Refugee High

by Elly Fishman

  At first, Sarah treads lightly. She asks Shahina if she’s eaten and if she’d care to share her lunch. The Sullivan cafeteria serves three meals a day, but the kitchen is not halal, so some Muslim refugee students skip all three. Not just during Ramadan, but all year. Most don’t bring their own lunches, either. Shahina smiles and shakes her head. Sarah pushes forward. She asks Shahina why she’s been ditching school.

  Shahina explains that she needs a job to pay back the man she was supposed to marry last year. Sarah’s heart sinks, but she doesn’t show it. Almost exactly one year ago, Shahina tells Sarah, her mother and stepfather sent her to Atlanta, Georgia, to marry a man named Hamid, almost ten years her senior. When Shahina made it clear she had no intention of marrying him, the wedding was called off. Now, she explains, she has to help pay back the $2,000 Hamid’s family paid her mother as an engagement gift.

  Sarah takes a deep breath. These stories never get easier to stomach. They are in direct contrast to everything Sarah stands for. And she knows Shahina’s minute-long version leaves out a lot, but even Sarah could not have predicted the harrowing forced journey that saddled now seventeen-year-old Shahina with a debt so huge it dragged her out of school.

  _______

  Shahina had just turned sixteen when her mother first brought Hamid, another Burmese refugee, to their family’s apartment. Shahina’s mother, Zakiah, told her Hamid was twenty-two, though he was really twenty-seven. A slight small man, Hamid wore a diamond stud, which Shahina figured was fake, and kept his glistening hair gelled back. Shahina, who sleeps on the couch of her family’s three-room apartment, had cleared her duffle bags of clothes and dirty towels from the room and sat quietly as two of her three younger siblings ran around the room.

  By refugee standards, Hamid had money. His family owned their own house and managed a Pakistani restaurant in Atlanta. Zakiah believed Hamid could take care of Shahina. She told her daughter she’d never want for anything with Hamid. Zakiah, who grew up in a wealthy family in Myanmar, knew how brutally fast bad luck can reverse one’s station and the shock and pain of the poverty that can follow. Hamid wouldn’t be perfect insurance, she told Shahina, but he was good for her and the family.

  Hamid kept his distance from Shahina, only gazing at her from across the room.

  “He is too short, and his skin was bad,” Shahina later told her mother. “I cannot marry him.”

  Zakiah implored her daughter to reconsider. She said she was sick, possibly terminally, and she wanted to ensure that Shahina would be cared for if she died. Shahina suspected her mother was lying. She often feels her mother manipulates the facts. Shahina does, too, a pattern that both Sarah and Josh have noticed in the girl. Josh recognizes the behavior as one often seen in trauma victims. They are often skillful liars; the habit can help victims cope with PTSD. He’s seen how it plays out across generations among the refugee families connected to the school. Then again, refugee or not, teens do sometimes mislead adults, and the teachers know that, too.

  Zakiah’s telling Shahina that she suffered a deadly illness might have been a lie, but the tactic worked. Shahina agreed to the engagement, if Hamid could wait until she finished high school to marry her. That would make it nearly a four-year engagement.

  A week later, on Friday night after prayers, Zakiah hosted a celebratory henna night. Women and a few of Shahina’s friends spent the night singing, eating, and painting intricate henna patterns on the newly betrothed girl’s right hand and arm. When it’s just women and girls, they can doff their hijabs and dote on each other’s hair, too. Zakiah gave Shahina a ruby red dress with silver thread stitched across the collar and down the center. The dress, which draped far below Shahina’s ankles, was paired with a silver headpiece and chiffon veil. Once Shahina was zipped in, Zakiah started on her daughter’s makeup. She glued dense, long fake eyelashes to her lids and spread a thick layer of foundation across her face, patting it into her skin. Zakiah then brushed on two colors of blush and painted her lips with bright red lipstick. She pinned Shahina’s hair into a beehive and with nearly half a can of hairspray made it feel like rigid wool.

  Shahina barely moved from the couch the entire night. While her friends and family danced around her, singing along to their favorite pop songs, the girl wept, smearing the black mascara, foundation, and blush across her face. Her friends laughed. Looking at the pictures later, they told Shahina she looked like a “sad-ass monkey.”

  A couple weeks later, Hamid came to Chicago to take Shahina to Atlanta for a few days. It was Shahina’s spring break, and she was supposed to just go for a visit. Her mother said she would trail Shahina and Hamid in her own car. But Zakiah never left Chicago. Only Shahina and Hamid would make the trip.

  Hamid is Kaman, a member of a small Muslim minority centered in northern Myanmar. He spent most of the ride south speaking over the phone in a dialect that Shahina could not understand. When they arrived in Atlanta, Hamid parked and then immediately ushered Shahina to a small room in the basement of the house. She asked for the WiFi password and plopped herself on the bed. Out the small basement window she saw a cow roaming the large backyard. She turned to Facebook. After a few minutes, Halima, a friend from Myanmar who now lived in Atlanta with her parents, messaged her.

  Congratulations on your wedding! So excited for Friday!

  Girl, what are you talking about? Shahina wrote back. I’m just here visiting, I’m not getting married.

  Halima sent her a picture of the wedding invitation. It came in the mail last week, she wrote. And they already bought the cow to butcher for the wedding.

  Shahina sat in stunned silence. She started to cry. She had been conned into her own wedding. This wasn’t just trickery, she thought. This was kidnapping.

  Shahina wondered if this was punishment for being her father’s daughter. When she was not yet two and Zakiah just twenty-seven, her father left them. Shahina barely remembers him. One constant, though incomplete reminder comes from her mother. Whenever Shahina pushes back against Zakiah, out pour her mother’s curses against his name. Shahina imagines her stubbornness comes from her father. Among Burmese Muslims, women left by their husbands are counted as divorcées, and once her husband left, Zakiah was a pariah to marriageable men in her class. Used goods, bad luck, expensive to keep. These were all labels Zakiah wanted Shahina to avoid.

  Locked in the basement, Shahina needed to come up with a plan—and quickly. The next day, Wednesday, two days before the planned wedding, she told Hamid she wanted to go home. She explained that she was lonely and she missed her mother. She did not reveal she knew about the wedding. Hamid told her they would take her back to Chicago on Sunday, at the end of her spring break. “Just wait,” he said.

  Shahina stayed in her room, staring up at the ceiling from her futon bed. Her thoughts spiraled as she imagined one hellish future after another with the man who had bought her, stole her, and now locked her up. If she didn’t find a way to escape Hamid’s house, she’d be stuck here, cooking and cleaning for his entire family. Shahina thought of her classmate, an Iraqi girl who, when she got married, promised she would still finish high school. She said nothing would change. A few months later, the girl was pregnant and no longer attending school.

  The looming possibility that Shahina would be confined to a similar life made her want to die. How was this life that her mother had forced upon her going to be any better than the one they fled in Myanmar? Shahina’s life had been good there. Now, her mother intended to marry her off to a man who, though a refugee himself, was willing to humiliate, torment, and bully her. She was terrified. A life with this kind of man, Shahina thought, was not a life worth living. She began to consider the different ways she could kill herself. She could drink the contents of Hamid’s medicine cabinet. She could bury her face in the pillow until she suffocated. If she could sneak past Hamid, his parents, and the growing number of cousins who had begun showing up, she could get a knife from the kitchen and slit her wrists. Shahina kept playing t
hose images in her mind. In the end, she stayed put on the bed and waited.

  Later that afternoon, Halima and her older brother came by to check in on Shahina. But before they could greet her, Hamid turned them away at the door. “Just leave her alone,” Shahina heard him say from the next room. “Don’t bother her.”

  Furious, Shahina waited until Hamid’s parents came home. As soon as she heard their footsteps, she shouted, “I’m not going to marry your son! You cannot make me. Take me back to Chicago. If you don’t, I’m calling the police.”

  “We’re not taking you back,” Hamid’s mother retorted. “You agreed to marry our son.”

  Shahina, who often fought with her mother at home, knew what was coming next. Hamid would turn off the WiFi. Without internet, Shahina, who did not have a SIM card for her phone, would not be able to communicate with Halima—or anyone. Typing as fast as she could, Shahina sent a message to Halima, whose family was both wealthier and more permissive than Shahina’s.

  I need a SIM card, she wrote. Come to my bedroom window later tonight. I will have money.

  Just past 4 a.m., Shahina heard a soft tapping on her window. It was Halima. She had the SIM card for her phone.

  “Take this,” Halima said. “Text me. I’m going to help you get out of here.”

  The two spent the rest of the night hatching a plan over text messages. Halima and her brother would come at breakfast time tomorrow and drive Shahina back to Chicago.

  When Hamid came to her that morning, Shahina told him she was going home.

  “You cannot leave,” he repeated. “You stayed at my house. Everyone is going to think you’re not a virgin. If you leave, everyone will think you’re a whore.”

  “I don’t give a damn what people think,” Shahina said. “Let me leave.”

  Hamid tried to block the door.

  Shahina ran to the kitchen and took a steak knife from the sink. She rolled up her left sleeve and started cutting small incisions on her wrist and inner arm. As she cut, she bellowed: “I’m going to kill myself in this kitchen if you do not let me go.” This alarmed Hamid and his parents. He told Shahina she could go. “You owe us $2,000,” he said.

  Shahina ran out the door and called Halima. “Come get me now,” she sobbed.

  It took eleven hours to drive back to Chicago. In that time span, Hamid sent Shahina three dick pictures. The pictures disturbed Shahina, but they were certainly proof that she was right: he would not have been a good husband. When Shahina got home, her mother met her with disgust.

  “You cannot come back here,” Zakiah asserted. “If you come in here, I will not speak to you. You disgraced me.”

  “Mama, if you don’t let me in, I’m calling the police,” Shahina responded. She did not wait for an answer and pushed her way through the door. She’d learned about the police from American movies and overhearing Sarah tell another student to do precisely the same thing if they found themselves in danger.

  While Shahina’s fight impresses Sarah, the girl’s story also leaves her head spinning. In her years of teaching inside Chicago Public Schools, she has seen all kinds of kids come in battered and bruised, others who have gone without food for days at a time, and countless students who have lost friends and family to violence. But, in Sarah’s eyes, nothing orphans a teenage student from the hopes of a bright future in quite the same way as a forced marriage. Growing up, Sarah’s stepfather, a career military man and primary father figure to Sarah, always told her that getting an education was the most important thing a person could do. He told her that education was the one thing no one can torture out of you; education is the ticket to a good life. But for these girls—Sarah knows eight and presumes there are more—marriage marks the end of their schooling. Child brides are walled off to the world, and the promise of their future is robbed from them. The project of Sullivan, of Sarah and her colleagues, stands against that. Sarah has seen it happen before and it sickens her: these girls get married and disappear from Sullivan forever.

  Sarah is still haunted by one student who slipped away. Habiba, a Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, was fifteen years old when Sarah first started to notice a change in her. When Habiba started the school year, she had been one of Sarah’s bubbliest and most dedicated students. She spent most of her lunch periods with Sarah and would volunteer to stay late after school to organize papers, pass out flyers, or help with any task that Sarah set her to. That winter, when Sarah collected old winter jackets from her own family and friends to give to Sullivan’s refugee students, she gave Habiba first pick—she took a North Face insulated coat. But by January, Habiba’s demeanor began to sour. She visited Sarah less often and went days absent from school. When Sarah did pass her in the hall, Sarah would make sure to say hi and ask Habiba how she was doing. Habiba always responded with the same curt answer:

  “Good, Miss. Thank you.”

  By February, Habiba rarely showed up. Sarah decided to confront the girl. When she asked Habiba to explain why her grades and attendance were slipping, the freshman threw her arms around Sarah and held on desperately. Without letting go, she told Sarah that her parents were forcing her to get married. Habiba’s attendance and grades suddenly paled in significance for Sarah. She spent her entire car ride home in tears, and the next day at school, Sarah asked if she could visit Habiba’s parents at home.

  When Sarah arrived at Habiba’s apartment the following Saturday, Habiba’s mother and siblings sat around their kitchen table, but Habiba was gone. They graciously offered Sarah curried chicken, rice, and spiced potatoes. Habiba’s mother was kind and gentle. When Sarah asked her directly about whether Habiba was being forced into marriage, the mother denied the allegation. A social worker from the Department of Child and Family Services who later visited Habiba’s mother got the same answer: there was no marriage, the mother said, Habiba was mistaken. After Sarah’s home visit, Habiba showed up at school only a few more times before the end of the school year. Sarah heard from the girl’s friends that Habiba’s wedding had been set for June. Just a few days before the end of the year, a few girls brought a picture from Habiba’s henna night. She looked miserable.

  The summer passed before Sarah heard any more news of Habiba. The next time Sarah saw Habiba, the girl was pregnant. She gave Sarah the news, adding also that her sixteenth birthday was just around the corner.

  In the eyes of the law, it’s not obvious that an arranged marriage constitutes kidnapping, or trafficking. Within CPS, awareness of the practice of parents marrying off their daughters, some of whom are as young as fourteen, is new. Teachers don’t even know how to spot it or, more importantly, how to anticipate it. One problem is that there is no paper trail. There are no marriage licenses or certificates. These are religious marriages; they are not recorded at the Cook County Clerk’s Office. The girls don’t write anyone to say they’ve changed their names or addresses. At Sullivan, the closest document to an official record is a student’s slip in attendance. No matter how many levels of ELL these girls pass, or Dua Lipa songs they learn, no matter how much the Sullivan staff tries to prepare them for the American mainstream, their parents can derail them at any moment.

  The practice of matching up child brides happens to grow out of the deepest hopes and fears of parents who are themselves victims and witnesses to the world’s worst horrors. It’s a practice they may have brought with them from home, carrying with it one of the few remaining links to the lives that were ripped away from them, often in the most brutal ways that humans suffer. They hadn’t intended to flee their countries and come to America. They didn’t choose Chicago, or Sullivan. It can, and does, terrify them, and, in their traditions, they find solace and an autonomy that is unavailable to them in most areas of their new lives. But, for Sarah, it’s the job of Sullivan to give her refugee students what she believes is the best shot at the best life in their new home. And child brides get the opposite of that.

  The Illinois Department of Education mandates that all public-school teache
rs report abuse. Reporting it to the Department of Child and Family Services would begin a chain of events that can create a more stable situation for students, but also has the potential to cause families irreversible harm. If she were to report Shahina’s story, a caseworker would visit Shahina’s apartment within twenty-four hours of Sarah’s call. The caseworker would question her mother, stepfather, and neighbors—anyone who interacts with the girl on a regular basis. They would assess her living situation, which Sarah knows, like those of most refugees new to the country, counts as extreme poverty. She would also need to call World Relief, the refugee resettlement agency that has supported Shahina’s family since they landed in Chicago in 2016. The agency would play the role of interpreter, translating the DCFS agent’s questions into Burmese. They’d report the family’s answers back to the social worker. If the agency concludes that a child is unsafe in their home, it may immediately place the child with relatives or in the foster care system.

  So much gets lost in translation. And for refugee families who have often been harassed, perhaps even tortured, by men in uniforms and coercive officials on their way to the United States, bringing in DCFS, or any kind of formal investigation, under the cloud of abuse can be cruel and damaging. Further, Sarah has seen families deceive investigators to prevent further interference into their home life. A call to DCFS is unlikely to offer Shahina relief.

  In Shahina’s case, the girl’s trauma unfolded more than a year ago, and while Shahina’s story is horrific, she is now back home with her mother and in no immediate danger. Should that change, and Sarah knows it well could, Sarah, as a mandated reporter, will be required to report the girl’s situation to DCFS.

  Sometimes Sarah imagines calling her brother, a contractor in Chicago. Together, they would draw up a blueprint for a renovation that would transform her single-family home into three separate apartments—one on each floor of the house—all equipped with their own bathrooms, kitchens, and sets of bedrooms. Next, she would buy the fastest internet she could afford and put range extenders on every floor. She would hit every thrift store in town—Goodwill, Salvation Army, Village Discount—and buy up beds, blankets, and pillows. Sleeping bags, too. She’d then tell girls about to be married off to visit her office at school one by one, where she would lay out the details of her plan. She’d instruct them to pack a bag and tell their parents they’d been picked for a special Sullivan exchange program for promising students. Sarah figures she could cram as many as twenty girls into her house. She would keep them in school and help them find jobs. She’d encourage them to date and teach them about safe sex. She would tell every single one of them that they deserve a future they want. She’d drill into them that they don’t get forced into marriage before they even know how to drive. Or are even old enough to drive.