A song of peace for their land and for mine
Ataaya, photo by the author
A flooded crawfish field in rural Louisiana. A squat brick building surrounded by a tall barbed wire fence. Inside, a room reminiscent of a middle school cafeteria: sounds echo off its cement walls, body odors linger in the humidity, and plastic chairs squeak noisily across the floor. Seated awkwardly on two of those chairs are a tall white man dressed in his southern Sunday best and a slight hijabi woman in an orange jumpsuit and matching shoes. Ozzie and Rümeysa have never met before and currently know only one thing they have in common: they are both dear friends of mine.
Ozzie rubs the bare spot on his wrist where a worn white thread, tied as a blessing by a Buddhist monk on a mountaintop in Thailand, had been forced off by a prison guard moments before. Rümeysa adjusts her posture, uncomfortable from her first week sleeping in a crowded cell. They make small talk about their academic research interests, his two young kids, and her native Turkey, where he studied abroad in college. Nearby, a man from Florida is visiting with his detained Latina fiancée; an Asian man is conversing quietly with his wife. The room is strewn with a few grimy toys for the occasions when children come to visit their mothers. Like most others in the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, neither Ozzie nor Rümeysa had known, until recently, that such a place existed. They had certainly never imagined themselves inside.
When I texted Ozzie to ask if he might be willing to make the trip from his home in Baton Rouge to the detention center in Basile on my behalf, he replied immediately and agreed without hesitation. We had met in our early twenties as young teachers in Thailand, where he helped me pronounce my first words in a new language and gave me thrilling rides on the back of his orange Honda CBR 150. As I pictured Ozzie racing along the Louisiana backroads on his current Kawasaki, I felt a flicker of hope for the first time since registering that the “international graduate student taken into custody” from outside her apartment near Tufts University was the same person I sat across from daily in our four-person lab, the colleague with whom I collaborated on research papers, the friend with whom I exchanged recipes after every potluck meal. Reading Tufts President Kumar’s vague email to the University community before bed on March 25, 2025, I tried to calm my horror by reminding myself how unlikely it was that it referred to one of the few international graduate students currently enrolled in my small program. But when I groggily awoke the next morning to texts confirming that it was indeed Rümeysa who was taken, I knew that the growing immigration nightmare in the U.S. was as close to home as it could possibly be.
When I was 20 years old and studying abroad myself, I was sort of, kind of, almost arrested on a beach in Dakar, Senegal. My crime: making tea with my host brothers after hours, when the beach was no longer open to the public. Ataaya is my favorite Senegalese tradition, boiling dried tea leaves and fresh mint leaves to sugary perfection while debating animatedly about ancient philosophy or current events, or just sharing local gossip. The process often takes many hours: the first round of tea bitter, the next sweeter, the final one almost unbearably sugary. The police officers showed up sometime between rounds two and three and chased us to our car, where I saw one of my host brothers slip them a few colorful west African francs before, giggling, we sped home to bed, my memory of the night with my brothers sweeter than any cup of tea.
That night has become part of the lore of my first experience living abroad, and it is the closest I have been to a legal incident in another country, even after the past 15 years as either a student or a facilitator of international education in Senegal, Thailand, and South Africa. When I consider the inevitable challenges of living in a culture different from my own, when I recall my near-arrest on the beach or the miserable bureaucracy of visa processes or navigating the onset of a global pandemic, I’m still left most vividly with memories of the generosity of my adopted cultures, and this is what I share with anyone who will listen. I attempt to translate teranga, the Wolof term that describes the hospitality of the Senegalese, who will give up their portion of a meal to make sure that you eat. I tell the tale of crashing a Thai funeral because I thought it was a restaurant, but being fed and included in the family’s blessings nonetheless. I share the story of a Johannesburg man who spent his days collecting dirt from the unused plot of land on the corner of one local road to patch the potholes so that no driver would get a flat tire. The unspoken rule I learned while living abroad is that it was my job to return to my own country and convince others that these places were home to the world’s most generous people. But I wonder what story Rümeysa will get to tell of her time living in the United States. Her experience this year has violated the other half of this rule, the host country’s responsibility to offer its best self to foreigners in exchange for our glowing reviews.
Until this past spring, I had held onto only the most uplifting stories of how Americans form relationships abroad and, in turn, host foreigners in the United States with that same care. In South Africa, I served for three years as the director of a study abroad program for American high school students that was housed at a pan-African secondary school. While it was wonderful to see how those students bonded in real time during their semesters abroad, what has stuck with me even more is the way they maintained those relationships after their semesters were over. When a Tunisian student started college at Oberlin in Ohio in the first year of the pandemic, her American roommate picked her up at the airport in Cleveland and sent me a masked selfie of the two of them setting up her dorm room. Another student, from New York City, sent me a photo of her Kenyan roommate watching the Macy’s Day Parade from her family’s apartment over Thanksgiving break. My own parents, who live in South Bend, Indiana, hosted a group of my African former students now studying at the University of Notre Dame for a meal in their home—my mother made the Panang curry recipe she’d learned in a cooking class we took together when she visited me in Thailand all those years ago.
My parents feel this urge in part, I am sure, because their three daughters lived with host families in Senegal, Morocco, and Cameroon in college, and they want to pay forward the welcomes we experienced. But cross-cultural educational connections in my family run deeper still. My American grandfather took his first collegiate teaching job on Prince Edward Island in 1948, where he married my Canadian grandmother; my Canadian father studied in Ireland (I am named for one of his closest Irish friends), then pursued his PhD in the U.S., where he met my American mother, who grew up as an Army brat around the United States and in Germany. My father-in-law came here from Nigeria as a student in the 1970s, and my husband is a product of his marriage to an American. Our first child, due in January 2026, will owe his existence, in part, to all of these cross-cultural relationships, which were themselves enabled by governments willing to grant study and work visas, and ultimately citizenship, to foreigners.
It is hard to reconcile the joyful cross-cultural experiences I’ve witnessed, and my own family’s origin stories, with images of families in America being ripped apart on a daily basis. In these actions, I see a broad panic about changes to a supposed “American way of life,” as well as specific, irrational fears, such as children in this country being forced to hear the Muslim call to prayer. I think about my own reaction to that unfamiliar sound on some of my first days in majority-Muslim Senegal back in 2008. It happened slowly, then all at once: the muezzin’s call to prayer, initially a strange, almost haunting melody outside my bedroom window, was suddenly one day comforting in its ordinariness. This is my favorite part of adjusting to a new place: the gradual process of foreign sounds becoming a familiar soundtrack, of what was once unnerving becoming just another melody of home. Interfaith curiosity and celebration have been at the heart of my experiences in Muslim Senegal, Buddhist Thailand, and Christian South Africa, as well as my friendship with Rümeysa. On a recent Sunday, I texted her the lyrics to one of the hymns we’d sung that morning in my Unitarian Universalist congregation that I thought might resonate with her own prayers for peace and international understanding: My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean, and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine; but other lands have sunlight too, and clover, and skies are everywhere as blue as mine. O hear my song, thou God of all the nations, a song of peace for their land and for mine.
Inside the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, the women can hear neither church bells nor calls to prayer, but they make space for each other to pray amidst the crowding and the squalor, for themselves and their families and their future freedom. Now in my third trimester of pregnancy, I think every day about the pregnant prisoners and the detained mothers who can no longer see their children. Even as Rümeysa excitedly asks which fruit or vegetable represents my baby’s size this week, I know we are both thinking of the women going through this same life-giving process from the dingy cell she once shared with them and the unbelievable cruelty they are subjected to as they work toward the most human of goals. They will continue to be on our minds and in our prayers as she soon holds my newborn and reads him the children’s books she loves.
On his second visit to Basile, knowing how much Rümeysa adores kids, Ozzie brought his own two children, ages four and five, along with him. They posed for a photo outside the barbed wire fence and played with those grimy toys in the visitation room. His four-year old daughter, currently in a princess phase, asked why Rümeysa and all of the other women wore matching orange jumpsuits. Shortly after Rümeysa came home, we mailed Ozzie’s daughter a photo of us together, tucked into the cover of a children’s book, Rümeysa beside me in a pretty pink dress. His daughter hasn’t seen it yet, though, because Ozzie and his family are currently spending a research year in Thailand, where his children will get to live in their mother’s culture and return to Louisiana with new perspectives on what it feels like to make a home somewhere else.
They will know, from a young age, that their two home countries alike have blue skies; they won’t feel the need to prefer the green of crawfish fields or rice paddies, each uniquely beautiful. As a child myself, my least favorite Crayola color was “jungle green,” because I never saw anything like it in my native Massachusetts. But when I lived in Thailand years later and rode my bicycle through the glorious farmland, I realized that the 64-pack of crayons is meant to reflect not the colors I have already known, but the ones I might someday see, if I am lucky enough to travel beyond the borders of my birthplace. The shade of green I once thought unrealistic is, in fact, the daily view out someone’s window. The crackling of the mosque’s loudspeaker is, for many, a reminder to center themselves in their faith. That white thread on Ozzie’s wrist, rejected by the prison guards as an unknown object, is actually a Buddhist blessing of protection and luck for the wearer, one I accepted myself each time I visited a Thai temple. The shared duty of the host country and the visitor is to transform sights and customs that may seem strange into the very texture of a life and a world that is first foreign, then familiar, and finally welcoming. Each of these stages is the next cup of ataaya, steeped longer and far sweeter than the last.
Mairéad O'Grady is a third-year doctoral student in Tufts University's Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, where her scholarship focuses on the intersection of adolescent identity development, civic engagement, and mentorship. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she spent 13 years working in international education, primarily at The School for Ethics and Global Leadership (SEGL) in Washington, DC, and as director of its partnership campus with African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is a 2010 graduate of Grinnell College in Iowa, where she studied Music and French, spent a semester abroad in Senegal, and was awarded a postgraduate teaching fellowship in Thailand.