“How many people live here?” I asked.
“Five boys.”
The term “boy” made me uncomfortable. Joseph used it, however, and they continually referred to each other that way. “By themselves?” When I’d first heard that Lost Boys would be living together in small groups in the inner city, I wondered how well they would do. Especially alone. Even kids with family support were at high risk in neighborhoods like this. “Joseph,” I whispered, “this neighborhood. Aren’t you concerned?”
He smiled. “Not too much. They are good boys.”
They seemed like good boys, but Joseph was a relative newcomer too, and a family man. Did he know about the gangs and crime in this area?
“I’m sure they’re great boys. But is it safe here?”
“Mentors will be very helpful to them.”
This was the second time he’d mentioned mentors. What exactly did he mean by that in terms of refugees? Was it an official role? I’d heard of sponsors, but the guys were already here, and IRC was taking care of the basics.
I didn’t respond to Joseph. I couldn’t and wouldn’t commit to something like mentoring now. Cliff still needed me around after school and weekends were for family. My free time on weekdays was dedicated to completing my novel. I was already involved with United Cerebral Palsy and the San Dieguito River Valley Conservancy. In recent months, I’d been trying to add focus and discipline to my life, not distractions, which was why a day or two as a tour guide around the city had made perfect sense in the first place.
Benson went into a bedroom and returned with two books, one small and thick and the other large and thin. Obviously they were precious by the way he cradled them. I recalled a scene in the 60 Minutes segment detailing how some boys had carried books all the way from a camp in Ethiopia.
He extended the smaller one toward me. “Dinka Bible.”
No bigger than my palm with a dingy, white cover, it lay lightly in my hand, yet was weighty with symbolism. From what I’d learned about the situation in Sudan, the beliefs within that cover had inspired so much hatred that two million of his countrymen had been killed.
“Are you Christian?” Alepho wanted to know.
He sure asked probing questions. “My grandmother was Episcopalian, sort of, but my parents didn’t go to church. When I married my husband, Paul, I converted to Judaism.” I wanted to say that I thought religion should be more like pizza. Some people could prefer a thin crispy crust, others the doughy deep dish with extra cheese, and others not at all, yet everyone could still be friends. But I realized that pizza as a metaphor might not work.
The three just looked at me.
“I believe that all religions have some good things to offer,” I added. “They have so many things in common. It’s a shame there are wars over the differences.”
They nodded. Benson handed me the larger book. “Manifesto of the SPLA. Sudanese People’s Liberation Army.”
I knew so little about the history and politics of Sudan. I thumbed through the pages. “What language is this?”
“Dinka,” Benson said. “Please read.”
“I can’t read Dinka.”
“You can do it,” they said.
The words were short and I read them aloud using the logical phonetics of Spanish, the only other language I knew. They listened politely. I thought I was doing well until I came to the second line. They roared in laughter. I laughed too. Formalities had been shoved aside, and these serious, proper, young gentlemen were suddenly gleeful.
“Please,” I said, “teach me to say something correctly in Dinka.”
Benson said something I couldn’t begin to repeat.
“How about ‘thank you’? Can you teach me how to say that? Please, can you write it on a piece of paper so I can see it?” As a visual learner, not to mention that math was my strength and language my weakness, my only hope was to see something written.
He wrote, yin ca leec.
“Yin ka leek,” I said.
“Yin sha laish,” he corrected.
I repeated it several times. At least I would be able to thank them in their language.
Alepho pointed to a dusty, discolored computer monitor and an old central processing unit on the table. “Can you make that work?”
My background was in the computer industry, but resurrecting and reconnecting such antiquated computer components was beyond my skills or desire. It probably couldn’t do much anyway. The difficulty of using its limited functions would only discourage them. It impressed me, though, that he sensed the value of a computer on only his third day in America.
A man came out from one of the bedrooms and extended his hand. “Hello, I’m James.”
He was the same height and coloring as the others but appeared a bit older. We shook hands and made introductions.
“How long have you been in the US?” I asked.
“Three month.”
As he spoke his forehead wrinkled along five faint lines that radiated up from between his brows.
“Can you find job for me?” James asked.
“I don’t know this area too well. Have you put applications into businesses?” Not wanting to be rude, but eager for a second look at his forehead, I let my gaze float an inch above his eyes. He wasn’t looking at me anyway.
“I work, you see, and it is good, but I need other job. Sometimes one, maybe two …”
I didn’t understand the rest of his sentence, but it gave me a chance to look at the pattern of scars like sun rays that radiated up to his hairline and gave him an intense, serious expression. It looked intentional. I wondered what it represented and how he got it.
“What do you do at work?” I worried about Benson, Lino, and Alepho finding jobs. They were too young and new to America to face this harsh reality so soon. From what Joseph had told me, federal funding paid for the first three months, but after that refugees like the Lost Boys were pretty much on their own. Daunting expectations for boys who were not only young and alone, but who also came from such a different world. Good thing the three newcomers had been placed with older roommates who had been here a little longer.
James responded, “Set up tables and chairs for hotel banquet. Good work, but only one or two day.”
Only one or two days of work per week. Now I understood. Considering the job probably paid minimum wage, that would be impossible to survive on in Southern California, no matter how thrifty one’s lifestyle.
Yet I was no more prepared for James’ request than I had been for Alepho wanting to sign up for school. I looked to Joseph for rescue, but he was quite obviously waiting to see what I said.
“I go everywhere,” James said. “I go downtown. Everywhere. They say, ‘No jobs. No jobs.’ ”
“The IRC has job development,” Joseph interjected. “They will help you.”
I added, “Yes, the IRC knows more than I do.”
We exchanged names. I gave them my cell phone number and wrote down the number to the phone in their apartment. Alepho wrote something on a scrap of paper and showed it to me. The words “size” and “seize” in neat handwriting.
“We do not have dictionary,” he said. “I understand meaning of these words, but how does one pronounce them?”
I sounded out each word. Their extensive vocabulary surprised me. They seemed to have less difficulty understanding me than I did them. “We must get you a dictionary,” I said, happy to agree to something I could provide. The day was passing quickly, but I still wanted to buy them new shoes and maybe some new clothes. I worried they’d get beat up wearing the clothing they had: pants four inches too short, one pair a yellow plaid like someone’s old golf hand-me-downs. I didn’t want to insult anyone; it was a matter of safety.
“Joseph, can we go somewhere and let them pick out new shirts and pants?”
“Sure.”
“We want to register for school and find a job.”
“The IRC will help you with that,” said Joseph. “And your mentor will too. Let’s go to the store today. Walmart has good prices.”
WALMART
Judy
Cliff talked with the guys while I drove. The afternoon was flying by too quickly. Showing them San Diego would be entertaining and educational for all of us, but I was realizing they had more urgent needs and desires. Clearly the advice and connections of a mature native would be invaluable, but that native wasn’t me. I lived forty minutes north of the city, and had been out of the business world since Cliff was born. Sure, I felt an urge to help them, but I wasn’t equipped for the duties and responsibilities of mentoring. I couldn’t help with the two things they’d already asked, school and work. I had no idea what else might be entailed.
Yet, I could see they needed guidance and wondered if the mentor they did get would give it to them.
We parked on the edge of Walmart’s crowded lot. I asked Joseph, “Would they mind if I take a picture?”
He smiled. “It’s okay.”
I pulled a camera from my purse. “I’d like to take a photo.”
They leapt into a group and grabbed Cliff to pose with them. “Get the cars in the picture,” they instructed. I took several shots of very enthusiastic subjects.
Inside the store, they craned their necks upward. Benson stretched both arms toward the ceiling. “A royal palace. Is this the store for the whole United States?”
Not quite. Probably the oldest, smallest Walmart in San Diego. “There are many like this.”
He looked at me with disbelief.
With each thing we did, I better fathomed how little they understood of the world outside the refugee camp.
We found pants and shirts for each of them. Lino, who towered over six feet yet had only a thirty-inch waist, insisted on the forty-four-inch belt. He pointed out that the extra leather for the same price was a good value. Then he politely asked, “Can you allow us some shoes?”
The others spoke sharply to him in Dinka.
“Shoes are why we came,” I said. “Let’s have a look.”
The style and size selections in the shoe department initially overwhelmed them, but eventually they started trying on shoes. Benson made his selection first.
Cliff asked, “May I take Benson to get some pencils?”
In the car, Benson had told Cliff that he liked to draw with colored pencils. While the others finished selecting shoes, Cliff and Benson started down the aisle together on a quest for colored pencils. Even though Cliff didn’t come much above Benson’s waist, I could see that he was confident and fully in control. Halfway down the aisle, Benson reached out a long graceful arm and put it around Cliff’s shoulders. Tiny bumps rippled along my arms. I wished my camera could have captured that moment. I stared after them, burning the scene into my mind. Even when they’d disappeared around the corner, I didn’t turn back to the others. My welling tears might have confused them.
The rest of us meandered through aisles and all of the things must have been strange to them. We caught up with Cliff and Benson in the school-supplies area. Now Alepho and Lino were interested too. “Would you like a composition book and some pens?”
Their eyes lit up. “Yes. We want to write down everything we see.”
After much deliberation and quite a bit of discussion in Dinka, they each chose a small pocket-sized notebook.
“You don’t want something larger?”
Benson asked, “If we write, will you help with our English?”
“Of course. That would be a pleasure.”
I handed my credit card to the person at the register, grateful that I could afford things to help these boys. While I paid at the checkout, Alepho went over to a ten-foot-tall stack of boxes of strawberry SlimFast. I’d already demonstrated how a can opener worked (even though they didn’t know what a can was) and tried to explain so many other things that my American world was beginning to look ridiculous even to me. I did not want to explain diet food.
“What is this?” he asked. His shoulder bones jutted out beneath his shirt. Like the others, he was close to six feet tall yet probably weighed less than me.
I sighed. “You drink this to get thin.”
He nodded with an expression that wasn’t sarcastic or judgmental, just pleased that he’d understood correctly what he’d been reading.
The others joined us. Their bewildered looks prompted me to explain further. “Remember what I said about eating too much of the food at the restaurant and what you said about Americans being fat?”
They nodded.
“Once they get fat they eat this to get thin again.”
My own words embarrassed me. How many hungry people could be fed with what Americans spent to get thin again?
AMERICAN SMELL
Alepho
We called it the American smell. Everywhere we went, the new clothes, inside the cars, in our apartment, each place had scents that were different than anything in Africa. My mind was fine-tuned to smells. They created a lot of questions in me.
I asked Judy to sign us up for school and help us find a job. She didn’t give me an answer to that question, but she and Joseph said they would take us to a store. We arrived at a place that was like a city inside a building.
Benson said, “Stay together. There are cities within cities. You don’t want to get lost and go into another city.”
I wanted Benson to be there with me, but I didn’t want him to tell me to do this and not that. I was like a young cat wanting to explore this new world. I had a hunger to learn things quickly, to figure out how things worked, because I knew that understanding helped a lot in surviving. There were so many things I didn’t understand here.
Judy asked, “Would you like to pick out some new clothes?”
The clothes we’d been given in Kenya smelled new, but these in America smelled better. They smelled fancy.
After we picked out the clothes, we walked around this huge store. What were all of these things? Did people buy them? We came to a row of objects that looked like guns.
“Guns,” Lino said in Dinka.
Benson said, “They don’t look like guns.”
“These are American guns,” I explained. “I saw these short, round guns in American movies. They are more modern than ours. They look small but when they shoot they destroy a lot.”
Movies in the camp had given me clues about things here. We used to grow okra near the water tap and sell it until we had saved up five shillings to go to the Ethiopian area, where some people had a television and a tape machine that ran on car batteries. Another world happened on that little screen. I saw Double Impact and Broken Arrow. Predator had a very scary thing that ate people, but it lived in the jungle, so I wasn’t worried about it here in the city. Benson usually saw movies first; he liked finding things out. He saw a movie about Buddha. I didn’t know about Buddha until he told me. We saw Rambo. My friends thought the fighting was good. They said his moves were skilled. I wondered about that. Why did people say America was a peaceful country if it produced such skilled fighters? Maybe the fighting was only in a small part of America, not the whole country.
Later another kind of movie came to the camp. People were fooled by the cover of the tape they put on the outside to show what the movie was about. They had titles like Hot Game but the cover didn’t show what happened in the movie. People went to see it and asked, “Is this what white people are doing? Are things like this considered normal for movies in other parts of the world?” Some people just left. I was careful to not waste my money on these films. I liked movies with spaceships and flying objects that made me wonder how a human being could create something that was heavy yet still flew.
Eating a handful of cooked cornmeal once a day was not enough. I’d been to the clinic in the camp. They prescribed aspirin, but it did nothing to alleviate the pain. I’d hoped that in America that pain would leave me. Happiness would be the day I didn’t have a headache.
Now that I would have food in America, my interest in education was cemented. Without the constant hunger, I would be able to learn. I could build my life on my education. Education would allow me to belong in the world like a letter belongs in the alphabet. No one is better than the other, each one does a different thing in society. Which letter was I? What could I do? That was what I was determined to find out.
Movies showed me what was outside the camp. After the movies, we had often discussed what was real or not. I leaned toward believing things were real and that they were somewhere else in the world. If not, how could they take pictures of them? People came to our camp with cameras, so I knew about cameras, and they took pictures of real things.
“I am going to ask about these guns,” Lino said.
“Don’t ask too many questions,” Benson warned.
Lino asked Judy anyway. We went close to listen for her answer.
Judy said, “No, no, those aren’t guns. They dry your hair.”
We looked at each other. Why would someone want to dry their hair?
Judy said, “When your hair gets wet, that’s the way to get rid of the water.”
Disturbed in Their Nests Page 4