by Helen Thorpe
At the end of the class, right before the bell rang, Mr. Williams called out to the distracted students, who were packing up their belongings. Somebody had forgotten a cell phone. The device had been left over by the windows, where it was charging.
“That’s Ksanet’s,” said Methusella.
When she walked over to get her phone, Ksanet noticed that a jacket had been left behind on the back of a chair.
“Jakleen! Jakleen!” she cried. “Your jacket!”
In a way, it was nothing remarkable. But in Room 142, it was new, this kind of behavior. They were starting to look out for one another.
* * *
Another day that month, I found Mr. Williams getting ready for class, and he asked if had I heard the big news. The district had made its selection: The next principal of South High was going to be Jen Hanson. Mr. Williams was jubilant. Hanson had previously worked as an ELA teacher at South before transferring to a rival high school to become an assistant principal. The entire faculty at South, and especially the ELA team, were thrilled to have Hanson return as their new principal, because they felt confident she would carry forward the legacy they had created together. Hanson’s appointment sent a clear signal that South would continue welcoming refugees and immigrants with open arms. Parents were equally ecstatic. “She really had a vision for the school,” Carolyn Howard, the PTA president, said later. “She was strong enough and charismatic enough to rally all of the stakeholders—the faculty, the parents, and the students.”
The other big news at South concerned Carolyn’s son, George, who had accidentally done away with the prom. The newcomers did not know this odd word, “prom”—we discussed it in class one day, and Mr. Williams got me to pantomime prom dancing—but during February, it was the only thing that members of South’s senior class wanted to discuss, besides the Super Bowl. One day in mid-February, when I swung by the Student Senate, I caught George trying to explain what had happened to other student movers and shakers. Mr. Brookes, the faculty adviser to the Senate, had just asked for an update from each class.
“Seniors?” Mr. Brookes said.
“We canceled prom,” the head girl said drily.
“Yes, and after having canceled prom, we decided it’s back on,” added the head boy.
“Can I just say it wasn’t completely my idea?” objected George. “They told me to do it!”
“George, explain,” suggested Mr. Brookes.
“There’s been a lot of tension about which prom theme we should use,” George began. “So on Friday we decided maybe, you know, we could try to lighten the subject and get people to chill out. So I figured that maybe people would know I was joking if I said that prom was canceled. And a lot of people didn’t know that I was joking. A lot of them did, but some people didn’t, which—which was a bit of a problem.”
The squabble had begun on social media, primarily the senior class page on Facebook, when one faction of students supported a Harry Potter theme, another faction went for The Great Gatsby, and a third for The Secret Garden. One of the many members of the senior class who had not understood George’s dry sense of humor was Rodica, the pom-pom-bearing student from Benin, the school’s only foreign-born cheerleader. Rodica and George had exchanged a few testy remarks online.
“So just to be clear, I talked to Rodica and stuff, and we’re all cool, we’re still friends,” reported George, who seemed a little chagrined. “But yeah, I thought I would tell everybody that it’s a joke, and prom is still on.”
In the end, not enough people had read The Great Gatsby, and as many people hated as loved the idea of a prom based on Harry Potter. “We decided to go with the one that people were not, like, ‘Oh, that sucks,’ ” concluded George. “We’re going with The Secret Garden. I think everyone can agree it’s a pretty good theme.” It was a good theme for South—a book about overcoming obstacles, about rejuvenation, about healing. And then, just as Denver was celebrating the city’s Super Bowl victory and Mr. Williams was celebrating the idea of Jen Hanson as his principal and George and Rodica and all the seniors were celebrating the idea that their prom was officially back on, Donald Trump started winning primary after primary.
The kids at South still thought Trump was a joke, but he spoke to other parts of America where good jobs had been vanishing and a sense of security about the future had been lost. The economic pain of small-town, rural America was being largely ignored by media outlets based in large cities, and the press was out of touch with what was happening in the election. As he campaigned, Trump was saying things about refugees that accurately captured the fears of ordinary Americans who lived in conservative places. He asserted, for example, that the United States was letting in refugees “who are definitely in many cases ISIS-aligned.” This was supposition. No refugees had been admitted with demonstrated ties to ISIS. Aid workers found the idea of terrorists trying to use the resettlement system to enter a developed country to be implausible, as it was the slowest and most uncertain means of entry. Less than 1 percent of those designated as refugees by the United Nations were given the chance to resettle in a third country, and refugees were vetted more extensively than any other type of entrant to the United States. But these things were not widely understood. Meanwhile, Trump’s assertions about refugees resonated with his audiences, and his popularity was growing at a meteoric rate.
2
* * *
We Hate Sheep
When I told Solomon and Methusella that I was hoping to visit them at home again, they conferred with their father and told me to come on a particular Sunday. This was shortly before they moved to the two-bedroom apartment, back when they were still living in their first house. The boys did not tell me a specific time. To be polite, I tried texting with their father, Tchiza, to see if 2:30 P.M. would be convenient. I never heard back.
When I arrived at the tan clapboard house with the dirt yard and the chain-link fence, I was welcomed just as before, by the same dancing whorl of children. On this occasion, Julius was not available—his schedule at the grocery store conflicted with the time I had chosen—and I wound up employing a different Swahili-speaking interpreter, a gracious Ethiopian woman named Berhane. She had come straight from church and was wearing a long black skirt and a magenta blazer. Berhane had arrived in this country as a refugee herself, and had learned to speak Swahili while living in a refugee camp in Kenya.
We sat down at the kitchen table. Once again the boys’ mother, Beya, busied herself in the kitchen without sitting down herself. This time I could see that her actions were a form of deference. Tchiza belonged at the table, and so did the guests; Beya stayed in the background. I told the boys’ father that before we spoke further, I wanted to make sure this was a good time. I had texted to see if this hour was okay, but had not gotten a response. Berhane translated all of this into Swahili.
Tchiza smiled broadly. “Well, we don’t have the same concept of time,” he explained to me kindly, as if I were his student. Apparently, we were going to study another culture together: Congolese ways. He would instruct me. “We don’t pick one hour and ask can we knock on your door then,” Tchiza said, as if doing something so formal as that were the craziest thing in the world. “We just drop by! If you are home, then it is a good time!”
So, this was a good time.
Beya brought to the table several cans of pineapple Fanta, one bowl of potatoes and beans, and three spoons. There was a spoon for me, a spoon for her husband, and a spoon for our interpreter, but there was no spoon for Beya. I did not sense any resentment on Beya’s part about this. She waited on us with an aura of gladness. But to me, it was strange, having her attend to the rest of us and keep herself apart.
“This is a sign of respect,” the interpreter told me, pointing at the food Beya had just put on the table. “We will all eat from the same bowl.”
Oh, that’s nice! I thought. I’ve been fully welcomed into the family.
“Also, it is a good way not to get poisoned,”
Tchiza added, with a little glint in his eye. “If you go to someone else’s home, and you all eat from the same bowl, then you cannot pour poison into their food, because if you did, then you would eat the poison, too.”
He smiled. Our exchange was amusing to him. Me, too. Beya had cooked the potatoes in tomatoes and onions and spices, and served them mixed with red beans that had been simmered until they were melting. The food was hearty and simple and I enjoyed it immensely. I simultaneously felt guilty about eating a meal bought with food stamps, but I was raised by people who consider it an important mark of hospitality to share food. So I found the act of eating with Tchiza to be meaningful. And in Congolese culture, I would eventually learn, when I brought gifts like a pineapple to their home, I was offering them a blessing, and by feeding me, they were offering me a blessing in return.
We spoke about their lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I thought maybe I should start with a softball kind of question.
“What kind of work did you do in the Congo?” I asked.
“Actually, in the Congo, people don’t do just one job and then come home, no—it’s not like this,” Tchiza replied.
He had done many different things. He had farmed (beans, cassava, sorghum, corn, peas, and sweet potatoes), advised other farmers, taught, become a leader in his village, and written reports about the movement of goods back and forth across the border for the government in Kinshasa. In his culture, one could not neatly pigeonhole a person by occupation; in my culture, we did so all the time. Time, work—at the most fundamental level, his concept of things differed from mine. Our ways of thinking about all aspects of life appeared a little at odds. And both Tchiza and I enjoyed discovering these discrepancies and turning them over in our minds. It was fun to hear what he had to say to my oh-so-American questions.
* * *
After what I considered a decent interval, I turned the conversation to the subject of the ongoing violence in the Congo, which in parts of the country had continued to the present day. What had led the family to flee their home village, walk for months, and spend five grueling years inside a refugee settlement? Why had they left the DRC? Tchiza started talking about Rwanda and the genocide that had swept that country in 1994. Then he spoke of the waves of Hutu and Tutsi escapees who had spilled over into the Democratic Republic of Congo, carrying strife with them. He described how the enmities born in Rwanda had taken root on Congolese soil. And he spoke at length of the various governments of the DRC—Mobutu, Kabila, and Kabila.
Then we got into an alphabet soup of armed groups that had represented the interests of either the Congolese government or its two main rivals, the countries of Rwanda and Uganda. Next came the militia groups that had splintered off the original armed groups. After that, we began talking about the mai mai, the villagers who had taken up arms to defend themselves against all of these marauders. I got lost somewhere in the middle, amid the acronyms and the tribal stuff. I could not absorb all the details, but I came away with the notion of a jumble of allegiances and betrayals, mixed with a lot of weaponry. One acronym stood out—CNDP. Tchiza said those letters a lot, always with the French pronunciation (“say, ehn, day, pay”). But who the CNDP was, or what they had against this group or that group, I could not follow.
While Tchiza was describing how their once peaceful village had gotten caught up in an endless cycle of violence, with different rifle-bearing commandos pillaging for food, and I was struggling to understand who was doing the pillaging and why, Beya became obviously distraught. This subject bothered her, a lot. She communicated this wordlessly, by shaking her head back and forth and then waggling both of her hands at Tchiza, as if to say, Stop, stop, stop.
Meanwhile, Tchiza spoke only in generalities. What about the particulars? Where did his personal allegiances lie? Whom did he know who had been hurt? Whom had he been trying his utmost to protect? Tchiza mentioned again the underlying Hutu and Tutsi alignments with the various militia groups in North Kivu. More acronyms. I felt as though he kept telling me the story and yet not telling me the story.
“What tribe are you?” I asked.
I had the intuition, as soon as the words were out of my mouth, that this might be a question that only an American would ask.
“Well, people can just look at you and tell,” replied Tchiza.
“I can’t tell, though,” I said. “What tribe are you?”
“You can just tell by looking at someone’s face, that’s how we know,” Tchiza said, demurring.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I can’t see those differences in people’s features. What tribe are you?”
“Hutu,” he said finally.
I had gotten an answer, but in the room there was a chill. I sensed that perhaps I had made a mistake. What I would learn eventually is that the tribalism of Africa is subtle, complex, and nearly unfathomable to outsiders. Customs are closely held and generally not written down. Some of the old ways might even go unspoken, or might be passed along from parent to child only at key life moments, a precious gift to be handed over at just the right juncture.
Each tribe has specific habits around what to eat, or which animals to hold in high regard, some of which might sound outlandish in Europe or the United States. A few customs sounded outlandish even to me, but the basic concept underpinning tribalism was highly familiar. The Irish hew to divisions, too; we derive a sense of who we are from similar juxtapositions. We define ourselves by what county our family once farmed, or what side of Dublin the last generation claimed as home, or what type of whiskey we drink. My mother is from County Cavan, which means that her people are known to be closefisted with resources, words, and vital information. If you are from Cavan, most likely your last name will be Brady. Once, I went to a reunion at the small village schoolhouse my mother had attended as a child—I was standing in on her behalf, because she was all the way over in America, and I happened to be in Ireland—and when I went to sign the register recording who had come to the event, I saw that it read: “Brady. Brady. Brady. Brady. Brady.” You would not say any more than that, on an official form, if you were from Cavan.
Thus, when Tchiza gave me a one-word answer, said only, “Hutu,” I recognized what was happening. This was the truth, but it was given grudgingly, under pressure; consequently, it was only a partial truth. The complete version of the family’s story, which I would learn in time, was more whimsical and more particular. Tchiza’s family belonged to the Ababanda Ba Bahoma tribe, a subclan within the general grouping known as Hutu. Across Africa, totems and taboos are used by tribes to create a sense of being at home. The Ababanda Ba Bahoma avoided eating certain kinds of meat, for example. “We don’t like sheep,” Tchiza’s brother, Nehemie, would tell me later. “We cannot eat it. We hate sheep.”
Or a tribe might hold a certain animal in high regard. If elephants are considered sacred, for example, then the tribe is obligated to protect and defend that totem.
“We respect birds,” Nehemie told me. “We respect especially the wagtail bird.”
The wagtail bird is so named because of its frequent tail-wagging behavior; it nests on the ground and lays perhaps six speckled eggs at a time. Because it eats insects that devour crops, the wagtail bird protects the food that families grow in that part of the Congo.
* * *
Tchiza and his siblings grew up in the village of Buganza, near the town of Rutshuru, in North Kivu. The closest major city is Goma, but Buganza is secreted away in a high and remote area, surrounded by hills. The roads that lead there are unpaved, and the village has running water but no electricity. Although the Congo is a largely Catholic country, Tchiza’s father attended a Protestant-based Bible school as a young man (a California-born missionary founded the school). He later started a Baptist church in Buganza, where he served as pastor. He died when Tchiza was still living in the village. When I asked Nehemie what their father had taught them, he said, “To know God. To love God.”
The turning point for Tchiza�
�the moment when he decided it was no longer safe to remain in Buganza—came after he began to play a greater leadership role and thus became a larger target. In July 2006, he ran for public office in the first multiparty elections to take place in the Democratic Republic of Congo in forty-one years. Voters were electing both a president and a new National Assembly, and Tchiza was hoping to join that legislative body. Armed clashes took place during the collection of the results (which were declared inconclusive, leading to a runoff later that year), and during the turmoil, Tchiza heard that his life was in danger. The violence he had tried to curtail had instead come to his door. He would die if he remained in the DRC, that was clear, Tchiza said.
The family left at 2 A.M. Each of them wore four sets of clothing and carried what else they could. They were going to walk to Uganda, and it would take several months. I asked, “How many children were with you at the time?” It seemed a simple question, to me—I just wanted to be able to envision how many of them were walking along those dusty roads wearing so many clothes.
The conversation took a strange turn. There was talk of Beya having three children, when based on the ages of the children I had seen, I thought she must have had six or seven. There was talk about what the word “children” meant. Did it mean tiny ones you had to carry while you were walking yourself? Or were you supposed to include the big ones who could walk on their own? Frustrated with not getting clear numbers, I put my hand on Berhane’s arm and tilted my head, a gesture by which I meant, Hey, why are you guys talking so much in Swahili? The interpreter looked at me with infinite patience and held up one finger, meaning, Just wait. She listened some more and then turned back to me.
Berhane confessed that she was having a little trouble communicating with Beya, because the version of Swahili Beya spoke was different from the version the interpreter had learned in Kenya. As far as she could make out, Beya spoke a version of Swahili mixed with a tribal language, plus a whole lot of French. It was only when I had asked the most elemental of questions that our level of confusion had become apparent: Among the three of us, we did not have an entire set of shared terms. This meant that, at best, I was hearing only an approximation of the story I was seeking. Such was the norm in my encounters with refugees, I had started to accept. There would be a whole lot of talking, we would achieve a muddled exchange, then maybe we might find some clarity about the level of confusion, and perhaps after that we might reach an understanding that was a bit less muddled.