The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  Mr. Williams demonstrated for the students how they should flap their arms when he said “fly” and jog in place when he said “run” and pull their arm back when he said “throw.” The technical term for what Mr. Williams was doing is “total physical response,” a teaching method highly popular among ELA instructors. His colleague Ben Speicher was employing the same approach with the newcomer students when he taught them math upstairs. So far, the students could act out addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. If Mr. Speicher said the word “addition,” they crossed their arms vertically and horizontally to make a plus sign; if he said “multiplication,” they crossed their arms diagonally to make an X. Acting things out was entertaining, but coordinating physical movement with intellectual concepts also helped foreign-speaking students understand and remember English terms by using various parts of the brain at once to reinforce learning.

  Downstairs in Room 142, the students were clearly amused when Mr. Williams acted out each verb on his list. After he got them all to practice the basic moves, he demonstrated how to play Simon Says, a game that appeared new to almost everyone in the room. Then Mr. DeRose led the class in a vigorous competition as Mr. Williams determined who remained standing and who had to sit down.

  “Simon says walk!” said Mr. DeRose.

  Everybody began walking in place, dragging their shoes over the navy carpet.

  “Simon says write,” said Mr. DeRose.

  Everybody scribbled in the air.

  “Simon says stop.”

  Everybody held up one hand in the universal sign for halt.

  “All right, poke. Oh, Hsar Htoo!”

  Hsar Htoo looked confused as to why he should not have pantomimed poking, when Mr. DeRose had clearly told him to poke, but he obediently sat down.

  “Simon says scare!”

  Everybody put their hands next to their faces and spread their fingers in alarm.

  “You guys are good,” said Mr. DeRose.

  “Simon says fly! Mariam, have a seat.”

  Mariam had forgotten to fly. She sat down, her long hair held back from her face by a leather headband, an abashed look on her face. Jakleen was eliminated soon after her sister. So were Solomon, Yonatan, and Amaniel.

  “Learn! Saúl, siéntate, amigo.”

  “Read your book. Oh, Methusella, sorry!”

  Only Grace, Stephanie, Ksanet, and Lisbeth remained standing. The girls pantomimed think, listen, run, talk, point, and jump. Then Grace and Stephanie were eliminated, leaving only Ksanet and Lisbeth in the contest.

  “Cook,” said Mr. DeRose. “Oh, sorry, Ksanet. Lisbeth is the winner!”

  * * *

  Lisbeth had been in the classroom for only two weeks, yet she had integrated herself more completely than some of the students who had been there since the beginning of the year. I thought this was partly a result of her outgoing personality, partly due to the fact that both of her teachers could speak her mother tongue, and partly because of the extensive similarities between English and Spanish. Almost every day, Lisbeth discovered another word in English that she essentially knew already. She also possessed perhaps the most positive attitude of any kid in the room, as I learned when she shared more about her journey to the United States one day over lunch.

  I was taken aback to hear that immediately before she joined Mr. Williams’s class, Lisbeth had been locked up in a federal detention facility, after entering this country as an unaccompanied minor. The grim story was hard to reconcile with her happy-go-lucky demeanor, but she provided court documents to back up what she said. At the same time that she was managing the transition into South, Lisbeth was also juggling what would become a lengthy legal odyssey over her status in the United States. The same was true for Saúl. Both of them had been apprehended by immigration officials while attempting to cross the border illegally, both had been minors at the time, and both had entered the country without a legal guardian. Throughout the school year, these two students from El Salvador were required to show up for hearings at the federal courthouse for what were known in official parlance as “removal proceedings.” The scary terminology was written across the top of the summons that Lisbeth showed me, which had been mailed to her home.

  News reports of children fleeing violence in Central America and traveling to the United States by themselves had been appearing in newspapers and on television almost simultaneously with word of the global refugee crisis—the main differences between the two trends being the manner in which the individuals entered this country and the precarious legal position of the unaccompanied minors after they arrived. Refugees enter the United States with the legal blessing of the federal government and carry visas that are good for one year; after that, they must apply for green cards and legal residency. Essentially, refugees are fortunate because they arrive with a path to citizenship. Lisbeth and Saúl, by contrast, had arrived without entrance documents and hoped to rectify their illegal status through the courts.

  When Lisbeth was little, her mother had worked as a police officer in El Salvador, she told me. She had admired her mother’s crisp navy uniform and shiny silver shield. On two occasions, her mother had moved to the United States to find other jobs, mostly janitorial work that was not as glamorous to Lisbeth. During those extended absences, she had left Lisbeth and her younger brother behind in the care of their maternal grandmother. Lisbeth did not describe her frightening emotions she grappled with when her mother vanished, but only the warm bond she forged with her grandmother. She described her grandmother’s adobe house as a rural idyll, surrounded by trees that bore mangoes, papayas, and oranges.

  Recently, Lisbeth’s mother had been forced to leave El Salvador again, after she had arrested several members of a violent gang and received death threats. Then the gang members had come after Lisbeth. “It used to be true that the gangs were mostly concentrated in the cities, but then they spread all over the place, and we saw the change in Santa Rita, a little bit at a time,” she told me in Spanish, speaking through an interpreter. “At first it was just that some kids were smoking pot. Then all of the boys started speaking really bad words and giving gang signs to everybody. And then we heard a lot about stolen cattle and people getting killed.” The gang members began their pursuit of Lisbeth by sending text messages asking for her mother’s location. When Lisbeth refused to reply, the gang members proposed a trip to a city called Apopa, which they described as a fun outing. After she refused to go, the gang members threatened to kill her.

  Lisbeth told her grandmother, who called her mother in the United States, who phoned an uncle in El Salvador. Within forty-eight hours, the uncle made arrangements with a man from Mexico, whom he paid to escort fifteen-year-old Lisbeth and her twelve-year-old brother as they made an illegal crossing into the United States. Her uncle put Lisbeth and her brother on a bus that was headed to the U.S.-Mexico border. Fearful of what might happen on the journey, Lisbeth made sure to keep her brother close; the only mishap that occurred was that some other children stole her brother’s sweater. Lisbeth gave her own sweater to her brother, to make sure he stayed warm. She stared out the bus windows at the captivating scenery. The lengthy ride was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to her, Lisbeth said. Later that year, when Mr. Williams would ask everybody in Room 142 to choose one word that would exemplify their journey to the United States, Lisbeth would choose bonita. It had been beautiful.

  That was Lisbeth: She bubbled with enthusiasm and saw the good in everything.

  Lisbeth and her brother had been apprehended by immigration authorities while they wandered around a dusty Texas border town in the company of other children who had crossed with the same coyote. They were held for one day in a place that was like an ice box, then transported to a holding facility for unaccompanied minors in Chicago (“The furniture there was really nice!”). Because they had been found without a legal guardian, they qualified for hearings to determine if they were eligible for asylum. Asylum seekers can ch
ange their status while remaining on U.S. soil—the law treats them differently from undocumented immigrants—if they can prove that being sent home would put their lives at risk. The risk cannot consist of general violence, but must represent a specific threat aimed at the individual in particular. After federal officials determined that Lisbeth and her brother had a legal guardian living in the United States, they put the children on a flight to Denver (“I came here in a plane! It was my first time ever! We took off and we flew and I got really scared because the plane was shaking—there was some turbulence—and then I looked out the window, and I said, Wow! It was extraordinary! I loved it!”), where they were released into the care of their mother. Lisbeth’s mother worked two jobs: She cleaned a local McDonald’s and she cleaned residential houses. Because her mother worked long hours, they were unable to spend a great deal of time together, and Lisbeth missed her grandmother terribly, as well as the beauty of rural El Salvador. At the same time, she was joyful to be reunited with her mother, and she found city life compelling (“I know how to get to Walmart!”). At South, she had been nervous because of the size of the school, but Stephanie had been kind and she had made friends with other Spanish-speaking students. The ongoing removal proceedings upset her, but she hoped in the long run to be granted asylum.

  * * *

  While Mr. Williams was doing his best to teach all the students that the world kept sending him, I was doing my best to be a helpful presence in his room, and one way I did this was by sharing the stories of students I got to know. Mr. Williams knew nothing about Lisbeth’s odyssey until I told him what she had recounted. Nor did he know about Saúl’s harrowing journey in the packed truck, nor that Jakleen and Mariam had lived through the civil war in Syria. He and Miss Pauline knew that Solomon and Methusella came from the DRC, but not that they had lived in a particularly violence-prone province. Whenever I learned details about a student’s background, I passed them along to both the teacher and the therapist. The students volunteered minimal personal information in the classroom, and I assume they were fairly reticent in group therapy, too, due to their lack of English and the inhibitions they must have felt about disclosing anything revealing in front of their peers. Neither Mr. Williams nor Miss Pauline had a budget that allowed them to use interpreters at will—the school district had a translation hotline, and there were paraprofessionals in the building who spoke a variety of languages, but I was the only person in the room who hired interpreters simply to understand the students better. Mr. Williams told me he had not previously been able to get to know his students so well.

  When I told Miss Pauline what I knew about Lisbeth’s background, she suggested that perhaps Lisbeth’s over-the-top extroversion might be a coping strategy; I could imagine that the legal proceedings probably left her feeling precarious about where she belonged and anxious about the possibility that her new life could be upended. It made sense that she might be using constant social interactions to distract herself from her worries about being “removed.” Mr. Williams found the background information helpful, too, as it made him feel more forgiving toward the student who was the most disruptive force in his classroom. For my part, I was relieved that I was able to let someone like Miss Pauline or Mr. Williams know when students had shared particularly difficult experiences, as some of them needed a kind of assistance that I could not provide.

  After learning that Solomon and Methusella might have witnessed violent events in the Congo, Miss Pauline brought in a male colleague who pulled the two brothers out of the classroom for individual therapy. After hearing that Jakleen and Mariam had lived through the civil war in Syria as well as the Iraq War, Miss Pauline provided the two sisters with individual therapy herself. I have no idea what they discussed, but when I looked at the screening questions that Miss Pauline used to determine which students should qualify for the additional therapy (which was also subsidized entirely by Jewish Family Service), I saw a few things that might have applied to Solomon, Methusella, Jakleen, and Mariam. To screen for students who had seen high levels of trauma, Miss Pauline asked if they had been assaulted, if they had witnessed violence, if they had lost a family member, or if they had seen dead bodies. I assume that the brothers from the Congo and the sisters from Iraq must have said yes to several of those questions, but I did not ask them such things myself, out of a concern that doing so could be retraumatizing. In terms of our respective professions—teacher, therapist, journalist—I think being in Room 142 left all three of us wondering, Will we be worthy? Once we got beyond our own propensities to misconstrue or underestimate or overlook, and caught sight of who the students really were, we could see that they were splendid kids who had lived through things that were quite simply beyond us. They left us asking ourselves, Can we rise to meet the challenges presented by such a room?

  * * *

  When I told Mr. Williams about my interactions with Hsar Htoo, I mentioned a request that the student had made. He had asked through an interpreter that I please not pose any questions about the death of his father, because that topic remained too sensitive for him to discuss. It was the only time during my career when a person I wanted to interview had known ahead of time what subject would be too upsetting and had forthrightly warned me away from that part of the story. The main things I learned during my short interview with Hsar Htoo were that he had spent his entire life inside a refugee camp called Mae La, which sits just inside Thailand, close to the border with Burma, and that his name meant “Golden Star.” Hsar Htoo had two older sisters and one older brother who had resettled in the United States before he arrived, which had eased the transition somewhat for the rest of the family. Hsar Htoo had come to the United States at the start of the previous summer, with his mother and two other brothers. For him, the highlight of the summer had come in August, when his family drove to Nebraska to visit close friends from Mae La who had resettled in that state. The reunion comforted Hsar Htoo—it was reassuring to see another family he knew so well also making the surreal jump from the reality of Mae La to life in America.

  The only family members who had enrolled in school in Colorado were Hsar Htoo and his younger brother; everybody else took jobs to support the family. One of his sisters worked at a laundry facility washing sheets and towels for hotels in the Denver area, and his other siblings worked at a meatpacking plant in Greeley. They commuted to the work site on a daily basis, even though it was a one-hour drive each way. Many Karen-speaking people worked in the meat-processing industry, because the jobs paid well and employers in that sector were willing to hire workers who spoke no English, had no formal work history, and were often illiterate.

  As requested, I asked nothing about Hsar Htoo’s father’s death, but I thought about it a lot in the months that followed. I admired Hsar Htoo’s straightforward dignity around his father’s loss; he rose in my estimation because of how he handled my curiosity. I believed I could see a special bond forming between Hsar Htoo and Mr. Williams, and imagined that it was good for Hsar Htoo to have a male teacher—an alternative father figure to show him the way forward during the unsettling first months in America.

  It was hard to find an interpreter who spoke Karen. In the end, I worked with a young woman named Christina, who had been recommended by the Goodwill volunteer coordinator who visited Mr. Williams’s classroom every week. Miss Ruthann had known Christina for a long time and had a soft spot for her. After we met, so did I. While the purpose of our encounter was to speak with Hsar Htoo, in the end it was Christina who wanted to share the most. She had arrived in this country as a refugee herself during her middle school years and had subsequently attended South High School. When we met, she was enrolled at a local community college.

  Like Hsar Htoo, Christina had lived in a refugee camp in Thailand, though she had been born in a Burmese village that her family had left in haste amid an attack by the Burmese military. During her first year in the United States, while she was still getting used to everything—one day she wore flip-flo
ps to school during a snowstorm because she had never worn regular shoes before—Christina’s grandmother had given her away as a child bride to a man who was more than ten years older than she. Christina was in eighth grade at the time. As we sat in one of the purple booths in South’s bustling lunchroom, she told me about one encounter with her supposed “fiancé.” He had shown up at the door of her apartment and demanded that Christina perform sex acts. She refused and threatened to call the police. I assumed this represented the full extent of their interactions, as Christina said no more about him. I told Christina that I thought she was incredibly plucky to have known at such a young age that she did not have to “marry” the man to whom her grandmother had wanted to give her away.

  “I was thirteen!” protested Christina. “You don’t even know what love is at that age! I’m twenty-one now, and I still don’t know what love is. Jesus Christ!”

  It was one of those stories that stayed with me. I remained in touch with Christina, and she invited me to her home to meet her adoptive family. Christina taught me many things about Karen culture, sharing books and photographs, showing me traditional Karen clothing, cooking Karen meals for me. Often, I learned as much from the interpreters I was working with as I did from the students themselves; many of the interpreters had arrived when they were school-age, and visiting the newcomer room seemed to transport them emotionally back to that earlier moment in their lives, when it had all been such a struggle. They identified strongly with the students because they remembered how hard it had been learning English and getting accustomed to life in a strange country, wondering if they would ever blend in. The interpreters had processed their own experiences, whereas for most newcomer students it was too soon for them to put words to what they were enduring. Hurled into the developed world at high velocity, they had not yet caught up with themselves.