by Helen Thorpe
One of the books that Christina and her adoptive mother suggested I read was For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question, a piece of gonzo journalism by Mac McClelland, which includes a scene in which McClelland temporarily moves in with some Karen activists who are living on the border of Burma, just inside Thailand. Upon her arrival, McClelland is shown around the house, where she sees a concrete trough filled with cold water. A Karen man pantomimes pouring cold water over himself, using a small bucket. McClelland then engages her housemates in a prolonged conversation about showering, in which she eventually realizes that nobody else in the house, at any point in their lives, has ever taken a hot shower. They are skeptical that such a thing exists. Even when she attempts to convince them that bathing with hot water is pleasurable, the Karen activists are dubious. One of them insists stubbornly that cold water is better. McClelland uses the story to illustrate the naivete of an American such as herself about her degree of privilege: Americans just take their hot showers for granted.
Hsar Htoo had made the same journey in reverse, traveling from the Karen refugee community to a place where people took hot showers all the time without giving any thought to the money spent on their physical comfort. The change was too big, it was too much for him to describe, even with the help of an interpreter who had made the same journey. When I asked him what the transition had been like, he just said “hard.”
* * *
Toward the middle of November, a new student named Kaee Reh arrived. He was from Thailand and spoke Karenni, a related but separate language from Karen. Later, Kaee Reh would tell me through an interpreter that, like Hsar Htoo, he had been born in a refugee camp in Thailand, after his family had escaped persecution in Burma. While the news media focused almost exclusively on the refugees who were at present fleeing from turmoil in the Middle East, both Africa and Southeast Asia had been generating large numbers of refugees for such an extended period of time that newspapers had long ago ceased to cover those stories. The popular term for this among humanitarian workers is “protracted refugee situations.” In the case of Burma, the stunningly brutal civil war had been grinding on for more than half a century. Just as Kaee Reh showed up, there were signs of democratization in Burma—an election was due to be held that fall for the first time in twenty-five years—but renewed fighting kept breaking out.
Hsar Htoo was compact and burly, while Kaee Reh was tall and slender, but both boys arrived at school with their hair short on the sides and longer on top, with the longer hair gathered into a ponytail. They had similar experiences and were from the same part of the world, but they could not understand one another. Each of the students from Asia—Hsar Htoo, Kaee Reh, and Uyen—had nobody else in the room who spoke their given language. While Uyen had managed nonetheless to become friends with Stephanie, thanks to Google Translate and a common love of Converse High Tops, both Hsar Htoo and Kaee Reh were far more isolated. At least Hsar Htoo was familiar with the other students already, but Kaee Reh seemed especially cut off. One day, he brought his lunch to Room 142, sat down by himself, put on a large pair of headphones, and began singing. He wasn’t humming; he was singing with his full voice. It was a beautiful tenor. It was impossible for anybody else to discern the meaning of his song, but the room filled with his keening. To me, it sounded like a song about loneliness.
* * *
After Kaee Reh’s arrival, there was a pause in the growth of Mr. Williams’s class. No new students arrived in Room 142 during the entire month of December. Mr. Williams now had sixteen students, who hailed from eight countries and spoke nine languages. Eight of the students were from Africa, three from Central America, three from Southeast Asia, and two from the Middle East. Coincidentally, the makeup of nationalities mirrored national trends.
In fiscal year 2015, the United States had accepted 70,000 refugees. Of that total, 27,000 had come from the Middle East, with almost half of those coming from Iraq. The United States had taken another 20,000 refugees from Africa, with Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo sending by far the largest numbers, followed by Eritrea and Sudan. And the United States had welcomed another 18,000 from Southeast Asia, almost entirely from Burma. Mr. Williams had students representing all those countries, with the exception of Somalia and Sudan. He used to see a lot of students from those countries, but after rents in Denver had escalated, Somali and Sudanese families had begun settling instead in other parts of the state such as Fort Morgan and Greeley. Rents were cheaper there, and the nearby meatpacking plants were hiring large numbers of foreign-born workers.
More students would arrive in January, but by this point Mr. Williams had amassed the bulk of his class. After Kaee Reh joined the group—during the lull that extended through December—Mr. Williams made certain to spend one-on-one time with each of his students. He gave reading assessments and listening quizzes and tested writing and speaking abilities. He found that Nadia and Grace almost always understood his instructions and often knew the right answers. Uyen and Stephanie could do the same and had surged ahead of others in their ability to read and write. Also, the two boys from the Congo were absorbing English at an astonishing rate. “Isn’t it incredible to see what’s happening with Solomon and Methusella?” Mr. Williams said one day while we were upstairs in the copy room.
Conversely, Hsar Htoo was struggling more than any other student. Mr. Williams feared Kaee Reh might experience similar challenges, but it was too early to tell. He thought Hsar Htoo’s difficulty was due largely to the fact that the Sino-Tibetan languages are about as far as you can get from English. Like most Asian languages, Karen and Karenni are tonal, which meant that Hsar Htoo and Kaee Reh were accustomed to deciphering the meaning and significance of words based on whether their sounds rise or fall. To further complicate matters, in the Sino-Tibetan languages, verbs do not change their endings. Tense, person, and number are expressed by adding other words, or are left to be inferred. Instead of conjugating a verb in Karen or Karenni, you simply add a word like “tomorrow” or “yesterday.” Thus Hsar Htoo and Kaee Reh had a steeper learning curve than anybody else in the room, because they were learning how to change tenses for the first time in their lives.
Another factor that shaped the rate at which students could learn English was the level of education of their parents, and Hsar Htoo had told me that his mother was illiterate. When I visited Kaee Reh’s parents at home later in the year, his father would mention that he could not read or write. Both Hsar Htoo and Kaee Reh operated at a disadvantage, because books and literacy were absent in their home environments. Solomon and Methusella’s father, by contrast, knew how to read and write in several languages, giving his sons an edge over Hsar Htoo and Kaee Reh, because an important adult in their life had modeled the act of reading.
Like Hsar Htoo, Jakleen and Mariam were slow in acquiring English. The girls seemed highly intelligent, but English appeared to leave them flummoxed. This was due in part to the extensive differences between English and Arabic, Mr. Williams understood. The girls had learned to read and write using an entirely different script, which was written from right to left. They had also grown up structuring sentences in an alternative order: Arabic sentences typically begin with the verb (for example, “Struggle Jakleen and Mariam with English”). But they knew how to conjugate verbs, and they were recognizing some words in English that were familiar.
The words that Arabic and English have in common are not cognates, technically. The terms are borrowed, as opposed to derived from a common origin, and are more properly called loanwords. A loanword moves from one unrelated language into another because of social interactions. Most African languages contain a high number of loanwords from Arabic, due to the extent to which Arab people served as merchants across that continent. English doesn’t have many loanwords that came directly from Arabic, but it does have a significant number that arrived through Spanish. Some of the many words that are identical or similar in all three languages are alcohol, elixir, giraffe, lemon, safari, and tal
isman. One day, as I was talking with Mariam and Jakleen about Arabic loanwords that passed into English through Spanish, an upper-level ELA instructor who was originally from Puerto Rico heard me rattle off my meager list. She called out enthusiastically, “Pantalones! Blusa! The Moors were in Spain for five hundred years!”
Mr. Williams suspected there might be more to the difficulties that the girls were experiencing than just the lack of similarity between English and Arabic, however. He knew they had lived in places consumed by violent events, and he understood they might have lost a parent, because their father’s absence had become common knowledge after the girls had mentioned it to several staff members. Mr. Williams thought that whatever the sisters had endured while living in a war zone might also be inhibiting their progress. He worried, too, that the increasingly polarized political climate in the United States might be causing them to experience a particularly chilly reception.
* * *
As it happened, Kaee Reh’s appearance in Room 142 coincided with a major shift in sentiments toward refugees throughout the developed world. During the same week that Kaee Reh arrived at South, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks broke out across Paris and the nearby suburb of Saint-Denis. The news media spoke incessantly of the suicide bombers who detonated explosives inside a football stadium, the gunmen who assaulted concertgoers at the Bataclan theater, and the mass shootings at a series of nearby cafés. The simultaneous incidents left 130 people dead and 368 injured. After ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks, France responded by bombing Raqqa (a city in Syria on the banks of the Euphrates that had become the de facto headquarters of ISIS), declaring a state of emergency that allowed police to conduct searches without warrants, and banning public demonstrations.
In Europe, the attacks provoked a deepening backlash against refugees from the Middle East, and the period of relative openness to the Syrian plight came to an end. Some Germans continued to support Chancellor Angela Merkel in her stance that Europe should admit large numbers of refugees to alleviate pressures in the Middle East, but opposition to her position grew apace, creating a much muddier environment in that country. Public opinion elsewhere in Europe tilted against refugees even more dramatically. Pundits predicted that the flow of migrants would diminish, due to the cold of winter and the danger of trying to cross the Aegean Sea during rough weather. In fact, a second wave of Syrians began leaving, because of the much-publicized warnings that access to Europe might become more constricted. Suddenly many people who had not yet left Syria thought they should go right away, before it was too late.
In the United States, sentiments turned hostile, too. The governors of thirty-one states announced that they would refuse to accept Syrian refugees who sought to resettle in their jurisdictions. The attacks also amplified the heated rhetoric in the ongoing presidential campaign. Donald Trump had already made headlines by insisting he would force Mexico to pay for the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. After the attacks in Paris, Trump also called for an immediate ban on Muslims entering the United States. He said this was purely a national security precaution, but after he made such remarks, some of his followers who harbored previously unspoken prejudice felt free to express hatred of Muslims. All this was palpable to Mr. Williams’s students, and young women in hijabs attracted particular ire. One day, when Jakleen said miserably that she wished she could go back to Turkey, I asked what she missed about life in that country. “Respect,” she said. I thought her transition might have been easier if she had felt truly welcomed, but in that regard her life was getting harder by the minute.
7
* * *
Does She Know Jesus?
Nabiha and I returned to the Pine Creek Apartments one Saturday afternoon. We located Ebtisam’s apartment without difficulty, joking about how simple the door was to find in broad daylight. Inside the apartment we discovered a middle-aged neighbor seated at the round wooden table beside the kitchen, an old tea towel draped over the shoulders of her worn dress. Jakleen, wearing plastic gloves, hovered behind her, watching a timer. An open box of Revlon Luxurious Colorsilk stood on the table, and the woman’s hair was steeped in dye. Nabiha and Jakleen chatted for a moment, and Nabiha explained that Jakleen had formerly worked in a beauty salon.
“She knows, she has experience,” said Nabiha. “She says, ‘Come here, I will do your hair.’ ”
Ebtisam greeted us in the traditional Middle Eastern fashion, with three kisses on alternate cheeks, and I presented her with some fruit. Refugee families always insisted on feeding me, because their cultures demanded that they show hospitality to guests, so I tried never to arrive empty-handed.
“Shukraan,” Ebtisam said.
By now, I recognized “thank you” in Arabic.
We sat down in the living room, where the family had just eaten lunch. I saw the remains of kebab, eaten with flatbread. For the next two and a half hours, Ebtisam told us the saga of the family’s journey. At first, the pace of the conversation was leisurely, as I asked questions in English, which Nabiha translated into Arabic; Ebtisam answered in Arabic, and then Nabiha translated her answers into English. After a while, however, Ebtisam began speaking more hastily, and eventually I didn’t have time to ask questions. The girls’ mother had lived through intense experiences and while recounting them she became caught up in the drama again emotionally.
Ebtisam had grown up in Suq al-Shuyukh, a small town in southern Iraq in the marshy lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates river delta, the same region that was once called Mesopotamia. Like the majority of people living in the delta area, Ebtisam and her family were Shia Muslims. Although reviled abroad, Saddam Hussein had successfully held Iraq together as a country, despite the fact that Iraqi society was divided between Shia and Sunni, between Muslims and people of other faiths, between Arabs and Kurds, and between supporters and nonsupporters of the Ba’ath Party (the governing political party in Iraq at that time, which was secular in orientation).
During the 1990s—after Iraq invaded Kuwait, precipitating the first Persian Gulf War—the United Nations imposed severe economic sanctions on Iraq. Many Iraqis left their home country as a result. Most of Ebtisam’s siblings immigrated to Germany during this period; although her parents remained in Iraq, they moved to Karbala, a holy city to Shia Muslims. Meanwhile, Ebtisam herself moved to Baghdad, drawn by the cosmopolitan environment. One day a friend invited her to a birthday party, where she met Fadi, an Iraqi Christian of Armenian descent. He and Ebtisam began dating, which caused a breach between Ebtisam and her parents. Her father disavowed her right away; when Ebtisam and Fadi married in 1999, her mother attended the ceremony, but subsequently decreed that her daughter should never contact her again.
Children arrived quickly: Mariam was born in 2000, Jakleen in 2001. While Ebtisam and her siblings had been given Arabic names, she and Fadi chose Christian names for their children—Mariam was named for Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Jakleen for a saint. Ebtisam told me that in her mind, Islam and Christianity held equal merit, but she had embraced Christianity because it had been important to her husband. Ebtisam told her daughters that they were free to attend either a mosque or a church when they became adults.
* * *
At present, Ebtisam and her daughters were attending Arabic-language services held on Sunday afternoons at New Life Community Church in Aurora. This evangelical Christian church had reached out to the fast-growing immigrant and refugee community moving into the low-rent housing available in that suburb. On my first visit to New Life, I mistakenly sat through part of a Christian service held in Oromo (a language spoken by millions of people in Ethiopia and Kenya) before I found the second-floor room where the Arabic-language service was held.
Shortly after Ebtisam and her daughters arrived in the United States, a devout parishioner from New Life named Mark started volunteering with the family. He had been introduced to them by their resettlement agency, Lutheran Family Services. Mark ferried them back and fo
rth to church, fixed anything that broke in their household, and accompanied them on errands that required translation. He had grown up in a rural part of Texas, but he and his wife had lived in Lebanon, and he spoke Arabic fluently.
Because Jakleen wore a hijab, and because the family was Arabic-speaking, I had assumed they were practicing Muslims; it had not occurred to me that they might attend Christian services. Mark was about the last person I expected to meet through Ebtisam. I am a registered Democrat, and I’m pretty sure he was a registered Republican, and our views on everything from politics to proselytizing appeared divergent. In many respects, however, Mark was representative of the typical volunteer who worked with refugee resettlement agencies—he was motivated by his faith. Many of the major resettlement agencies were originally faith-based organizations with ties to specific religions, and the aid groups still relied upon local congregations to send them volunteers.
When I met Mark, one of the first questions he asked me was, “Where do you go to church?”
I told him I attended Quaker Meeting, which seemed to satisfy him—I was Christian.
Then he asked me about the interpreter I was using. “Does she know Jesus?”
I had never quizzed Nabiha about her faith, but I knew that she observed Muslim holidays.