Home Now

Adult nonfiction 

     "It wasn't until the 80s, passing through on the way too and from college and later from my home in Massachusetts, that I realized how much Lewiston was changing.  The couples and young families had vanished, and Lisbon Street was losing businesses like a mouth losing teeth, with only scattered stores remaining."

     As a child Cynthia Anderson, author of Home Now: How 6,000 refugees transformed an American Town, considered Lisbon Street in Lewiston to be "the center of the world." Stores did good business, fueled by the prosperity of the city's mills.  Couples and families with children strolled about.

     When the textile and shoe factories shut down one by one the stores took quite a hit.  What had been a prosperous city went into serious decline.  As jobs disappeared younger people moved out.  Many of the families that stayed were mired in poverty.

     But Lewiston was not down for the count.  Its unlikely saviors were African refugees, many of them Somalis, looking for safe streets and affordable housing, willing to risk anything from an almost all white citizenry to a climate far different from what they had left behind.

     Anderson provides in depth coverage of several recent years in Lewiston: the events large and small, the politics, the progress of the newcomers, and the reactions of the natives, both positive and negative, to them.

     The most special strand of the narrative is the in depth portrayals of the newcomers and their experiences.  Readers interested in better understanding the complex dynamics through which refugees shape and are shaped by their host communities will find Home Now to be a must read.

On a purrrsonal note, my internship got off to a great start the first week of the semester.  I did my office hours.  That felt strange at first.  Unlike most of my peers, I hadn't had the experience of being a GA.  I'd bankrolled my education working dining where I was on my feet doing physical work.  My first internship with Upward Bound shepherding teens was also an on my feet thing.  So a job involving a lot of sitting felt strange.  I'm getting to know the students who drop in, talking to students who don't know about the place, and networking with other people who run other spaces where commuter students spend time.

I have dishes and laundry to catch up on.  But Tobago is curled up between my feet on the sofa, keeping me in a state of inertia.  (Jules)

That's right.  Respect the right of a cat to snuggle.  (Tobago)

A great big shout out goes out to Eugene and the others who were out plowing last night.

Tobago and Jules Hathaway 

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