A teacher from a nearby school came out to talk to me when I was walking my dog. We started talking regularly when I took the dog out. One day he invited me to a movie. It was the Return of the Jedi. It was playing in a very posh area near Fashion Island in Newport Beach, CA. It was an area I had never seen before. It seemed like another world to me. Anyway, it so happened that I had a horrible cold sore on my lip. But I was very matter of fact and said that in summer I was prone to herpes. (That is what cold sores are: a form of herpes). The guy seemed scared and repulsed. After the movie, he drove me home and I said he could come up to meet my mother and have a tea with us. He said he was going to pass and I never saw him again.
A few months after our arrival, with no success in finding employment, I saw an ad in the paper for 6 months classed at the Institute for Medical and Dental Careers. The ad said that placement was provided and guaranteed at the end of the course. You needed a high school education. I decided to take this opportunity. And suspecting that my education beyond high school might be a liability, I decided to omit it. Both my mother and I had paid to have our diplomas translated and notarized before leaving Romania.
I decided to become a Medical Assistant. The course cost in excess of î3,000, which I promised to pay gradually, after I started work. There would have been some grants available, had I been in America for at least 1 year. But this was less than 4 months after our arrival.
In June ’83 I started classes. They were 5-6 hours/day. We wore uniforms and practiced taking blood, giving injections, x-rays, on one another. We developed camaraderie. Although a foreigner, the others were asking me how to spell various medical words because spelling came easy to me. Medical terminology or most of it anyway, comes from Latin and Romanian is a Latin origin language.
After a few months, I also started a very P/T job in the evening (some 9-10 hours a week, at î4/h at a tiny T-shirt store in the Disneyland area of Anaheim. I was there by myself, usually 3 times a week, between 6 and 9 p.m. I used the bus to go to school and to the job. The school was fun and the job was too. I was a little more confident in the future. The only problem was transportation. Sometimes I would miss the bus to go to school, or the bus was late. And sometimes, people offered to give me a ride to school. Not knowing any better I accepted. Some men propositioned me but soon gave up. I was very lucky. A few times I missed the bus to come home at night from my job. I chose to walk because after I accepted a ride from a stranger at one time, I had a hard time convincing the man that I was not a hooker. At one time, I felt I was being followed when I walked. Luckily, a police car stopped and I asked the policeman to give me a ride. He did.
In the meantime, the Refugee Job Center and Welfare office were still periodically calling me to report to them. I filled out forms all the time and I remember informing them that I was enrolled in a 6 months course and having a very P/T job.
6 weeks away from the end of my course, I received notification that I had broken the law by going to the Medical Assistants school. The Refugee Job Center said that I was not supposed to enroll in any course but work effectively. By taking a course, I limited the time I could have spent looking for a job. Because of this violation, I rendered myself ineligible to receive public assistance. Moreover, I would have to repay all the funds received since I had started school.
It was a nightmare. It seemed totally nonsensical. There I was, doing my best to get off public assistance by enrolling in a course that I would have to pay out of my own pocket later on. The Refugee Job Center did not offer me any job, refer me to any other placement office, or offered to pay for some state or federally funded program that would make me more employable. Moreover, they had not mentioned at any time that I was not allowed to take any courses. It was a lose-lose situation for me. It seemed as bad or worse than something I might have encountered in Romania.
Being a very belligerent person when my rights were threatened, with an acute sense of justice and fairness and the ability to plead my cause, I started a string of memos, interviews, and later on, court appearances to overthrow that decision. In the meantime, they continued my benefits but these were reduced by the amount I was getting working at the T-shirt place. All the money that I earned there was subtracted from my public assistance check. How is that for incentive to work?
My fight with the Refugee Job Center was extremely long and stressful. There were numerous hearings, appeals, other hearings, appeals. Memos, telephoning, pleading, furious and angry outbursts, etc., etc. I went to court and lost. I appealed. And lost again. The judges told me that they thought very highly of me, that what I was doing was exactly what every immigrant should do, but unfortunately, the law (which they found on their books and which I never knew) said that I couldn’t take courses while being on Public Assistance. I cried a lot and deplored the wrongs (and stupidities) existing in this society which I had striven so hard to join. In the end, the Refugee Job Center followed my every move after I became employed, unemployed, employed, over and over again, through my move from the West to the East Coast. They never relented until I paid back everything. By the way, I also paid back the airfare to the organization that had paid it for us when we arrived in the States. But I considered that fair.
(to be continued)
