Many of the stories sounded like the evening news.
Raids on villages by Khmer Rouge soldiers. Hiding in a bomb shelter in Jordan. Fleeing a big house in Mogadishu after rebels from the countryside started looting homes.
“Some people killed my grandpa,” reported Younan Younan, a pupil born in Iraq. “It was because of our religion. We are Christians. I was in 3rd grade when we had to leave.”
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“I think I was born in Bosnia. I only remember shooting. I cannot remember well because I was so little,” added solemn-eyed Mirela Kozarcanin, now 12.
Yet what was surprising, at a crowded open house Monday in Albany Park, was the search for connections, rather than differences, among people who had seen firsthand the worst that the modern world has to offer, in violence, hatred and dislocation.
For three hours, on the main floor of Hibbard Elementary School, at 3244 W. Ainslie St., neighborhood residents slowly moved through an exhibition titled, “Changing Worlds: Stories of Migration as Told by Hibbard Elementary School Children, Parents and Grandparents.”
Open to the public, the show consists of photographs and stories from families now living in the area, long a port of entry for immigrants, where more than 40 languages are spoken.
The aim of the project was “to affirm identity and bridge boundaries between races, ethnic and language groups, cultures and generations,” said photographer Kay Berkson, who started work on it four years ago, along with Hibbard’s art teacher, Barbara Myers.
More simply put, the idea was to show to each observer, through storytelling and photo portraits of people and their families, how much of “them” is also “us.”
It is a subject to which Berkson brings considerable emotion.
In the Hibbard corridors, while others pondered the works, she remembered a day with an elderly aunt, 89. They came across an old family portrait taken on Ellis Island when the aunt, arriving with her large family from Russia, was a toddler.
“It was in a frame, in a drawer,” Berkson recalled. “I said, `Let’s put this out. It’s beautiful.’ She said, `No, people don’t like to look at foreigners.’ “
“That,” said Berkson, “was sad.”
Indeed, what has fascinated the organizers of “Changing Worlds,” as well as its viewers, is the minutiae of how other people around the world organize their daily lives, gathering food, making meals, socializing, keeping pets, going for long walks.
“Knowing where a friend came from, and what it’s like there, there’s no way geography can be more real,” said one interested spectator, Hibbard’s principal, Anthony Jelinek. Among the elementary school set, he suggested, an insider’s view from a classmate often carries far more weight than a book called, say, “Our Neighbors Around the World.”
“You know what, it’s good to show the countries where the kids came from. It builds respect between them,” added another onlooker, Namah Moussa, who was born in Jordan and is now a Hibbard teacher’s aide. “Yes, there are a lot of good things in it,” said her son, Mohanned, 9, as his sister, Nancy, 8, nodded in agreement.
“There are a lot of parallel stories in Albany Park,” noted art teacher Myers, “but often people who live upstairs and downstairs from each other don’t share them because they come from different countries and a lot of the old antagonisms survive.”
Why, Myers asked, reflecting a larger agenda of the show, “can’t we also have the beauty-of-life stories?” Not all the stories, however, end happily.
Many of the children write of their fear of street gangs. “If there are too many, I go on the other side. It’s very scary,” noted one Hibbard pupil, who added that he had felt safer in Pakistan. Others, many of them parents, wrote of isolation in a new country.
“It’s so important to bring the parents in,” said 2nd-grade teacher Stephanie Gross. For parents who don’t speak English, the show’s personal stories, collected by Jill Rohde, Brenda Berman and Berkson, have been translated into 12 languages.
This winter the show will tour, opening at the Daley Center in January, then moving on to neighborhood centers, libraries and churches, on a schedule now being worked out.
“My students now think they know celebrities when they see their friends and neighbors in the exhibit,” said Gross. At her grade level, she added, the show has also sparked interest in group exercises, such as “things families do together,” “one thing a grandparent misses about their childhood home” and “how do different languages sound?”
Such activities are described in a “Changing Worlds” teacher’s manual, along with a game Gross invented called “Flat Stanley,” after a book by Jeff Brown in which the hero, being flat, could travel the world by mail.
Foreign-born children are encouraged to bring in addresses from their country of origin. Most pen pals wrote back, the pupils found to their amazement, and they have carefully flagged each reply on a world map just outside the door of their classroom, for others to see.
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