Week 3
This week I interviewed an asylum seeker from Venezuela in order to learn more about what happened to him and begin helping him to find the best way to tell his story to the judge. In order to figure out how to frame and tell his story, Estela (one of the GAIN staff who was interpreting) asked him to give us as many details as he could about what had happened to him and why. He was open with us, and soon we were flooded with information about a government scandal he had helped expose and the web of local political figures and their associates who made his life in Venezuela into a nightmare.
Even though I had spent time over the last few weeks doing research on the political situation in Venezuela for other people seeking asylum, gathering reports and news stories of government abuses and corruption, it still was eye-opening to hear the same story from a person sitting across the table.
Having the past few weeks of research floating around in the back of my head made it more emotionally difficult to hear what had happened to him because I knew that everything he told me had also happened to hundreds of other people in Venezuela. It’s one thing to know that the Venezuelan government has disappeared political dissidents and allows Maduro-aligned gangs to kidnap people. It’s another thing altogether to talk to someone who tells you exactly how it happened to him.
Between relying on an interpreter and it being my first time interviewing a client, the interview ran almost an hour longer than we had told him it would, and there were minutes when he would have to pause so Estela could translate what he said, then he would have to repeat or clarify certain details. The parts of his story that were most important to his application were the same parts that were the most traumatic and difficult to talk about, and I was very grateful for his patience and openness over the whole conversation.
Some of the things that stuck with me most were the smaller indignities that the government perpetrated in between the horrific incidents of persecution. The government would impound his car for months at a time. They would cut the power to his house, but not the rest of the neighborhood. They were the kinds of things that would frustrate any attempts to return to normal life, but that could also make a person believe that the worst was over and that they would just have to find a way to accommodate their new, more miserable normal. The small things made his decision to stay in Venezuela after the first two incidents of persecution make sense to me, because I could understand how he could say, “I handled that, I can handle this.”