Peacekeeping, and books for young readers

By TERRY FARISH ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Terry Farish is a writer of books for children and young adults, including “Go Home” with Lochan Sharma. She was awarded the 2024 Yates award by the Concord Library Foundation for her work with children and books.

The night was clear and cold and the election was over. Lochan Sharma and I were at the Bookery in Manchester to present the young adult novel we’d written together, “Go Home.” There was a hum of anxiety among us program organizers about the consequences of the election in this city of many immigrants.

Lochan himself is the son of Nepali-speaking Bhutanese parents who were violently deported from Bhutan after the country’s “One Nation, One People” edict. Years later they moved to Concord and one of his teachers at Concord High was here.

Our partners this night were Vijay Bhujel, Deputy Director of Building Community in New Hampshire, a refugee support organization, and Jessica Livingston, director of the Concord Multicultural Festival. We anticipated that people from many countries would come. Ghana Sharma had made momos and we had a catering hot box full of them.

It was Jessica who had asked earlier, “Should we have peacekeepers?”

Peacekeepers are volunteers who’ve trained with NH Peace Action to de-escalate potential harassers. Peacekeepers had been at the Multicultural Festival as a precaution. The organization describes itself in this way: “The NH Peacekeeping Project is comprised of trained volunteers who adhere to non-violent de-escalation practices. Peacekeepers are called upon to be present for a variety of events helping to set the tone for an action, assist with communication among participants, mediate conflicts, and serve as intermediaries between participants and authorities.”

After the election, hate speech against immigrants was mainstream. There was worry that the ease of using hate speech could incite harassment tonight. There were other sources of anxiety. Vijay and Jessica said a lot of immigrants were scared they’d lose their TPS, temporary protective status. They worried a piece of paper wouldn’t protect them.

I’d met a high school librarian in Laconia, Karen Abraham, the 2023 New Hampshire School Librarian of the Year. We talked about the fact that some kids casually used hate words in school.

“Lots of times kids don’t know what the words mean,” she said.

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“They hear it in music.” Words in the air. She’d thought about reading a novel where this happens and talking with students about how characters deal with it. She wanted to help them understand the hurt the words cause.

In “Go Home,” Lochan and I wrote about three teens, a Nepal-born boy, a New Hampshire-born girl, and her boyfriend Gabe who blames immigrants for the losses his family has endured. The novel opens when Gabe almost shoves Samir into a cove of the fast-moving Piscataqua River. Samir can’t swim.

We’d written about characters torn by conflict with each other and afraid of betraying their families who they loved. We hoped that readers would pause and imagine each of them. They were like a lot of people we knew.

Lochan and I prepared to begin in the dancing lights of the glass window of the bookstore. Our audience was mixed, people with deep roots in the city and newer immigrants.

Seacoast facilitator Anne Romney told me about her work facilitating around conflict. Anne uses the saying, “It’s important to be included at the party but it’s more important to be invited to dance.” We had a plan to do something like that at the Bookery. Romney and Abraham led me to the idea that we can place trust in personal stories as part of the peacekeeping to help us meet each other and so that, as Naomi Shihab Nye writes in her poem ”Shoulders,” “we can all live in this world.”

Maybe tonight we can put our teens’ stories in the air, teens trying to figure out a clash between new friendship and bone-deep loyalty.

In Manchester, a man and his wife came as peacekeepers. The man stayed on the busy Elm Street sidewalk and observed. He wore a red jacket in the cold and we could see him through the glass behind us. Lochan and I told our story.

This time we ended the program by inviting the audience to remember and write or draw an image from their childhood, like Lochan had remembered details of Nepal as we worked on the novel. The families liked this. They wrote about a grandmother putting a penny in her granddaughters’ shoe for good luck, plowing behind oxen in Bhutan at ten years old, being a small boy pretending to drive while he sat on his grandfather’s lap in their truck, growing sugarcane in the Philippines.

Vijay told the image of a newcomer from Ukraine. “When she sees the sky in New Hampshire, there are no bombs.”

We were relieved we could pass out the momos at the end of the event, and no protesters had pounded their fists on the glass.

Fear remains. Fear is always for the children.

Standing in front of the window are Terry Farish, Vijay Bhujel, and Lochan Sharma at The Bookery in Manchester at Lochan and Terry’s event.

PHOTO BY JESSICA LIVINGSTON