Explaining Life Insurance to a Refugee
Imagine explaining the concept of life insurance to someone who has never heard of it. When you step back from our lives in the United States you realize how strange it is. “You see, you pay money for something you hope will not happen for a very long time, and if you die your family receives money, so it is not as bad when you are dead. But actually, a lot of the money just goes to your funeral, which you don’t need at all… because you are dead, but we have very expensive funerals in this culture.” In most places in the world and at most times in human history you died, and that was the end. We had no financial means to cushion your death.
I used to work in refugee resettlement, and sometimes it was my job to help newly arrived refugees fill out their employment paperwork for their first job in America. One occasion with an Eritrean man stands out in the monotony of helping refugees navigate our various American bureaucracies and legal standards. Eritrea on the horn of east Africa is sometimes referred to as “the North Korea of Africa,” and the description is accurate. A brutal regime controls the country absolutely. Christians and Muslims who are not of the right tribe have been persecuted in equal measure. The government conscripts young men into lifetime military service for the state doing hard labor on government projects- de facto slavery. A mass exodus of refugees have fled the regime to neighboring Ethiopia, into north Africa, across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the Sinai, and beyond- if they can make it.
I was helping one very lucky middle aged man who came to the USA after years in one of the UNHCR refugee camps in Ethiopia. I forget if he was Christian or Muslim- it does not matter. He took some basic English lessons at the refugee camp in Ethiopia, and he continued his ESL classes once he arrived in America, but he still needed some assistance with reading and writing in English, especially when it comes to our highly particular legal documents. He found a decent job at a hotel, and it came with a basic health insurance plan as well as a small life insurance policy. The middle aged man looked slightly older than his years physically but not if you watched his facial expressions. He had a slight grin and a youthful energy in his speech that I can hardly muster here in my late 20s. He carried his little bundle of legal documents- green card, passport, documents from the UNHCR camp, some other state ID, social security card, and handwritten notes.
We sat in the computer lab at our agency where we sometimes helped refugees learn basic computer skills or assisted them in filling out documents online. He knew enough about the health insurance policy, and we finished the paperwork for it without much conversation, but then we came to the life insurance. The man had a wife and one adult child in the country. I think he had another child at some point, but they were lost along the way, and when you work in resettlement you do not ask your clients about such things. If they start to describe the horrific things they have seen you listen, but you never ever pry.
I tried to explain the concept of life insurance. This man’s English speaking ability was functionally fluent, but I often worked with clients who had very little English, and from this I had developed a habit of pantomime to supplement my words, so I explained things like “death” and “benefit” with sweeping arm motions that I somehow thought would make my words more understandable. I looked at this middle aged refugee who had been through God-knows-what, and I told him we were preparing for his death. It was awfully bleak when I thought about it like that. This man had already dealt with death more than I would ever know.
After a few minutes I had conveyed the concept, and he understood it, and I summarized saying, “This looks after your family & loved ones when you die.” At this point the man’s grin widened. He leaned back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling, and pointed to the sky with one hand.
“God is my life insurance,” he said. “God will look after me and my family when I am gone.” I had no idea how to respond. I got a little choked up. Like many refugee resettlement non-profits in America my agency was faith based. We operated under the umbrella of Lutheran Family Services. Our humanitarian work was secular, and my colleagues in the office (many of them former refugees themselves) were of many faith traditions, but our organization’s mission stemmed from the Christian concept that God commands us to love and serve others. Half joking, this Eritrean man had just declared a faith that was simple and assured. More so than I have heard in any homily. I struggle with my faith, and I have not seen a fraction of the things this man has. I did not know how he could have that. Maybe faith is how he did anything. Maybe it was what kept him alive. In that interaction I learned that I was not serving refugees- they were serving me. I taught them how to fill out paperwork and take a public bus to work. They taught me more important things. They taught me perspective on what matters. They taught me faith, and loyalty, and goodness. I had become jaded to all three as an American who was simply born here by no choice of his own.
After describing his theology to me so beautifully the Eritrean man and I finished his life insurance paperwork, and I never saw him again. He had a good job, and he had acclimated to America very well, so he did not have much use of the agency and our services any longer. God was on his side.
