Far away from home for the holidays

Being thousands of miles away from your family for months at a time is never easy. But it seems so much tougher at Christmas, a time for family togetherness. That's true of the military, and it's true of immigrants working here to build better lives for their families in Latin America.

That separation is vivid for me because of a busboy at our diner who brings glasses of water to my wife and me, offers refills for our coffee and tea, and clears our table when breakfast is over. He has a wife and three children in El Salvador: two teenagers and one in college. The economic realities make it hard for him to see them often. In his decade-plus in this country, he's only been back to El Salvador four times, including a visit a few months ago, but never at Christmastime. And, as Christmas nears this week, he'll be doing what he always does: riding his bike back and forth to work and using a phone card to stay in touch with his family.

This isn't the time to reflect at length on the global forces of poverty and dislocation that drive people to come to a land where they don't understand the language or the culture. It's not the season to argue over the arcana of quotas or legislation. Better to look at it through the simple human lens of separation, of longing for home.

That's what Sister Margaret Smyth does, understanding the difficult emotions that Christmas brings to those she serves as director of the Diocese of Rockville Centre's Hispanic apostolate on the North Fork.

"It is really hard, because they have that sense of all their traditions at home," she said. So she helps them to observe some of those traditions here. One of the traditions is "las posadas."

Posada is Spanish for inn, a reference to Bethlehem, which had many visitors but no room at the inn for an older husband and a wife about to give birth.

From mid-December to Christmas Eve, immigrants re-enact that search for lodgings. "It's about Mary and Joseph looking for hospitality," Sister Margaret said. "We go from house to house every night."

But every night there's a house that serves as the designated provider of hospitality, a welcoming venue for singing and praying and eating. The host family for the evening gets to pick the cuisine. Last year, Sister Margaret said, one posada was a home in East Marion with Polish roots, where 40 or 50 Spanish-speaking pilgrims feasted on kielbasa and pierogies.

Sister Margaret works to get local English-speaking families, whose own immigrant roots are well in the past, to host the posadas. "This way, we move between two communities and do it bilingually," she said.

Those celebrations can help some immigrants feel more at home. But Christmas causes anxiety for others: For the undocumented, it's a longing for a journey home that their situation won't allow. For those here legally, who have been trying for months or years to get a visa for a relative to enter, it's a wan hope that their loved one will finally make it through the impossibly tiny needle's eye of our legal immigration system.

Those are the questions that come to the Amityville headquarters for the immigrant services office of Catholic Charities. Its counselors and attorneys help immigrants, refugees and victims of human trafficking all year. But they get even busier in December, answering the Christmas inquiries, which too often end sadly.

Family reunification is supposed to be central to our immigration laws, but the reality is too often family separation. So, at Christmas, let's keep in mind that the new parents and their baby had to flee their own land for Egypt soon after the birth. And let's recall those separated from their families by global economic forces and bureaucracies beyond their control.