The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  The Goodwill volunteers returned to read with the students. Mr. Williams placed Ksanet and Methusella in a higher-level reading group, where they tackled a book called Amazing Sea Lizards. Their volunteer paused to explain the meaning of the words “tentacle,” “float,” and “swallow.” Over at another table, Jakleen sat with Nadia and Grace, reading a book called Mighty Mountains. Their volunteer struggled to explain the word “melt.” She talked about sun shining on snow, snow turning to water, and then pantomimed drinking. “In Denver, when you turn the tap on to get a glass of water, it comes from the mountains,” she said. “It is snow that has melted.”

  “Really?” said Jakleen, incredulous. That didn’t happen in Iraq.

  The students worked on a handout about the language of comparison, which had been used a lot in that book. Nadia asked if I would read over her work.

  “Nadia! You are the smartest!” I told her.

  She laughed—she got the joke.

  “Who is the oldest?” I asked, looking at Nadia and Grace.

  “She is,” Nadia said, pointing to her sister.

  “Words of comparison end in E-S-T. Okay? So coldest is the most cold of all. High, higher, highest. What about this? Can you make this tall, taller . . .”

  “Tallest,” said Nadia.

  “Yes, good. That’s right. So, hot, hotter . . .”

  She wrote H-O-T-E-S-T.

  “English is funny—so it has two t’s,” I told her. “H-O-T-T-E-S-T.”

  She fixed the mistake.

  “Yes, good.”

  Then Jakleen had a question. Mr. Williams had explained that there was a change in the schedule. What was this thing, a pep rally?

  “In the United States we love sports,” I told her. “And people root for their teams. They wave pom-poms and they sing songs. So the last period of the day is now going to be a pep rally for the basketball team. I think it will be very, very loud. All the students will be yelling, ‘South High School! Yay!’ ”

  “Every day?” Jakleen asked, in complete dismay.

  I started laughing. “No, no, no, just one day,” I assured her. “The schedule is changed only for one day. Just today.”

  “How about if we are not interested to go?” said Jakleen. “Do we have to stay for this?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “It’s a good question.”

  I pulled up some pictures of pep rallies on my phone and tried to convey that it might be fun. At the end of the day, I followed a river of students toward the gym. When I stopped in the girls’ bathroom, I discovered cheerleaders changing into their uniforms. The skirts were so short that the cheerleading squad was almost exclusively American born, with one exception—Rodica, an especially outgoing young woman who was originally from the West African country of Benin. The cheerleading coach had tried recruiting other foreign-born students, but their parents deemed the uniforms too risqué. Most foreign-born parents wanted their daughters to go to church and get married; they did not want them attracting unwanted male attention by exposing their legs.

  As I walked into the gym, the cavernous space echoed with the sound of “Time of Our Lives,” by Pitbull and Ne-Yo. A throng of American-born kids danced below bleachers filled with their peers. “I knew my rent was gon’ be late about a week ago,” Ne-Yo sang. “I worked my ass off, but I still can’t pay it, though.”

  Milling about under the bright fluorescent lights I saw a girl in a purple tutu, a girl in a purple tiara, and a couple of girls sporting purple short shorts. I spotted one foreign-born student wearing a floor-length purple dress with a purple hijab—fusion attire. Then came a boy in a purple Superman cape, a boy with a purple mohawk, and another carrying a clear purple life-sized plastic blow-up doll. More kids started dancing as Pitbull took over. He sang about dirty talk, her saying yes, him getting blessed.

  All the kids from the Student Senate were there, in their full South regalia. The DJ played songs by Outkast, Unk, and Pitbull again (“It’s going down, I’m yelling timber / You better move, you better dance”). An ensemble performed a routine to the song “Bang It to the Curb” (“Oh word, we absurd / Got that fire, we can burn”), cheerleaders cheered, and the drum line played every kind of drum. The head boy and the head girl announced the school’s sports teams to wild applause.

  I looked around for the newcomers. The pep rally seemed like a rare chance for them to mix with the rest of the school; surely anybody could figure out this was a party. Finally, I spotted Mr. Williams’s students, sitting in the last two rows of the bleachers closest to the exit, as high up as they could go. Half of them had their backs pressed against the white cinder-block wall; the rest were clumped together one row below. The loud fuss in the gym ran at odds with what was deemed appropriate in many of the places they came from, and the frenetic scene was also a long way away from the safety of Room 142, such a chaste place by comparison. The kids who had made it to the pep rally looked frozen, silent, appalled. Becoming American was going to take some time, apparently. Jakleen and Mariam were nowhere in sight.

  4

  * * *

  Our Souls at Night

  The next time Nabiha and I visited Ebtisam, we found her prone on one of the big green sofas in her living room, with kitchen items spread all over the place. Dishes, dry goods, and silverware were piled on the nearby coffee table and on the round table where the family ate meals. Elsewhere in the building, exterminators were going up and down the hallways, knocking on doors. Ebtisam had been told to take everything out of her cupboards to get ready for the team to spray for bugs. Consumed by that task, and by a variety of other concerns—she was in the middle of looking for a job, and she was in the middle of fighting with her daughters—she had forgotten about our appointment. We caught her in a down moment.

  At school that day, Jakleen and Mariam had been absent. Before I could ask why, Ebtisam brought up the subject, which was the origin of the fight.

  “Jakleen has made me so angry,” said Ebtisam. “She didn’t go to school today, for no reason at all. My heart is hurting me right now, because I am so angry!”

  Though I had not seen Mariam at South, either, Ebtisam said only Jakleen had stayed home; apparently Mariam had gone to school but had cut Mr. Williams’s class. After all the sacrifices Ebtisam had made—how hard she had worked to get her daughters out of harm’s way, how desperately she was struggling to make it in America—having them defy her in this manner left her distraught. Her smile was gone, her face, weary.

  Meanwhile, Jakleen had locked herself in her bedroom and was yelling intermittently at her mother. Eventually she strolled out to greet us, wearing an impudent look.

  “We missed you at school today,” I told her.

  “I don’t like school,” she said in a surly voice.

  “How come?”

  “I don’t like waking up early,” she said in Arabic, through Nabiha. “I need to sleep for at least eight or ten hours.”

  “I think Mr. Williams is worried about you.”

  “Why?”

  “He thinks that you’re really smart, but he’s afraid if you don’t come to school more often, you might have to repeat the class, and he doesn’t want that to happen.”

  “I don’t care. I have decided next year I will stay in the same class.”

  “So you’re okay if you’re in newcomer class again next year?”

  “Yes,” snapped Nabiha-as-Jakleen. “No problem.”

  “Okay, but here’s what happens,” I said. “To graduate, you have to take newcomer class first, then you have to take English Language Acquisition 1, then you have to take English Language Acquisition 2. And then there are two more required English classes that you must take. So, at a minimum, it’s five years before you can get a high school diploma. If you repeat newcomer class, then it will take you six years.”

  Jakleen was taken aback. “If I decide not to go to school, it’s going to be six years?”

  “Yes. Although you could also skip ahead—i
f you learn English quickly. I think if you showed up every day, and did all the work, you would learn twice as fast.”

  “No, we do not learn the language quickly,” she said. “It will take a while.”

  “For you, it is harder, because English and Arabic are not close,” I agreed. “But there are a lot of different things that affect how fast a student learns, and one of them is motivation. I think you have lost your motivation, lost your hope. So you are not learning as fast as you could.”

  “I’m supposed to be in twelfth grade!” Jakleen burst out. “And they moved me to grade nine!”

  “I know you feel that you are behind, and maybe it will take you longer to get a high school degree—but it’s still worth getting the degree. You will have a better life if you can accept that it might take five years to graduate, but that’s okay—you can get the high school degree, go to college, and have a much better life.”

  “I know about all of that,” Jakleen said scornfully. “I know that—but this eight hours, it is too long for us. We are too tired when we get home.”

  “If I could wave a magic wand, I would make your school day four or five hours long. But this is just the hardest year. Next year will be better.”

  “Yeah, maybe, if we have friends, communication with American people, it might be better,” conceded Jakleen. “If we were happy in the United States, it would be easy, everything, for us. But we are not happy in the United States.”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Not now and not ever!”

  “You’ve decided to be unhappy in the future?”

  “Yes!” she retorted.

  But even Jakleen smiled as she said this. I started laughing out loud.

  “I hope you change your mind,” I told her.

  “There is no life here,” Jakleen said, in a more serious tone. “We used to be with a lot of people around us, a community. People who had the same experiences. Here there is no community. We are all by ourselves.”

  I reminded her that Mr. Williams was trying to facilitate a relationship with other Iraqi students.

  “Sana wants to meet with you, to encourage you, to make you feel less lonely,” I said.

  “We would like to talk with her,” Jakleen said.

  “Maybe soon.”

  “In sha’ Allah.”

  She retreated to her bedroom.

  “It’s hard,” I said to Ebtisam. “They are being teenagers.”

  “Yeah, and in a new country,” added Nabiha. “It’s not easy.”

  “Mmmm,” said Ebtisam.

  We fell silent.

  “I am tired,” Ebtisam told us after a while. “I am looking for a job every day. I’m tired. The kids, and then the rent, and looking for the job.”

  There was a knock on the door. A volunteer from Jewish Family Service had come to give Ebtisam a lift to a therapy appointment.

  “Are you ready to go?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You will not come?”

  She shook her head. She was too weary.

  “Okay, cancel,” said the man, and he left.

  Ebtisam told us that warring with her daughters had exhausted her. “I think I will take a nap, because I am so tired. I have a pain, here. I am stressed, and when I get angry, right here, starts the pain.” She pointed to her chest.

  There was another knock on the door. It was the bug-spraying team, with all of their equipment.

  “Ready?” said a worker for the extermination company, in a mock-cheery voice.

  Ebtisam and Jakleen had to leave the apartment for two hours. The longed-for nap would not happen—not now, anyway. Jakleen wound a gray scarf tightly over her hair, then rustled around in the closet for a pair of red sneakers. She flashed us a triumphant smile, as we said goodbye, clearly pleased with herself for having defeated her mother. In contrast, Ebtisam looked downtrodden. I left thinking about how demoralizing it had to be, getting passed over for menial jobs and then coming home to face her beautiful middle daughter’s merciless intransigence. Afterward, I told Mr. Williams and Miss Pauline what I had witnessed. Later, I also described Ebtisam’s condition to Whitney Haruf, a licensed clinical social worker employed by Lutheran Family Services, the resettlement agency that handled Ebtisam’s case. The social worker helped me understand what I had seen in the larger context of all the refugees with whom she worked.

  * * *

  Whitney Haruf had been concerned about Ebtisam’s state of mind from the beginning. They had met for the first time when Ebtisam had come to Lutheran Family Services for her initial meeting with staff at the resettlement agency, seventy-two hours after she and her daughters had arrived in the United States. Ebtisam had come to see her case worker, Yasir Abdulah, and during their conversation he grew worried about Ebtisam’s mental state. She appeared traumatized by the disastrous turns in fortune she had experienced over the previous decade. Yasir understood exactly what she had survived, for he was an Iraqi refugee himself.

  Ebtisam liked Yasir a lot. She told me this one day when we happened to go to Lutheran together. As we sat in the lobby, I faced a large banner that bore a quote from the Bible: I WAS A STRANGER, AND YOU WELCOMED ME IN, Matthew 25:35. By that stage, Ebtisam had spent many hours at Lutheran, and various staff members kept waving and saying, “Hi, Ebtisam!” Eventually, Ebtisam turned to me with an expression of sheepish pride on her face and said ruefully, “I am famous.”

  As we waited, Ebtisam caught a glimpse of Yasir, and then tapped her temple several times.

  “Yasir, very good, here,” she said.

  “Oh, Yasir is very smart?” I asked. “He’s very intelligent?”

  “Yes!” said Ebtisam.

  Yasir had lived in the United States for only two years and his command of English was imperfect, but his commitment to his fellow refugees was steadfast. He was stretched, like every case worker I met; anytime I saw him, he apologized for how long he took to respond to my emails or my requests to meet. Just like Troy Cox over at the African Community Center, Yasir worked at a run, every day, all the time, because of the exploding refugee crisis.

  Yasir had met Ebtisam and her daughters at the airport at the end of August, along with a friend of theirs—a Kurdish man named Anker, who was letting them stay at his apartment until they found a place of their own. When he first greeted Ebtisam and her daughters, Yasir recalled, “She was happy, but she don’t know—what would happen, what are the rules here.” Three days later, on September 1, 2015, when Ebtisam came to Lutheran for the intake meeting, Yasir tried to go over everything (welcome money, TANF, Medicaid, food stamps), but as he did so Ebtisam lost her nerve. Faced with the harsh reality of life in the United States on a poverty-level budget, she lapsed into gloomy fear. “She understood but she was worried,” Yasir remembered. “She said, ‘That’s a really small amount, how can I survive? And the rents here are really high.’ ”

  Noticing Ebtisam’s dejection, Yasir went to find his colleague, Whitney Haruf, who served as the director of the Family Stabilization Unit at Lutheran, a group that tried to prevent refugee families from spinning into crisis upon entering the developed world. Previously, Whitney had worked in Mae Sot, Thailand, along the border of Burma, for an organization called Burma Border Projects, meaning that she had seen just about everything that could go wrong in this world.

  Whitney provided extra support to individuals with refugee status who required services beyond what a case manager could offer. Refugees experiencing domestic violence, refugees with mental illness, and child refugees abused or neglected at home comprised the majority of her caseload. Whitney has strawberry blond hair, thousands of freckles, sky-blue eyes, and a face as wide-open as the prairie. Her father was the novelist Kent Haruf, the author of Plainsong, Benediction, and Our Souls at Night, among other books. His early work breaks your heart talking about teen pregnancy, while his late work is the most beautiful writing about old age that I have read; throughout he captures the rhythm of life in small-town
America. I came to think of Whitney as one of those people who straddle worlds (rural and urban, artistic and practical, literary and therapeutic) and are therefore simply bigger human beings than most.

  “They definitely seemed shell-shocked or something,” Whitney recalled of Ebtisam and her family. “It seemed like their systems were overwhelmed, kind of in shut-down mode. Like they had made it here, and that was as far as they could go. They just looked exhausted. And they were not really able to engage too much.” Whitney shared some almonds and dried fruit with the family. She told them that things were going to be all right. “I just tried to be a welcome presence and to give them a sense of safety or comfort or security,” she said. “It seemed like they needed time to decompress. And I think things did improve from there—but then, they’ve had all these different issues that came up.”

  Whitney made clear that the level of difficulty Ebtisam experienced during her resettlement placed her in the minority, in terms of Lutheran’s overall clients. The agency had roughly one thousand active cases, and only a fraction of those had been referred to the Family Stabilization Unit. Ebtisam was referred to the program because of mental health problems, Whitney said. When Ebtisam shared her IOM packet with me, I saw that somebody else had noted issues in that arena, too (“depression, seen by psych in Syria, once given a medication that she did not take as it was making her sleepy . . . started exercising and felt better . . . has insomnia and cries and is worried about her future but also has plans and hopes . . . may benefit from counseling”), probably brought on by trauma and chronic stress.

  The day after her intake meeting, Ebtisam called Yasir and said she was thinking of moving to another state where rents were cheaper. Yasir told her to decide soon, because she needed to sign up for benefits right away, or she would run out of money. The following day, Yasir called to ask if she would stay or go. She had not decided. Yasir wanted to fill out all those forms, so he could find this woman some money. He called again a day later and pushed her to make a choice. Ebtisam said she would stay in Colorado.