Refugee High

by Elly Fishman

  Felix and Belenge make a plan to walk home together. The two are neighbors now that Belenge’s father moved his family next door to Felix’s family’s apartment. Belenge’s father, Tobias, works long hours and when he isn’t working, he drinks. Felix’s mother, Sakina, who everyone calls Mama Sakina, looks after Belenge and his siblings. She makes them fufu in the afternoon and spends the evening braiding Belenge’s sister’s hair. In an environment where everything remains new, Mama Sakina offers Belenge some sense of stability.

  After greeting his friends, Belenge takes a seat in the library. A student explains, in Swahili, that he needs to wait for his schedule. Belenge settles in. He doesn’t mind waiting. He’s used to it. In Nyarugusu, the average family remains in the camp for seventeen years before they are resettled somewhere new. Waiting is part of life.

  Shahina

  Every morning on her way to Sullivan High School, Shahina passes reminders of the life she narrowly escaped. That’s why she counts down the days until she turns eighteen. She still has 408 days to go, but that’s close enough to keep the Burmese sophomore in good spirits.

  Though the way to school conjures bitter memories, Shahina, a refugee from Myanmar, is always relieved to be out of the house. Tensions are high at home—Shahina and her mother rarely speak, and when they do, Zakiah curses her daughter’s obstinacy—and school offers distraction. Inside Sullivan, Shahina walks past quotes painted next to each classroom. Maya Lin’s “The American Dream is being able to follow your calling” and one from Dr. Seuss: “Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!” The school is a sea of navy blue lockers with the bright yellow S, Sullivan’s insignia, painted above them. Below, the drab black-and-brown-checkered floors seem to dampen the optimism advertised on the walls.

  The deteriorating first-floor girls’ bathroom, marked by large concrete slabs and rusting water pipes, stands among Shahina’s most cherished spaces inside Sullivan. It’s there, in the fetid room, that the sixteen-year-old will station herself near the mirror and take dozens of hijab-less selfies. She’ll spend hours each day posting photos enhanced by kitten-ear filters to Snapchat, uploading close-up doe-eyed portraits to Instagram, and keeping up with ongoing flirtations with a slew of Burmese boys on Facebook Messenger. Recently she’s been talking to a Rohingya boy in Boston who claims he carries a gun and runs with a crew called the Asian Boyz Gang. His profile picture boasts the group’s logo: their name with a lightning bolt for a z.

  Though she’s never been particularly interested in school, Shahina looks forward to starting her sophomore year at Sullivan. At school, she can watch YouTube tutorials on sunset makeup looks and catch up on social media gossip. She can make plans to watch scary movies and hitch a ride to the mall. She can drink Diet Coke and eat soggy pizza. Ever since Shahina, who cloaks her thin frame with loose clothing, began fighting with her mother, the girl refuses to eat at home. Most days, the meals provided at school are the only ones she eats. At Sullivan, Shahina can be a kid. Six months ago, the teenager thought she’d never get that chance again.

  Chad Adams

  Chad leaves the auditorium at 8:10 a.m. He heads directly toward the school lobby. There, he passes a wall of notable Sullivan graduates—Borscht Belt comedian Shecky Greene, cinematographer Haskell Wexler, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, Pulitzer Prize–winner Ira Berkow, and an assortment of local luminaries. The images signal Sullivan’s roots in serving immigrant and first-generation children since it opened in 1929. For nearly a century, Sullivan has been an engine of education and integration for immigrants.

  The first editions of the yearbook, called The Navillus, or Sullivan spelled backward, are dotted with images of students like Rhoda Rothbaum, a brown-eyed young woman with glossy lips and a center part, and Robert Gluckman, a serious-looking young man who participated in both the business and economic clubs. Back then, Sullivan students would gather at Ashkenaz’s Deli on Morse Avenue, a joint known across town for its corned beef on rye. On the weekends, sophomore and junior boys would gather at Fratini’s, a bowling alley and pool hall for men only.

  Later, in the 1970s, the school population shifted as Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees began to resettle in the neighborhood. By the late 1980s Sullivan served a majority Black American population, which remained true for the next two decades. When Chad first walked through the doors of Sullivan in 2013, the school had been on probation for thirteen years running. It also had the highest number of in-school violent incidents on the north side of the city. He was the fourth principal in five years. Sullivan was a place that had suffered from troubled leadership and decades of divestment. That meant if it didn’t improve academically, and attract more students, the school could be shuttered for good.

  In his first year at Sullivan, Chad took note of another characteristic that made the school unique. He noticed that the student population included kids from all over the world. Though Chad had spent his career working in public schools, he’d never encountered such a diverse student body. One reason Sullivan boasted a global population, Chad would learn, was that Chicago’s five major refugee resettlement agencies, groups that work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to sponsor and support new American families once they reach the United States, were located on the North Side of the city. Resettlement agencies help connect new refugees to jobs, medical and financial support, food stamps, and schools. They also set up families in apartments and cover the first three months of rent after families arrive in the United States. In Chicago, that means that most refugee families are placed in apartments not far from East Rogers Park, an area that keeps them close to the agencies and makes Sullivan their neighborhood school.

  Chad saw an opportunity. He wanted Sullivan to serve not only families resettled in the neighborhood, but all the teenage refugees arriving in Chicago, too. He understood that finding a new mission for the school could turn Sullivan’s fate around. In his second year as principal, he decided to allocate extra funds to the school’s English language learner, or ELL, program, designed for refugee and immigrants who speak little or no English. Five years later, more than 70 percent of the students speak a second language, and over half of the students are either in, or have graduated from, an ELL program. There are close to forty languages spoken at Sullivan. And among students, Arabic is the third-most-spoken language after English and Spanish. One nickname for Sullivan: the Google Translate School. Some students need the app to talk to others.

  Passing through the lobby, Chad makes his way to the tower, the highest point in the school, which sits at the building’s center. He comes here to absorb the energy of the school. Chad believes in spirits—he burns sage at home when he feels the presence of a nasty one—and Sullivan is full of them, and not just those whose names hang on the walls. Standing at the top of the tower stairs, Chad leans into the bannister. He lets the commotion below rise to meet him. Over the last four years, Sullivan’s performance ranking has steadily risen. Today marks the start of Chad’s fifth year as principal at the Rogers Park high school, which means he has made it halfway through his ten-year plan to turn the once-troubled neighborhood school around. When Chad pitched the local school council, he promised that by 2023, Sullivan would be a school where he’d send his own son. Shaping Sullivan into a good school—in his first five years Sullivan has risen from Level 3, the lowest Chicago Public Schools ranking, to a 2-plus—has been the hardest work of Chad’s career. But Chad intends to turn Sullivan into a great neighborhood high school. That transformation will be his legacy. He holds the image in his mind and lets the thought propel him back down the stairs.

  Sarah Quintenz

  It’s not yet 11 a.m., and Sarah Quintenz has already sought stillness in her car three times today.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat of her midnight blue Toyota with the window rolled halfway down, Sarah holds her cigarette and releases a long exhale of smoke. On a whim this morning, Sarah decide
d to wear flared white jeans, a decision she’s now regretting. They get dirty easily, and she’s been rubbing a lot of elbows. As usual, Sarah is frustrated with the cell phone service inside the Sullivan building, but now sees all the messages that sat in purgatory arrive in a rapid-fire succession. She scans each message but waits to respond. Enjoying her smoke, Sarah soaks in the melancholy notes of the Dave Matthews Band song “Crash into Me,” which plays from her car stereo.

  After five years teaching in the English language learner program, Sarah has stepped into a new role: director of Sullivan’s recently created Newcomer Center, the first within Chicago Public Schools. The designation is especially for schools that offer robust, targeted programming for refugee and immigrant students and comes as a response to the steady rise of refugee students at Sullivan over the past two years. At the end of the 2016–17 school year, more than one hundred new refugees enrolled at Sullivan. It also means an additional $300,000 funding for ELL education, which helps cover seven new teachers and staff who all report to Sarah. Sullivan’s refugee and immigrant students are geographically, religiously, and culturally diverse. They stand among those caught in what’s been called the worst refugee crisis in history with more than fifty million people across the globe fleeing violence or other threats. Her students arrive from more than thirty countries and some have lived their whole prior lives in refugee camps. Nearly all have been subject to the world at its most hateful and violent. Students can sit in the hall and compare notes on the relatives they’ve seen killed in front of them. Most are traumatized. Many are highly resilient; some are less so. The Sullivan staff’s task is not only to teach them English, but to figure out ways to help this current crop of refugee students leave high school as a formidable new generation.

  _______

  But for now, Sarah just has to make it through the first day. She takes a final drag of her cigarette. She arrived at school already tired. It hasn’t been an easy year for the thirty-seven-year-old. In June, she finalized her divorce after a two-year separation. The process has left her with debt and deep wounds. Sarah is still waiting for her life to feel less painful.

  Back inside the school, Sarah, who is thin with an angled, cropped haircut and dark brown eyes, keeps pace. She only makes it a few feet before hearing her name shouted across the hall.

  “Ms. Q!” a round-faced sophomore in a hijab, a refugee from Myanmar, throws her arms around Sarah’s waist.

  “Hi, honey. How was your summer?” Sarah responds, though she doesn’t expect an entirely honest answer. After years of working with refugees, Sarah has learned that the truth doesn’t always emerge right away. Students juggle numerous challenges and often conceal home pressures. Among them, arranged marriages, a practice that hits Sarah especially hard. That’s one reason Sarah, who uses pitch-black humor to connect with students, ends every school week by offering the students the idiom: “Have a good weekend. Don’t get pregnant. Love you!”

  “Good. Boring,” the girl responds, her hands now hooked on her backpack straps.

  “Come say hi later,” says Sarah. “I’m in the library now.”

  Sarah’s new office, which she shares with three other staff, sits at the northern corner of the library. Before she heads to the small, claustrophobic room, Sarah scans the library for her new hires. Josh Zepeda speaks in Spanish with a freshman boy who looks on the verge of tears. He manages to get a laugh out of the boy, which seems nothing short of a small miracle. Danny Rizk, the frenetic twenty-three-year-old math and science tutor, translates for a Muslim family in a blend of the Egyptian Arabic he learned from his great-aunt and Syrian phrases he picked up during his time as one of Sullivan’s City Year fellows. The goal today is to register as many students as possible. Sarah has registered scores of new immigrant and refugee students at Sullivan. She speeds through the process faster than anyone else. Every few feet, she stops to give a quick, three-question assessment test: How are you? What country are you from? How old are you? In a matter of seconds, Sarah can determine enough information to temporarily place them in one of the school’s four introductory ELL tracks. She will later administer the formal placement test, but for now her goal is to get new students into the classroom as quickly as possible. After a few short rounds, she arrives at a boy slumped in the corner of the room.

  “Hi, how are you?” she asks. He mumbles a response, his eyes downcast at the floor. The boy’s plastic backpack protrudes from his back. Sarah stands her ground, unphased. Sarah prides herself on crafting pointed responses that cut through the fog, and surly teenagers are her specialty.

  “Hey, I need you to look at me when I talk to you,” she continues.

  The boy briefly makes eye contact before darting his gaze to the corner of the room. “There you go,” she says encouragingly. “Was that so hard?”

  He laughs. A couple more questions answered, and Sarah discovers the boy has lived in the United States for eight years. He doesn’t require ELL classes.

  “Sometimes they don’t speak English, and sometimes they’re just dumb teenagers,” Sarah grumbles. Within seconds, she’s on to the next.

  2

  OCTOBER 13

  Belenge

  As on most days early in the school year, Belenge starts Friday, October 13, at the glass bus shelter on the intersection of Birchwood Avenue and Clark Street. He waits for a few of the other Congolese refugee students to meet at the corner before the group makes its daily trek the 1.2 miles south to Sullivan.

  The street is both busy and deserted. The corner is bounded by largely empty parking lots, one for a generic strip mall with off-price clothing stores, a big athletic shoe shop, and a discount makeup store. Another lot is for a national bank. Beyond that is a string of rubble-strewn lots left empty by demolitions. The landscape is a familiar one in Chicago, a city where entire neighborhoods can go underserved and overlooked for decades on end. Chronic disenfranchisement propels rates of poverty, trauma, and crime, too.

  Belenge is uneasy. Idling there even for just a few minutes at seven in the morning, he feels unsafe after being confronted and intimidated by a group of boys just a week before. After a few minutes, Felix and Asani arrive. The two flank Belenge as they head for school. The walk to school takes thirty minutes and will go faster, he feels, with friends. The boys spend much of their time together, especially now that Belenge and his three younger siblings sleep next door at Felix’s family’s apartment most nights. During his first six months in Chicago, Belenge had been in charge of his younger siblings. His eldest brother had moved north to Wisconsin, where he had taken a job at a meatpacking facility outside of Green Bay. During those months, Belenge would pick up the three youngest from school and scrounge a dinner from whatever he found in the kitchen cabinets. Most of their food was donated by RefugeeOne or American co-sponsors.

  Belenge isn’t much of a cook. In Nyarugusu, his mother prepared their food. If he closes his eyes, Belenge can still smell the steamy aroma of her fufu. But she had died in 2014, and it was after that, that the role of parent fell to him, instead of to his father, Tobias. Although Tobias had lost other loved ones, his wife’s death seemed to break him. Tobias would not have found the strength to move his family through the camps and to America if Belenge had not taken charge in Chicago, and if he didn’t have the help of Felix’s mother, his family would have broken into more pieces, too.

  Once a small group gathers, Belenge and the others make their way south on Clark Street. An arterial street, Clark cuts directly through the Rogers Park neighborhood. The traffic moves much faster on Clark than on the neighboring residential streets, but at 7 a.m., the street has barely come to life. The multitude of taquerias, the mechanics’ garages, and storefront law offices are still quiet. Only the Mexican panaderias, the aromas of fresh chamuco and concha wafting from them, have their doors open to passersby. Though Belenge and his crew could have ridden the Clark Street bus to Sullivan, it costs 75¢ per ride with discount cards provided by the school. The
cumulative cost proves prohibitively expensive. Plus, Belenge prefers the fresh air. It’s a welcome contrast to sitting inside stuffy, fluorescent classrooms where the temperature fluctuates between boiling hot and ice cold.

  A few blocks from Sullivan, he passes the McDonald’s on the west side of Clark Street. There’s always a long line of cars waiting in the drive-through. Belenge can still recall the first time he stepped inside a McDonald’s. Standing in front of the cashier, neck craned upward, Belenge froze. Before coming to Chicago, Belenge knew little about America and the information he did possess stemmed mostly from movies and music. As a result, Belenge’s impression of American culture was formed by songs like 50 Cent’s single “In da Club” and testosterone-fueled movies like Rambo and Commando. They left him with a narrow, often problematic, understanding of his new country, and none of the action movies included a wall of monitors filled with a tiled pattern of what looked like the same image: a hamburger and fries. Belenge ate his first-ever hamburger at the cafeteria at Senn High School, but it was presented to him without choice. How was he supposed to know the difference between the array of images at the restaurant? Even now, despite some practice, Belenge cannot decipher the chain’s offerings. If asked, he keeps his order simple and to the point: hamburger.