Disturbed in Their Nests

by Alephonsion Deng

  “Very much crying and joyfulness,” Benson added.

  “I can imagine.” But I really couldn’t. I couldn’t imagine being separated from family so young and for so many years because of a war. All that time not knowing who was alive. Or dead. I couldn’t imagine wondering if I’d ever have family again or begin to know what it must feel like to find a brother after all those years.

  “I have headaches and nightmares,” Alepho said.

  I’d heard that could be a symptom of post-­traumatic stress disorder. “Joseph told me he was getting you some medicine for your stomach. Is it feeling better?”

  “No. I lose my appetite.”

  “Did you have this when you were in Kakuma?”

  “It is worse here.”

  “Then you must tell Joseph.”

  “I must wait for card.”

  What card? He was asking for help and I was already lost.

  Alepho brought out a Newsweek magazine.

  “Did you like reading it?” I asked.

  “Yes, it is good book. I learn many things about America.”

  “Great. I will bring you more like it.”

  “Yesterday I read about a pedophile.”

  He said it without emotion or humor and not looking at me. They seldom looked at me. Wonderful. A pedophile. Welcome to America. I was embarrassed but also had a protective feeling, like he shouldn’t have been exposed to those weaknesses in our society yet. A silly response. Surely, it was no different in Africa. He was a grown man who had been through a war. Even Cliff was probably aware of those sorts.

  He opened the magazine to an article called “Out of Africa.”

  “This is about us,” he said.

  The Lost Boys article that I’d read several months earlier. “I read that last May,” I told him, trying to make eye contact. “That is how I knew some of your story.” I wanted to read it again. The details would have more meaning now.

  He smiled and glanced at my eyes before looking down again. I’d ask Joseph about that. Even if it was uncomfortable for them, they needed to change that habit of looking down or away when they spoke. It wouldn’t serve them in any situation here.

  “I was told that in America it is important to look into a person’s eyes,” he said, as if reading my mind. “That is not acceptable in Sudan.”

  He didn’t look at me again. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. Here, it is good to look people in the eyes. It shows that you have interest in what the person is saying.”

  “I’m learning that,” he said with another glance into my eyes. His attempts to adapt were admirable. “Must one call before visiting?”

  He could jump from one subject to another faster than I could conceive of a thoughtful answer. “That is polite, yes.”

  “I want to be a doctor,” he said.

  We talked about their education, English classes, GED test, and going to college. We understood each other better each time we met, but our conversations were like talking over an old-­fashioned long-­distance line, where there’s a time lapse while the transmission travels the cable. They often paused after a sentence, and I was too quick to interject or answer, not realizing they weren’t done. I overran their words. Worse, when two, or even all of them, talked at once, they just went on talking at the same time, in the same tone, not raising their volume to compete with one another and forcing me to decide who to listen to.

  The conversation about education gathered them around with bubbling enthusiasm. Obviously, education was their top priority. I explained the structure of our school system and the process of becoming a doctor.

  “Too many years to be doctor,” Lino said.

  “There is saying in Sudan,” Benson said. “Get education and fight with your mind.”

  Benson had a large collection of sayings and proverbs. I wished I had a gift for remembering like that. “And you will find good work too,” I told him.

  Mentioning work brought up a whole new round of questions and concerns.

  “I want to work,” Benson said.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  “Any work. Do you know of work near our house?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but I live thirty miles north of here and don’t know people or businesses in this area. Joseph said the IRC will help you to find jobs. Focus on school. Once you pass the GED, there are scholarships or grants to help with college.”

  “Madam Judy,” Lino said.

  It occurred to me then that they hadn’t addressed me as anything yet.

  “Please call me Judy. We aren’t so formal here.”

  They smiled but didn’t look convinced.

  On the way to IRC we stopped by the bank. Each one received eighty dollars a week. They cashed the checks and stuffed the money in their pockets. No wallets. I wondered how many more months they’d receive this assistance.

  I was hungry and we had some time to kill. “Do you want to try Mexican food?” A taco shop was just across the street, and I was eager to introduce them to my favorite food.

  “No. American.”

  We walked to McDonald’s again. While we ate, I recalled an article that claimed City Heights was one of the most diverse communities in America. Just looking around inside the McDonald’s confirmed it to be true. As I pondered that, Alepho said, “We think Americans are beautiful people.”

  “Really?” I was thinking what a motley, mixed-­up bunch we must look like to them. From pasty white and splotchy pink to every shade of brown and black imaginable; from short to tall, thin to fat, though not too many thin people here in McDonald’s. Couples didn’t match each other, and many kids didn’t look like the parents they were with. Lots of variety and still the three Sudanese men stood out. Tall, thin, darker than anyone else, plus their perfect posture gave them a regal bearing. Not to mention, they were dressed more formally than anyone else. “Why do you think Americans are beautiful?”

  “Americans very smooth.”

  “I think many Americans are too fat,” I said. “It’s not healthy.”

  “I want to be fat,” Alepho declared. “In Sudan there is a competition. The men drink milk for a month and the fattest man wins the prettiest, most clever girl to marry.”

  Lino held up his well-­muscled arm and pointed. “You see the muscles.”

  I did. Only long hours in a gym would produce that enviable definition.

  “Look ugly,” he concluded.

  “Americans like to see the muscles,” I said, thinking that in an odd way showing them some of our magazines with underfed models might actually be a good thing for their self-­esteem. “I think the Sudanese are beautiful people.”

  BLIND DATE

  Alepho

  Our roommates Daniel and James had become acquainted with life in the US. They said we had to pay for everything. I didn’t understand. I thought the house and the things in it belonged to all of us, just like the camp. “Food, water, rent, and electricity too,” they said. “In America, you gotta get moving.”

  Excitement left me. How would I pay for these things? I wanted to get moving, but where does a person go to look for a job? I saw signs for all kinds of food, discount stores, and places to get quick money, but I had not seen any signs that said jobs.

  Most importantly, I needed to complete my education in America. I’d had that goal since I was a child in my village and saw a white streak make its way across the sky.

  “What is that?” I’d asked my father.

  “Alepho, that’s the big bird.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  My father pointed west. “Far away, where the sun sets, there is a huge lake. Only the big bird can cross it. On the other side of that lake is another land where white people live. They use magic power to control the big bird.”

  “How do they get
magic power?”

  “They go to school. They have education.”

  I was only four, but that story stuck with me. I wanted that magic power, too.

  The next year a new kind of learning came to our village. My father sold many cows to send my brother Yier, the oldest son of his first wife, to a place called school.

  Yier went away for a season to study. When he returned from the university he looked different. The men of our village either wore nothing or the traditional jalabiyas, long sand-­colored shirts that nearly reached the ground. Yier had a short blue shirt and a separate garment that covered each leg, which he called pants.

  All of us village children, maybe fifty together, gathered around Yier. He told us stories we’d never heard before, stories not told in our village. He removed a flat white thing, like a big leaf, from his bag. He asked each child his or her name and scratched the white thing with a small stick that made marks. “Come back tomorrow,” he instructed us.

  We gathered early the next morning. Yier held up the white sheet with the marks and spoke each of our names in the exact order we had given them the day before. When he called, “Alepho,” I couldn’t even answer. How did he get our names from the white thing? My brother had become a wizard.

  “How did you become a wizard?” I asked.

  “School,” he said. “That is where I learned to read and write. It doesn’t make me a wizard, but it is magical.”

  I wanted that magic power to fly the big bird and know things like a wizard. But my chance to go to school did not come. War came instead.

  Now, here I was in America where people had the magic. I had to find a way to get my education.

  • • •

  In the evenings, we gathered in the main room of the apartment to watch the television. BBC World News was our favorite. A local news show came on after that with news about the weather in San Diego. A man talked so fast that I couldn’t understand him, but at the end he always shouted the station name in a funny way. I liked that part. Some shows were about animals, and even though I grew up with lots of animals, educational shows about them—with someone explaining what they ate, how they hunted, and where they lived—interested me. I realized that television was a place to begin my education.

  One afternoon I discovered television shows about American culture. I looked forward each day to Blind Date and The 5th Wheel, which explained two ways to meet girls in America.

  In Blind Date, the guy stepped out of a nice vehicle, dressed well, and used proper English to impress the lady. It seemed that before I met a girl I needed a car, fancy clothes, and to work on my English skills.

  Sometimes the dates did not go well. A beep sounded when they spoke, and their mouths went blurry, as though magic had shut off their words.

  “They are saying curse words,” James explained.

  Those dates were called “Dates from Hell.”

  When the dates went well and the lady and man got together, they called them “Hot Zones.”

  The 5th Wheel was more complicated. Two men and two ladies met each other and all went out together. One more man or one more woman joined them. At the end of the show each person voted on who they would like to go on a date with.

  Everyone said that America was a diverse country, but I didn’t understand at first that they meant the cultures were diverse also. Now I saw there was more than one way to meet a girl in America. Both of these cultures were different from Dinka culture. When approaching a Dinka girl you did not reveal your true personality the first time you met. You went with manners. Some of the people on the American dating shows were so blunt. Only after you had known a Dinka girl for some time could you reveal your true personality like that. The people on TV revealed their true personality on the first date.

  I fell between two worlds. Because I’d left my village when I was so young I only knew a little about my own culture, and I didn’t know anything about American culture. Now that I was here, I needed to understand how American people lived.

  What I saw on TV was the American life—so, if I wanted to be an American, I needed to learn these things.

  SUN VALLEY

  Judy

  In early September, Paul and I flew to Boise for a writing conference in Sun Valley. Soon after I’d begun working on my novel, Paul had started a medical thriller and joined my weekly writers group.

  It was late morning and at least a hundred degrees outside by the time we started out in a rental car. The air-conditioning ran full blast. Although Idaho wasn’t the official “Big Sky Country,” these vistas stretched for fifty miles or more. It was gorgeous.

  Yet, as I gazed out the window, I wasn’t contemplating the writer’s conference or even the beauty of the surrounding terrain. All I could envision were little boys walking across something this hot, this barren, and this immense. Thousands like them had made that journey, but it was Benson, Lino, and Alepho who were on my mind. Their stories varied in detail, but each had lost everything a child needs. What kind of impact did that have on a person? When did they realize that they weren’t going home? They’d told me so much about the sounds, the smells, the guns, and the deprivation, but nothing about their confusion and terror. I thought I had grasped it intellectually, but I couldn’t feel it. It was too foreign from anything in my own reality.

  “What’s that glassy-­eyed stare?” Paul asked. “You look like you’re writing a whole chapter in your head.”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “Is there something distracting you from finishing your book?”

  “No, I’m just thinking.”

  “I’m not supposed to say anything, right?”

  I smiled. “Not a word.”

  “I know what it is.”

  I shook my head. He probably did. Thirty years of marriage rendered private thoughts elusive. “You’re right. This last couple of weeks have given me a lot to think about.”

  “You told me not to let you get distracted from your novel.”

  “I know. I’ll finish it. But you’ll understand when you meet them.”

  He turned to me. “I already understand. But you’ve helped people before, like your SDSU students, and still wrote.”

  “I know,” I said and touched my fingers to the heated glass of the window.

  “This is different, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s different.”

  “How?”

  Some of the students I’d helped were refugees, but mostly adults like Joseph, established, with their own lives and families. Already involved in their communities, enough so they took on projects to help their communities even further. I only assisted them with those projects, not their lives. “It’s hard to put into words. But I guess you could say they are different because I see a huge potential in them that is at great risk here in the US.”

  He leaned back in the seat, straightened his arms against the steering wheel, and looked over at me. “You keep telling me how smart and well educated they are. How they have strong values and are disciplined. Maybe you’re underestimating them.”

  I pondered that for a moment. “That’s interesting—I’d been thinking everyone else was underestimating them. The articles and TV shows all talk about how they were coming from the Stone Age. So insulting. They’re much more complex than that. Their situation may have been Stone Age, but they have substantial education. When I bring up politics or what’s going on in the world, they’re often more informed than I am. You might be right, I could be underestimating them, but I don’t think I’m underestimating how challenging it’s going to be for them here. They’ll be lucky to start at minimum wage jobs, so they definitely have to work full time. I’m just afraid they’ll fall into that trap of sacrificing themselves for their kids like most immigrants do. They’re still kids themselves. I’d hate to see them not be able to get that education they really want.”<
br />
  “Sounds like an opportunity to make a positive difference in someone’s life. Isn’t that what you always wanted to do?”

  “Can I make a difference?”

  “Now who’s underestimating?”

  “My novel might make a difference too. Besides, I’ve always wanted to finish something. I get distracted too easily. That’s my problem.”

  He gave me a familiar grin. “I know. I was one of those distractions.”

  He was. We’d married when I was nineteen and he was twenty-­one. I had quit college in my second year to work while he went to medical school. “But I’m thirty years older now. I said I would finish the book. I’m going to focus on finishing the book.”

  HARD CULTURE

  Alepho

  Sometime after I’d arrived in Kakuma camp, my friend Santino told me, “If a girl sees you cooking that will be a shame on you. Only women do cooking.”

  My mother and sisters cooked for my father and us boys, but that was in the village. No one had ever said that my father and brothers weren’t allowed to cook. I’d been cooking or finding my own food since I left home.

  “Why can’t I cook?”

  “You will be considered greedy. No girl will want to marry or engage you either.”

  From then on, we cooked together near our huts where women or girls wouldn’t see us. Yet, I had felt overwhelmed by the hard culture of my people. Since I’d been in America, I’d read about men who were the best cooks in the world. How could that be?

  Santino had also told me, “Wherever you go or live, Alepho, remember not to forget your culture.”

  It had been difficult as a young boy in the camp to stick to and value my Dinka traditions. I’d left my village young and did not learn much about our ways. By the time I reached America, I had been wandering by myself for almost thirteen years, without parental teaching and care. There was no one to teach me my own traditions.

  Cultural things were rare in the refugee camp where so many people of different backgrounds were stranded together. And, when one is destitute, life itself becomes a jewel. Just being alive meant more to us than the type of cloth we wore or the way we cooked.