine” formed with a dozen Holy Trinity folks who called, texted, and visited to get to know her and discover how we could help. She found herself a job as a nurses’ assistant at a Dover nursing home. Without a car, she walked to and from her job, and when Team Claudine discovered it was a 5-mile walk each way and that her shift ended after midnight, we quickly organized a team of drivers. In addition, both HT and the Temple donated funds to help with her groceries.
Claudine’s home in Dover was only a block away from one of the Catholic churches. She attended regularly, but as the only Black person, she felt too shy to approach the altar for communion or even to talk to the priest. We started taking her our Covid communion kits and sharing them together. We went for long walks with long talks. She sewed for some of us who brought her fabric. We learned about the elderly mother she’d been forced to leave in Cameroon along with a daughter and some grandkids. A second daughter was attending school in France.
None of us knew what had happened in Cameroon that made her need to escape. We weren’t allowed to ask, and Claudine’s asylum attorney had made it very clear that she wasn’t to talk about it outside of a courtroom setting. A lot has happened between those Dover days and now, including two different jobs and two separate living arrangements, all in Dover, and then an additional move to the Dartmouth area as a traveling nurses’ aid. She was unsure where she belonged and where to find work. So when a Cameroonian woman she knew from home who lives in Las Vegas invited her to share her apartment, promising her she could easily get a nursing position in the city, she took the next plane out.
That was almost two years ago. Loving the job and finally earning enough to live on, she now has her own apartment. Last spring she was able to fly her daughter from France to join her for a visit. The best news of all is that she finally has a date scheduled for her asylum hearing.
These successes have given Claudine the faith to take the next step. Last spring she enrolled at Las Vegas College in their LPN program. It’s hard: fulltime nursing student and still parttime nurses’ aid. But she knows it’s the right path.
We communicate back and forth routinely, and in her last message she wrote, “Please please please ask the good people at Holy Trinity to pray for me.” I said yes, of course I will.