We thought finding the perfect home for our family would be an easy task, but it didn’t take long for us to realize that the search for the perfect house is a search that never seems to end. We spent hours upon countless hours driving around the city, looking at different houses, scheduling appointments with realtors, and researching and learning about the different neighborhoods. What a task! After a few months of this non-stop searching, we found a really nice place in our price range which was nearby, in West Saint Paul.
The house seemed to have everything we wanted: it was affordable, had the right number of bedrooms, and was located in a relatively nice, safe neighborhood. We were in love. As a family we decided it was the one for us. My mother swiftly put in an offer to the realtor as the rest of us mentally and emotionally prepared ourselves for moving out of our apartment and into our dream home.
It was at this point that I was reminded how God speaks to us in mysterious (and sometimes frustrating) ways. With our family, God spoke to us by cancelling our plans for this so-called dream home. After putting in the offer on the home we found out, quite by accident, that the current owners were in the middle of a modification: they had ripped out the straight staircase and had installed a winding (and ugly) metal staircase in its place. Because we hadn’t been notified of the planned changes at the time it was being shown to us or at the time my mother put in an offer, the realtor and the sellers were in breach of contract. When my mother confronted the lady realtor and told her she wanted out of the agreement, the realtor became angry and argued that we were bound to the sales contract. After hours of arguing and nearly calling in lawyers to settle the dispute, the realtor agreed to break the deal and let us walk away from the home. We were disappointed in the dishonesty of the realtor; we had our hearts set on moving into that house, but there was no way my mother would agree to a house with an ugly, metal staircase and who-knows-what-else wrong with it. Mom’s thinking was that, if the realtor wasn’t going to disclose the current modifications on the home, what else on the home had been modified, what else we hadn’t been told about, and had there been modifications without the proper building permits? (Without the proper permits registered with certain government offices, we could have ended up in a big heap of trouble if ever we needed to do modifications of our own, or sell the house in the future.)
While my mother understood all these little things about home buying, we kids couldn’t understand what the big deal was. We thought we’d just have to live with a winding stair and, even though we didn’t like the stair, we did like the rest of the house. On top of everything we were eager to move! So I asked our mother why she did that, why had she pulled out of the sale so quickly and over such a small thing?
“That house was not meant for us,” she said. “God knows where we belong. He made sure to show me the problems before I bought the house.”
My mom made me understand that the change in plans was a sign from God telling her that there is a house out there for us, but that one was not it.
The events which followed made all the strange circumstances come together with pristine clarity.
When summertime arrived a few months later we were still living in our one bedroom apartment. It was the summer my mother took me to the store and bought me a bike, a shiny new bike—red with black flames—that I could keep with me all year-round and ride whenever I wanted. (Except when it snowed, of course.) Yes, things were going well and, though we had no house, we were still content living in our cramped apartment.
Then one night I had a dream about my grandfather, my mom’s dad; we were having a conversation. In the dream, my granddad gave me a message to pass along to my mother, then stood up as he looked at me. With that encouraging smile of his, he turned around and walked away from me toward a room too dark for me to see into. Before he entered the room he turned around one more time to look at me. He smiled, almost in tears, and then disappeared into the darkness. I woke from the dream a little confused, but didn’t put much weight on it. I quickly went back to sleep next to my mother, whom I shared a bed with.
The next day, after everyone had gotten up, Sylvie and I went out job hunting (we did everything together). We were gone most of the day. When we returned home that afternoon, we found mom standing in the kitchen crying and yelling into the house phone, speaking in Bahbah (the language of our village). We watched her; by the time she got off the phone she was still crying. Scared and confused, we asked her what was wrong. She told us that was our uncle, her brother, on the phone, and that he was calling from Africa to let us know our granddad had passed away. She had been told before that my grandfather did not want to be buried unless his daughter, my mom, was at his funeral to say goodbye to him one last time. My mother had to figure out how to get to Cameroon and bury her dad.
It was then that I recalled the dream I’d had the previous night. I realized I was the last person to “talk” to Granddad. He had given me a message for my mother; had told me things he wanted me to always remember. As I watched my mother sobbing in the kitchen, I knew now was the time for me to pass the information given me by my grandfather onto her. I waited until later that night, when I would have a moment with her alone to tell her what I knew. She was still very sad, but I told her about the dream, about everything that happened in my dream, and told her what granddad had told me. She hadn’t forgotten about my abilities and visions about people dying; she remembered the incident back in Africa when I was an infant and wouldn’t stop crying. She also knew that my grandfather was aware of my ability, so it made perfect sense the he would come to me in a dream to talk to me before passing away.
Flying to Cameroon at that time, for an immediate fare, cost upwards of $2,000. We understood now why we weren’t meant to have that house which we had wanted to badly. Had my mother spent all her savings on purchasing a home she wouldn’t have had anything left to afford airfare to Africa. My grandfather’s dying wishes would have gone unfulfilled. And, in our culture, that was unforgiveable.
My mom believes God knows everything; she believes He tries to point us in the right direction, guiding us with little hints like he did with the circumstances surrounding that dream house of ours in South Saint Paul. But, unlike many people, my mother never overlooks anything that happens to her. Because of her faith she was able to keep her eyes open and see things for what they were: messages from God. She prays, she believes, she loves, and she works very, very hard. My mom is quite amazing; her faith is incredible. God has never failed her in the ways that truly matter. That He protected her from spending all her money on a house, therefore leaving funds available to her to fulfill her father’s wishes, is a good example of how God is always thinking ahead for her and guiding her to make the right choices.
Lakeside Ohio from the boat view
Wen sitting with one of the cool cat that ever lived, Kaboodle
CHAPTER 8:
People & Possessions.
“At the point when your possessions start to control you,
you have lost your life.”
By using the money from her savings account, my mom was able to afford to purchase airfare to Cameroon in order to lay her father to rest. She had to leave us kids at home in America—there was no way she could afford tickets for us all, nor did she want us to miss out on school—but she did spend a little extra money to buy a few things for friends and family who she would be visiting.
A three-stop flight, bouncing from Minneapolis to Atlanta, then from Atlanta to France, and from France to finally arrive in Cameroon, is the most typical and quickest route from America to home. It was a long trip and, when she got off the plane in Africa, she was very tired. Her brother was there at the airport with a car, awaiting her arrival, and she was driven the rest of the way with some good company despite the hazardous and unsafe road conditions.
Family matters in Cameroon are quite serious. My mother barely got any rest from her flight before she went right to work, doing everything her father had told me
to tell her to do to prepare him for burial and for his funeral ceremony. In between all her tasks (and there were many!) she would call us to see how we were doing. We could tell from her voice that she was extremely stressed. So, after we spoke to her on the phone the first time, the four of us vowed to stay out of trouble and behave while she was away.
It was two weeks before my mother returned home. It was easy to tell she’d been in Cameroon because, first, she’d lost a lot of weight, which is common for people who return to my country after being away for a while; second, her skin had darkened from the intense African sun.
We were happy to see her and gather around to hear what had happened in Cameroon. The stories were many and too long to go over in this book in detail, but, all in all, the trip was a success. She told us she’d barely had time to sit down because everyone was relying on her to get things organized for the funeral; handfuls of people were calling for her at the same time, she could barely rest or eat. The family went through with Grandfather’s burial without too much trouble, but the fighting began when time came to divide his property: his land, animals, houses, et cetera. The fighting was mainly between my mother and another person (whom I won’t mention by name). While my mom didn’t really care about having any of the property herself, she also didn’t want her father’s things to be ruined or disrespected; this particular person was known to treat their possessions poorly. My mother eventually won the argument—resulting in my grandfather’s only son receiving all my grandfather’s property—but the resolution did not occur without leaving some scars behind.
After everything was said and done—after the funeral had concluded and after the dividing of Grandfather’s possessions had been settled—my mother prepared to return to America. It was some work to get a ride to get back to the airport. Our mother ended up arguing with our father because he did not want to give her a ride back in the car which she had left for him; it was a car she’d purchased in America with her own money a long time ago. She’d shipped it to Africa for her family to use and now Moh (our father) wasn’t letting her use it. She was running out of time and soon gave up, hiring a series of taxis and buses to take her where she needed to go.
In addition to all the stories, our mom had brought food back with her. It is impossible to go back to my country and not bring back some of the special and native foods they have there. Before she’d left for Africa, my siblings and I had written out lists of the food we missed, of the things we wished for her to bring back to us. She had to do some searching, but my mother didn’t fail us: she’d found everything we’d wanted.
One thing in particular which she brought back with her was a delicious vegetable called cocked eru; it tastes something like spinach. Unfortunately, eru also looks very similar to a particular leaf on America’s illegal drug list. Because she had it in her carry-on bags, my mother got double- and triple-checked by the United States’ FAA and TSA Security Guards. At first glance, a bag of eru looks like a bag of marijuana, but it smells a lot different and the texture is very different. Still, my mother had to do a lot of explaining until the authorities eventually let her keep it, though they were still a little apprehensive. The bag of eru had caused her some amount of trouble, but she’d done well. The fruits of her labor were that we were able to sit around the table, talking and hearing our mother’s stories, relishing in having her with us again and being able to enjoy native Cameroonian food and be reminded of home, together.
It’s sad how possessions can tear a people apart, like how greed and desire for my grandfather’s property drove a wedge between those individuals arguing over it. I wonder sometimes if there are still some hard feelings between my grandfather’s loved ones in Cameroon. I wonder often if he would have been disappointed in them fighting over his things instead of remembering his love and the love he taught them to share.
But, it’s wonderful, still, how some possessions—like a little troublesome eru or a special supper shared—can also bring a people, a family, together with an even tighter bond.
Cooked African eru.
(Image © 2013, Afro Fusion Cuisine, Wauwatosa, WI.
http://www.learnafricancuisine.com/senegalsenegal-thieboudienne-recipe/eru-royal/)
CHAPTER 9:
Finally Home!
“Pain in the past easily translates to lessons for the future.”
The time following my mother’s return from Africa was a productive one. Even though it started off with all of us gaining a few pounds from the food she’d brought back from our home country (and it was well worth it!), we picked right up where things had left off before she’d left: searching for a new home.
As is the case sometimes when in the elegance of God’s plans, we found the right home in a fraction of the time we thought we would need. It was a really great house for us and God had planned it down to a tee, even making the price on the home surprisingly low. Even for being located in a rough neighborhood, the home and neighborhood were still an improvement from where we currently lived. After some paperwork and waiting for the sale to go through, only a few months had passed before we were packing our things to move in and begin a new life in our new home. We had three bedrooms, just enough space so that, if someone slept on the couch and I shared a room, things would fit just right. And that’s how it worked out.
During all this excitement, our mom had been additionally blessed with a reduction in her workload. She scored a full-time job at the biggest university in the state as an employee in the Health Research Database department. Still, with the one job, just as she did when she had two, Mother worked tirelessly at it, docking hours in order to make the money to make due on the new mortgage payments.
Moving to a new neighborhood was not the only change for me. I was to begin the sixth grade at Longfellow Elementary, my final year of classes before heading off to middle school. Sixth grade was a year of blunders and stumbles for me in my social and emotional growth. It was the year in which I learned the art of blame, otherwise known as the “blame game”.
Since the day I’d first started in an American school up through fifth grade, I had easily cruised through coursework because of my excellent education in Africa; I had already learned in Africa everything being taught in my American classes and that put me at the front of the class.
But sixth grade was different. Topics were being taught by different teachers instead of a single teacher for all subjects, even though it was on the same campus. The coursework was more challenging. We were being treated less like children and given more responsibilities; the adults were slowly trying to teach us how to be grown up. It was a little confusing and a lot frustrating. I didn’t do well with the changes.
My Math and English courses were taught by the different teachers. I was already really bad at English. The English teacher I had was mean to me about my lack of skill in that area and I didn’t make it easier on myself by believing that every mistake I made was my teacher’s fault and not my own. Blaming someone else for my own shortcomings wasn’t the way I was raised. Back in Africa, I had been taught to take responsibility for my actions. In America, though, such failures were handled differently. I was learning the “blame game” from the kids I began to associate myself with at Longfellow.
Fitting in when you’re a foreigner is not very easy and nobody likes being singled out and ridiculed for something they cannot control. It’s a very lonesome way to go about life, especially at a young age. In order to fit in I purposely changed the way I acted, and the way I changed was determined by the kids I hung out with and what they told me was “cool”. I thought being cool was being irresponsible: not caring about school and my assignments, talking during class, ignoring other kids that weren’t up to my standards. I believed I was supposed to hook up with girls, drink, smoke, and fight—all things I instinctively didn’t want to do, all things I hadn’t been raised to do, but things I did anyway because I was desperate to blend in.
Along with my social problems, I was inevita
bly growing older. My body started having issues that it hadn’t had before. One particularly embarrassing day my gym teacher pulled me aside from class:
“Wen,” he said, “I’m just telling you this because I like you and I don’t want you to get made fun of… but you smell really bad. You should have your parents pick you up some deodorant or something.”
I didn’t know what deodorant was. American kids knew because they grew up seeing their parents using it, or watched TV commercials for deodorant. But no one ever gave me the memo! I had no idea what deodorant was, but apparently I needed it. I went home and had to ask Francis what deodorant was. He showed me what it looked like and I immediately told my mom I needed to get me some.
But it seemed like the negative experiences never stopped coming my way. Aside from having to handle jokes about being African, and then jokes about the way I smelled, I started getting teased about the way I talked and dressed. That I talked differently hadn’t occurred to me before because, to me, all Americans sounded different. But, to them, I was the different one and, because I sounded un-American, I was targeted for ridicule. My accent wasn’t the only reason: people made fun of me because I’m naturally a really fast talker. The most hurtful thing was that the insults came from kids I considered my friends! It changed the way I thought about friendships. Before I thought friends were people like Noah and his family up in Lakeville: kind people who made you feel good about yourself. But, in sixth grade, I began to believe that friends treated one another with meanness, insincerity, and sarcasm. In sixth grade, the people I called my friends were the guys that were “cool,” but they used me as their punching bag and person to go to when they needed something—and I let them do it.
African in America Page 5