January 30, 2007
Ethical Dilemma
I have been faced this ethical dilemma at work that had kept me awake for the last few days…. I was not sure at all what the right thing to do is, and I felt tortured about it.
I have been volunteering with an organization that deals with refugees. When I go in the morning, nothing at all can possibly prepare me for what will happen during the day. Few weeks ago, a woman who speaks Arabic showed up at the door can’t say which country, because that won’t be ethical! Since I have to hide her identity! Anyway, since I am the only one who speaks Arabic I was summoned to do the honors of translation.
This lady says that she is living with her daughter, and the daughter is getting married and does not want her in the house. Then she started narrating to us a story after the other about how bad her daughter is. I was appalled by the human race… how could someone do this to their own mother? I wondered. Dragging her mother all the way to a foreign land and then leave her to wither alone without love or care and simply disown her! I was fuming thinking that the daughter is the bitchiest thing I have ever heard of!
Obviously the old lady is not entitled to any benefits here since she is on a visitor’s visa and since the benefits are linked to the immigration status. The only thing is that she can do if she does not want to end up in the street is to go home, she cried when we told her that, saying that if she goes home, she will be in the streets, there is no social system in place, no family to take care of her…she will be worst off than she is here. … I cried with her, I was upset and disappointed at how unfair this whole thing is…
We wrote her daughter a letter, asking her to apply for her mother as a dependent, and that she will have a good chance to get an indefinite leave to remain in the UK. And I asked the lady to tell me what happens with the letter. She called me few days ago, telling me that the daughter received the letter and tore it up to pieces and threw it in the garbage. I called her this weekend to check up on her, she told me she wants to call her er other kids but she does not know how to use the card. So I suggested that I will call them and get them to call her.
At this point I started feeling that she is a bit confused, on several occasions I told her things and have a feeling she does not understand me, so I asked her to repeat what I told her… she would repeat it and then ask me again something that made me feel she did not understand a thing.
I called her daughter and I wish I did not!
I was prepared to be talking to a bitch, since the lady hates her kids… and I found myself talking to this charming, very well mannered and well educated lady. We talked a bit, she told me when her mother went to England she was simply seduced by the culture. She begged me to convince the mother to go back to their country. She does not speak the language, does not know how the culture or the system? How will she take care of herself when she is 77 years old and she can’t walk or hold things? In their country, the daughter told me that her mother owns a house and has two daughters and one son, among them; they can take care of her. She can come and visit their sister in the summer if she wants,
Lastly I told her but ya Madame, your sister can apply for her and she can go live on her own . The lady completely surprised by saying yes I read the letter that you guys sent… The cynical me did not believe her since her mother told me that the other daughter has threw it in the garbage in pieces… so I asked her to read… and she read it to me!
So here I was facing a confused woman, who is lying but probably does not know that she is, and who wants to stay here and she is fighting for it. Her husband was nasty, and maybe she loves it because she loves her independence… The point of this all somehow I managed to find myself in a situation where I was the spokeswomen who was assigned on her case. Responsible people called me to ask me about my opinion! And I found myself being challenged not knowing what to recommend. Send this woman back home before her visa expires and this way she can always come back for a visit, or fight for her but meanwhile she will be living in a shelter where there is sickness, hunger and coldness …but if she won, and if she was alive by the time she got her papers, then maybe then she can have her independence?
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