by Elly Fishman
Recently, Luana has mentioned her dream of opening a restaurant in Guatemala City. That worries Alejandro. He wants his mother to have aspirations but starting a business there would almost surely require paying a fee to members of MS-13, whose dominance in Alejandro’s home neighborhood has only grown. The group now commands large swaths of the city, using its numbers and ruthlessness to tighten its hold on businesses and residents. If Alejandro’s mother opened a restaurant, they would demand extortion payments. And even if she paid them, it wouldn’t guarantee his mother’s safety. The cost of opening a restaurant in Guatemala, Alejandro told his mother, is too high. The cost of remaining in Guatemala, he thinks, is also too high.
But Alejandro still aches for his home. He keeps a stack of printed photos in his dresser. They are images from Guatemala. An early birthday party; a soccer game. One of his favorites depicts ten-year-old Alejandro looking up at the camera. He’s shirtless and his hair is wet. He looks directly at the lens, mean-mugging the cameraman. He was skinny and small back then and he used to gel his black hair up and into a spiky triangle that protruded from the edge of his forehead. The photo was taken on a hot afternoon when Alejandro and his friends hiked to a river and spent the day swimming and lounging on its muddy banks. In Guatemala, Alejandro was rarely without his friends. Beginning at age five, he attached himself to a group of older boys who were like surrogate brothers. In a city where public trust in police and government was tenuous at best, Alejandro’s friends not only offered a social network, but safety, too. The group always traveled as a pack. They’d play pickup soccer games in the neighborhood streets and competed in online FIFA games, too. The group would ride their bikes around the city, stopping for hilachas, stewed shredded beef served on the streets in giant vats, or beans and macaroni salad dished out in small Styrofoam containers.
The images transport Alejandro to sunny days in Guatemala, but they also remind him of how long ago they were. Those sun-drenched images are not the Guatemala he left behind. In the months before he fled, Alejandro watched as friends turned on one another. It grew increasingly hard to distinguish between those he could trust, and those who would use his trust to lure and pressure him into MS-13. And those who remained outside the gang didn’t last long.
In his first couple years in the United States, Alejandro dreaded hearing from his mother. She had become a reporter of tragedy, and Alejandro feared that each message would bring news of another death.
Everything here is bad, Luana told Alejandro the first time he called her from the United States.
Why? Alejandro asked.
One of your friends got shot.
Who?
Puerco. They shot him four times in the abdomen. He’d been drinking and he started running. But he was losing blood quickly. Someone saw that he was bleeding and called an ambulance.
Puerco survived, but many of Alejandro’s friends did not. Bad news kept coming. In one particularly brutal incident, Luana relayed that one of his friends had been dismembered into forty different parts. The police found pieces of his corpse when a neighbor found his dog digging up a partially decomposed hand.
By 2015, Luana had reported deaths of nearly ten of Alejandro’s friends. Across Guatemala, the number of murders ticked upward. Some months, more than five hundred murders were recorded and year-end reports totaled nearly six thousand. Alejandro started to have recurring nightmares. He couldn’t free himself from the terror even in his sleep. The distance didn’t make Alejandro feel safe. It left him feeling hopeless. He thought to himself: I don’t have any more friends. In Guatemala or in America. I have no friends in Chicago and everyone at home is dying. I don’t want to live no more.
One morning before school, Alejandro opened the bathroom cabinet and found a bottle of NyQuil. He took as many pills as he could fit in his mouth. When he arrived at Sullivan, his girlfriend met him by the door. He saw two of her. He saw two of everything. Alejandro’s girlfriend rushed him to the school clinic where the nurse called an ambulance. He spent a week in the hospital and several more in intensive therapy. His therapist gave him techniques to deal with the stress of bad news. One included a stress ball, which the therapist told Alejandro to squeeze when he felt engulfed by anger or despair. He still has the dense blue ball. He stores it on his dresser, just a few inches above his stack of photos.
Alejandro pulls himself off the futon bed and returns to his text conversation with Luana. She still hasn’t written to him. His eyes settle on the final messages in their last exchange. Luana had signed off with familiar words of encouragement, the same ones she told Alejandro the day he fled to the United States: God takes care of those who are good. You are good.
Sarah Quintenz
Abdul Karim, a Syrian senior, storms into the ELL office. He sits down next to Danny Rizk, who has spent the last several minutes eyeing a pair of the Air Jordan 1 shoes on a streetwear resale site. He’s a sneakerhead.
“I’m so sick of this,” Abdul Karim says, agitated. “Why do some people always think Arab boys are bad? I’m not bad. They don’t know me.”
“Honestly?” Danny says looking up from his phone. “It’s not worth your energy to dwell on things people say.”
“But some people, they hate Arab students,” Abdul Karim continues. “Why they hate us? That’s called discrimination.”
“Look, you are going to face discrimination the rest of your life in America,” Danny continues. “It’s gonna suck.”
“But when I came to America they told me, ‘Welcome to free country.’”
“Let me give you a new welcome,” Danny says, now turning toward Abdul Karim. “Welcome to a lie.”
Across the table, Sarah is immersed in another world. She must address the grim news delivered to her by Matt Fasana earlier in the week. The additional Chicago Public Schools funding, which remains dependent on new refugee students enrolling at Sullivan, is in danger of being eliminated. While Sullivan received a record number of new refugee students in 2017, President Trump has since introduced new, severe restrictions on refugee resettlements in the United States. The measures have already cut the number so severely that Sullivan has enrolled just one-fifth as many refugee students as it did in recent years. Sarah must now make the case to OLCE, the department that doles out the federal funds allocated for schools who serve foreign-born students, that Sullivan deserves a second lump sum to keep its burgeoning program alive.
Losing the OLCE funding would be devastating. If the department does not renew the funds, Sarah will likely have to lay off several of the staff she just hired, a few of whom left well-paying jobs because they believed in Sullivan’s mission to serve refugee students. It would likely mean losing Danny, who fields queries and concerns like Abdul Karim’s on a daily basis. Losing funds to staff Danny alone could have a withering effect on Sullivan’s ELL program.
For Sarah, losing the funding means rolling back years of work. Ever since Chad put Sarah in charge of the ELL program in 2013, Sarah, along with Matt Fasana, has dug in to reshape it. After she introduced the “cohort” model, a classroom structure where students learn in pods determined by their mastery of English, Sarah and Matt also made sure to get word out to the five major resettlement agencies and establish better communication with them. The two spent hours in meetings, pushing the message that Sullivan High School would be the Chicago high school for refugee students.
But Sarah’s case to OLCE must be a pragmatic one. The head of the department has asked her to prepare a one-page report that he can review at the next meeting. Sarah has enlisted Annmarie Handley, who has experience in marketing and grant writing, to help make a case for the program. She’ll then present the language to Matt who may well end up presenting the flyer to OLCE. Bureaucracy.
Annmarie sits just inches away from Sarah at the office table. Both women have their laptops open.
“I feel like when we’re talking about our mission, we should focus on the English language program, because that’s what we
’re giving the kids,” says Annmarie, who points to some initial language she’s written for the presentation. “It’s under the umbrella of this Newcomer Center that is part of Sullivan High School.”
Sarah nods and adds an mm-hmm, in agreement.
“So, I think we should start with what we have done with that money,” Annmarie continues. “You said we got two years’ worth of money. We need to tell them we went from this to this. And how that’s different from other schools. Why do we deserve that money more than other programs?”
Annmarie throws out an idea. She and Sarah could design the page with a graphic that mimics the design of drugstore medicine bottles. One side of the graphic, she explains, should show what Sullivan has accomplished, while the other shows other CPS high schools such as Mather and Senn. “It should make it really easy to look at and see that we have more refugee and immigrant students than them.”
Sullivan, for one, doesn’t just boast more refugee students. Mather has just two dedicated ELL teachers and Senn has gone years with none at all. New student enrollment at both schools can prove long and arduous, and several refugee students have complained that administrative staff pay little to no attention to their particular needs.
Annmarie then turns to the working mission statement of their program. We are the English Language Program for Sullivan High School Newcomer Center. The language gives Sarah pause.
“See, here’s where I get caught up. A Newcomer Center, I’ve never liked that name,” she says. The ELL program rebrand remains a work in progress.
“I don’t like it either,” Annmarie adds.
“Well, let’s get rid of it. No more Newcomer Center. This is the International Academy at Sullivan High School.”
Over the years, Sarah has collected and mastered a set of facts about the ELL program, or International Academy. If asked, she can provide data points on the spot: thirty-five countries, thirty-eight languages, and more than three hundred students who have participated in ELL classes. Numbers like these can fit easily on a one-page document and, hopefully, compel attention. But Sarah keeps a second set of data in her head, too. One less easily measured by standard metrics. It includes the time when Sarah left a laundry basket out and offered to wash students’ uniforms. Many of them cannot afford to wash their clothes at the neighborhood laundromat. There is the period of time she found herself at the DMV almost once each week in order to help a group of Syrian students apply for driver’s permits, and she needed to help them navigate Illinois’s vetting process, which took longer for Syrian refugees than for others. And there are the hours she’s spent on her students’ informal Americanization, such as teaching them to trick-or-treat for their first Halloweens. One year, she had her students organize themselves in a single-file line outside her classroom door, and one by one they approached Sarah and said, “Trick or treat,” before Sarah handed them a piece of candy.
Sarah has learned that seemingly simple things, like how to use an apartment doorbell, must be learned anew. She taught this particular lesson after she’d heard students had been throwing rocks at their neighbors’ windows. These important data points are hard to quantify. She can no longer keep count of times she’s sat down with students to show them how to pay bills. Or when, after discovering her students dating for the first time, she gives them impromptu sex education lessons.
“Don’t let your boyfriend make you feel bad for telling him to wear a condom,” she’ll tell the girls. “And if you’re too embarrassed to openly discuss safe sex, then you’re not ready to have sex.”
Because much of Sarah’s goal for the students is to make them feel safe and happy, the numbers that ultimately matter are often the bad things that didn’t happen, and the ones beyond a tally.
Also incalculable are the ways Sarah’s students have left an indelible mark on her. Like when a few days before Sarah’s thirty-seventh birthday, her students organized a surprise party for her. Just before the class period was supposed to begin, Sarah was called to the music room at the opposite end of the hall. With Sarah out of the room, her students scurried to decorate.
“Everyone put your food on the desks,” a senior girl instructed. Soon, the room was transformed into an international feast. Bowls of hummus, trays of chicken curry and peanut noodles, fufu, pico de gallo, and a spread of Middle Eastern salads topped a collection of desks pushed to the middle of the room. Several students brought liter bottles of Diet Coke and piled them in a corner. Another provided a store-bought cake with “Happy Birthday Ms. Q” written in frosting across the top. Once the food was out, the same senior told everyone to write “Happy Birthday” in their native languages on the whiteboard.
Joyeux anniversaire.
Eid milad saeid.
Heri ya sikukuu ya kuzaliwa.
Eleven different languages filled the board. The group then huddled at the back of the room and dimmed the lights. They each held a corner of a hand-drawn banner that read “Happy Birthday Ms. Q!” in multicolored letters. When Sarah entered the room, the group cheered. The senior stage manager cued up a playlist of Sarah’s favorite songs including Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself,” a tune she’d played for the students dozens of times. Midway through the party, a group of girls handed Sarah a thick book made from construction paper and held together by string. Sarah grasped it carefully with both hands. The title: “Ms. Q Travels the World.” Each student had drawn Sarah a picture. They were images and descriptions of the students’ home countries. She would drink jasmine tea, one page read with an image of a small streetscape from Homs, Syria.
She would see giraffes and zebras, read another written by a Kenyan student who accompanied the words with pictures of the animals.
The book brought Sarah to tears. Its pages were not just an imagined travelogue, but a document of what was lost to violence and war in the students’ communities, a time capsule of their crumbled worlds.
The students could pull Sarah up when she was low. A year before Sarah’s surprise party, her students collected around her as her own world fell apart. Sarah had just separated from her then-husband and the decision to break apart her family left her shattered. She took a leave of absence from Sullivan. She needed to spend time with her son, then just five, and mend from the heartbreak. The decision was not an easy one for Sarah. But she knew if she couldn’t show up as the best version of herself, it was better to step away. Midway through her leave of absence, a colleague reported that Sarah’s students wanted an update on her well-being. Sarah agreed to visit them. When she arrived at her classroom, her students swarmed her. Sarah asked everyone to sit in a circle on the floor. She sat down with them and held up a piece of paper.
“You know when a man and woman love each other, they get married, right?” Sarah said as she drew stick figures of a woman and man holding hands inside a circle.
Her students nodded. “Well, sometimes, that love changes and in America, men and women go through something called divorce.” Sarah paused to draw an “X” through the circle. “A divorce means you’re no longer married.”
The students remained silent. For many, dissolution of marriage came only in death, or when a husband repudiates his wife. The notion that a man and woman would together decide to end a marriage was new.
“I need time to heal myself,” Sarah continued. “And I need time to heal my family.”
“Can we pray for you?” one student asked without raising his hand.
“Yes, you can pray for me,” Sarah said. “Everyone. Hugs.”
Sarah pulled herself up from the floor. As she did, her students formed a line in front of her. One by one, they hugged her. Some only let go when classmates peeled them off. Some she knew to fist-bump while others gave brief hugs, their shoulders barely touching Sarah’s. As the line shortened, a Somali sophomore made her way to the front. Standing at barely five feet, she held her hands up and hovered them an inch away from Sarah’s temples. Closing her eyes, she whispered a prayer in Somali. When she finished
, she opened her eyes and looked directly at Sarah.
“You will heal,” she said in English. “God will heal you.”
_______
The final layout of Sarah and Annmarie’s flyer for OLCE spreads across two pages. The first page features a panel with Sullivan’s yellow S insignia and a world map beneath it. The second highlights the ELL program’s mission, a goal described in educational jargon that points toward making students good citizens. Sarah understands that this version will most effectively deliver her message up the CPS ladder. If she had her way, however, the mission might read: To help students feel like they are a part of this country; that America is their country. To share the motto: If we’re not laughing, we’re crying. And to help them feel secure and content and teach them to always wear a condom.
Mariah
Mariah keeps her eyes on a group of Syrian and Afghani refugee boys in the corner of the room. She doesn’t want them to approach her and her pointed glare makes her aim clear. Mariah is not wearing her uniform today. Not disobedience this time—she says she put those days behind her—but because Chad recently introduced dress-down Fridays at Sullivan. No uniforms required. Outside, the remaining mounds of snow have turned to a grayish slush. The sun has emerged from a long winter hibernation, casting a yellow glow on the otherwise gloomy streetscape. Inside Sullivan, however, spring fully blooms. The halls are bouncing. Girls in skinny white jeans paired with cropped floral tops mingle with others in faded pants with pre-torn cuts across the knees. Sneakers skid across the floors, emitting high-pitched squeaks that echo throughout the halls. Boys in tapered sweatpants and fitted T-shirts tucked beneath hoodie sweatshirts nod to one another in recognition. The drab down jackets have given way to brighter ones. There’s an audible brightness in students’ voices and a slight bounce in their gait. The winter lull has begun to lift.