“This is like a dream,” Dad said.
He was thrilled to be able to give his family this opportunity. We had been struggling for so long. He told us that in America, we would not necessarily fit in, but that we had a chance to better ourselves and further our education.
Other families from the massacre were on the plane with us, and people were in good spirits, if a little discombobulated. Because everything was labeled in English, some people got confused and sprinkled packets of salt in their tea instead of sugar. Someone ate a pat of butter. We shared some laughs about that.
I was astounded that there was a kitchen on the plane, serving up warm food. A few people got motion sickness, and threw up in barf bags. Alex and I discovered that we could entertain ourselves by running up and down the aisles.
We had a layover in Kenya, then in London. The London airport was swirling with people. Announcements blared from speakers in crisp British accents. For a snack, I tasted an apple for the first time. I took a bite and thought it was the nastiest thing—it was soft and squishy, not crisp. This is fruit? I thought. This is disgusting!
Dad tried it too, and I was impressed that he kept eating it beyond the first bite.
Mom laughed. “Do you actually like it?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “But I have to get used to the food.”
We all laughed. My dad, such a trooper.
Finally, we flew into John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City—and landed in the middle of a snowstorm. Looking out the window at the wild gusts of snowflakes, I thought: Oh my goodness, these people live in ice.
The airport was massive, like a humongous maze, overflowing with people. Some slept on the floor with their luggage, awaiting delayed flights. It was startlingly cold, even though we were indoors. The heating system couldn’t keep up with the weather, and we had no winter coats. I was wearing a thin pink jogging suit. We retrieved our bags, and Mom pulled out her traditional cotton dresses. We wrapped them around us, trying to add layers of warmth. She kept pulling out more clothes for all of us. We definitely stood out. Mom’s frocks were made in the brightly patterned East African fabrics known as kitenge, or igitenge. I didn’t see any other people from Africa, except for the people in our own group. I had never seen so many white faces in my life.
We needed to find our connecting flight to Rochester, which was challenging because none of us spoke English. But we had the entire day to get to the departure gate. The snow had delayed all the flights. My dad showed people his ticket, and we eventually made our way to the gate, weaving our way through the obstacle course of people lying on the floor. We boarded the plane for the final leg of our journey, a short flight to northern New York.
When we arrived in Rochester, dawn was breaking. Heritage stood there in the airport, waiting for us with a big smile. He was with a caseworker, a Ukrainian woman named Katarina, and a new friend he had met, a refugee from Uganda named Jacob. We stepped outside the airport to go to the car, and the arctic wind stopped us.
“I feel like I’m being electrocuted,” Dad said.
We got our bearings and hurried to the car, shivering to the core. As we drove through the streets of Rochester, I looked out the window and saw a city covered in white. The snow coated everything—houses, yards, treetops, churches, cars. Nobody was outside. It seemed like I was in a strange, hazy dream. We stopped at a run-down house in an inner-city neighborhood that we were told served as temporary housing for refugees.
I was so worn out from our hours in the sky, it was hard to focus on much of anything, but I remember thinking that the house looked kind of old and beat-up, its paint chipping. Even as a twelve-year-old girl landing in America for the first time, I could sense that we were not in a nice neighborhood. Of course, it was surely better than being crammed into a one-room apartment with my entire family in Rwanda. But it was also disappointing: I had been promised the American dream. It was my first hint that life in America might not be such a dream after all.
The house was stocked with food I had never seen before, like peanut butter. I thought peanut butter was an especially odd concept: You were supposed to cook with peanuts, not pound them into a cream to put in a jar. There were more apples. There was no whole milk. We grew up on whole milk, gulping it down every day. When I opened the refrigerator, I hollered for my mother.
“Mom, these people eat worms!” I said, pointing to a package of pink worms.
“No, no,” she said, shaking her head.
“Look!”
She looked at the piles of worms, confused, just like me. We learned later that it was ground beef.
Those first few days were strange and disorienting. It was frigid outside, so we mostly stayed indoors, catching up with Heritage and eating bread and drinking tea. We didn’t have any other food we were used to eating, like chicken, vegetables, or our coveted whole milk. The microwave was another enigma: We wondered how it cooked food, since it didn’t grill or fry. A caseworker brought us a TV, but the shows were in English, so we couldn’t understand anything. I watched cartoons—Arthur, Clifford the Big Red Dog. I was too old for them, but they were the only shows I could understand. They turned out to be a good tool for learning English.
Our caseworkers tried to figure out what kinds of foods we liked, but communication was difficult. They bought us things like heavy cream for coffee, but we didn’t drink coffee. I tasted the heavy cream and I thought: Ugh, this must be how milk tastes in America! They brought us chicken, but it tasted strange, probably from the hormones injected to make the birds fatter. Back home, we always ate fresh chicken, no chemicals. Mom wanted to prepare the chicken the way she always did for us, with her sauces and spices, and she tried to convey the ingredients she needed to the caseworkers. They genuinely tried. It just didn’t work out. Mom would say she needed tomato paste for sauces, and they would come back with canned tomatoes instead. They would bring us things like onions and salt, which were not ingredients that she used. Mom would say, “What do I do with these?” Even when she got the spices she liked, the chicken tasted different than it did in Africa. I began to hate meat. Gradually, I stopped eating it all together.
We had a caseworker named John who thought it would help if he took us along with him to go food shopping at Walmart. It seemed logical enough; we could point out what we needed. John was a nice guy, an older man, worryingly overweight. I wondered if something was wrong with him. I didn’t understand how he could get so big, or how he could survive in that unhealthy state. He drove us to the Walmart and we walked in the front door, where he promptly sat down on a little cart to drive himself around the aisles of the store. It seemed like no one walked anywhere. I thought: Is this a thing here? Nobody walks in America? You drive to the grocery store and then get out and drive around the store in a cart?
People in the store looked huge to me. The store was huge. I had been to big food markets in Rwanda, but Walmart was a new ball game—more like a town than a market, with its aisles and aisles of mysterious foods, like boxes of cereal. Cereal made no sense to me. I thought: You’re supposed to put these flakes in a bowl of milk and eat them? What? Milk is for drinking!
There were aisles of cookies, potato chips, sweet snacks, salty snacks, bags of candy, and cheese presliced into little cubes and squares. The people at Walmart didn’t look like the people I saw on TV. The people on TV—the models and actors—were super-skinny, especially the young women. They were rail thin, and they paraded around half naked in bikinis and short-shorts. I wondered where those people lived. Clearly not in Rochester.
We went to Walmart a few more times with John, and the trips remained uneasy. There was always a degree of tension as we tried to communicate what we needed: We didn’t want to appear rude or ungrateful, but we didn’t want to buy food that we would not eat. We hated to see food go to waste. We knew that food was a precious commodity. We rarely had translators to help us navigate anything, unless we had an official meeting of some sort. Ther
e were no other members of our tribe in Rochester. Everything was new to me. My brain could hardly process anything. My family was really flying blind.
FIFTEEN
OUR NEIGHBORHOOD WAS MOSTLY BLACK, but there were still more white people there than I had ever seen. Sometimes I saw the white people eyeing my family curiously. As we strolled the aisles in Walmart, I could tell they were talking about us, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. We definitely looked different: I was thin and wore my hair cropped very short, practically shaved, per the style for kids back home. I didn’t see any girls in Rochester wearing their hair that way. My mom wore her traditional, vividly patterned African dresses.
The houses on our street were all very close together, but none of our neighbors came over and introduced themselves. No one knocked on our door. Mom was surprised by how lonely and isolated America felt. The neighbors didn’t seem to know each other. People locked their doors. Everyone kept to themselves. Mom would look out the window and ask, “Where are all the people?”
Back home on our sunny, friendly street in Uvira, we had people coming and going in our house all the time. People smiled and said hello when they passed you on the street. We never locked our doors.
One day, our caseworker John took us to a church clothing drive to help us stock up on clothes, including much-needed winter coats and boots. Adele had arrived at that point, and as we looked at the shelves of musty clothes, arranged by category—shirts, jeans, shoes—we couldn’t help but giggle.
“Check out these pants,” I said, pointing to a polyester pair that had not been popular for decades. They were universally unfashionable—not retro chic, just old, and they smelled old too.
Adele laughed. “Those bell bottoms are so big, you could use them as mops.”
We spotted a long denim skirt, sending us into a new round of giggles.
“The only place someone could wear that skirt would be to an Ugly Skirt Convention,” I said.
I didn’t want to appear rude, but as a preteen girl, I thought, I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing anything in here. Yes, we were refugees, but it didn’t mean we had no fashion sense. Back home in Congo, our clothes were tailored, and they fit beautifully. People in America seemed to assume that we were coming from an undeveloped land where we had no decent clothes. But we knew style. And we had seen plenty of American music videos. We knew what Americans wore. I didn’t want to get bullied out of school in Rochester for wearing a voluminous denim skirt.
I was also astonished by the array of short-shorts on offer at the clothing drive. The ladies who worked there pointed them out to me, encouraging me to pick them up. I had no interest in those shorts, and I could never wear them anyway: My dad would literally chop both my legs off if he saw me wearing them. And the shoes! Another bummer. Mainly they were heavy winter boots for trudging through snow, as ugly as could be. I wondered how people could wear those things. I figured it must be necessary to keep your feet from freezing off.
“Those shoes are like boats,” Alex said.
We chose some boots and coats, out of necessity, and I also managed to take home two T-shirts and a pair of jeans—not stylish but wearable. John was surprised that we didn’t take more items. He thought we would scoop up everything in sight. Another disconnect. I think people have this perception that because you’re a refugee, you’ll take anything you can get your hands on. To some extent that’s true—we were definitely in need—but we are all just people. And everyone wants to look good, especially twelve-year-old girls. Girls are girls everywhere.
John tried again later, taking us to another clothing drive. He asked the women who worked there to find us super-stylish things.
“These girls are very trendy,” he said.
Actually, we weren’t so fashionable; we were just regular girls. But we appreciated his efforts, and we tried to find some things, which remained a challenge. We noticed at both clothing drives that the clothes had a distinct smell: damp and moldy, like they’d been stored for a long time in wet cardboard boxes. Sometimes the clothes smelled like a hospital, perhaps from being stored in mothballs.
We began to wonder if this was how white people smelled.
My first real interaction with white kids came when I met two little girls who lived next door. They quietly wandered over one day when I was kicking around a ball with Alex in our backyard. The girls were around four and five years old, and they wanted to play. Pretty soon, they were hanging out in our home all the time. They appeared to be lonely, curious. Their mom drank alcohol and smoked, and the kids smelled like smoke too. It didn’t help our growing suspicions that white people didn’t smell so good.
As I got to know the girls, I remember thinking: Wow, I’m playing with white kids! Their mom seemed worried that the girls wanted to spend so much time with us—sometimes they would fall asleep in our house at night—but my mom welcomed their presence. She loved opening her home to others and having people around. To her, it was normal.
My two young friends had mountains of toys in their house. Dolls, stuffed animals, and plastic cars and trucks were strewn across the living room, and the kids didn’t seem interested in any of them. They had an assortment of Barbie dolls, which struck me as particularly bizarre toys. The dolls were stick-thin, like the actresses on TV, unlike the people I saw in real life in Rochester. I thought it was weird that the Barbies wore makeup too. Actually I thought it was strange that the dolls had faces at all. My soft cloth dolls back home in Africa had no faces; we used our imagination to dream up their facial features and personalities.
The boobs on the Barbies were another matter. I thought they were so inappropriate! They actually made me uncomfortable. I wondered why kids would want to play with dolls that were so developed. The dolls seemed like they were made for adults, not kids. Children don’t have gigantic boobs. Why did their dolls have them?
After just a couple weeks in Rochester, I began another weird new adventure: middle school in America.
SIXTEEN
I THOUGHT IT WAS STRANGE THAT I WOULD be sent to school so soon after landing in Rochester. It was April and there were just two months left in the school year. I didn’t speak English, and I didn’t feel ready. But the caseworkers thought it would be good for me to jump right in.
I was supposed to be in eighth grade, as I had finished seventh grade in Rwanda. But in America, I got placed in sixth grade. I had worked so hard on my education, and this felt like a setback. I knew I was being demoted because I didn’t speak English, but this made me angry. How would being in a lower grade help me learn English? I didn’t think our caseworkers valued the education we had achieved. Adding to my frustration, Alex would get to be in eighth grade—the grade I was supposed to be in.
My first day of school was the worst. I didn’t know what to wear because I had always worn uniforms to school back home. My frumpy clothing-drive clothes embarrassed me. I wore bleached blue jeans, a generic striped green-and-white shirt, and white sneakers. I was very skinny, and the jeans were too baggy.
The school, John Williams School No. 5, was huge compared with my elementary school in Congo. This one had several floors and indoor bathrooms. Several bathrooms on each floor! I wondered why the students needed so many toilets. The bathrooms were clean, and filled with kids, gabbing and gossiping. Back home in Congo, I avoided using the school bathrooms because they were unsanitary and often lacked toilet paper. Students who were late or who misbehaved in class were responsible for the upkeep of the toilets at school. In my new school, it appeared that there were employees whose sole job was to clean up after the kids. I had so many questions.
The halls were chaotic, swarming with chattering, shouting kids. Lockers were always slamming. I saw some boys taunting an overweight girl. Discipline clearly did not rule the day, as it did in schools back home. I couldn’t understand the words that anyone around me said. It was the first time I had been in a school where I could not comprehend anything at all. The kids stared
at me. They were mostly black and Hispanic. No one said hello to me or smiled. I felt like an alien. I immediately wanted to turn around and go back to my family.
In class, my teacher, Ms. Wilson, didn’t know what to do with me because of the language barrier, and she plunked down some math problems in front of me. Math was familiar to me, so that was one small comfort—numbers are numbers. Once in a while, the teacher would come and check up on me. She would speak slower and a bit louder than necessary, maybe because she thought it would help me. I sympathized with her—she was trying to do an impossible job: She was not an English-as-a-second-language teacher.
I was floored by how obnoxious the kids were. There was no chief of class to keep the peace when the teacher left the room. And even when the teacher was present, I could tell the kids were rude. They talked back to her. They smirked and made faces. They ignored her, texting on their phones while she spoke. Kids appeared to think of school as a chore, a bore. I thought of the boys back in Congo who were forced to serve as child soldiers, and the girls who were married off, never given a chance to finish high school. School is a privilege.
Another thing I didn’t understand: why kids would need their own cell phones. So many kids had phones. I could see why adults might need them, but kids?
At lunchtime in the cafeteria, a new minefield: rows and rows of tables and chairs, cliques of friends, trays of weird food. I didn’t know what to eat. I grabbed a little carton of milk and some fruit that looked familiar—an orange, a banana. I sat down at a table by myself. I had once loved going to school, and now I just wanted to go home. A boy named Abdul was the only kid to approach me. He was small in stature and seemed quiet, but with a mischievous air. He spoke to me in French, as kids from Africa generally know some French.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Congo,” I said, relieved that someone was talking to me.
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