Often, when Judy explained things to us, we didn’t know what was the right thing to say. We just said, “Oh. Oh. Yeah.” And nodded our heads like Americans. When we asked Judy a question and she gave us an explanation, then we didn’t have more to say.
I sat at Judy’s table. My head hurt and my stomach felt like I’d drank bad water but I knew the water in America wasn’t bad. I expressed to Benson how embarrassed I was to ask Judy about my personal problems.
Benson said, “First inquire what is culturally acceptable before you plunge into a raging water.”
In the Dinka culture, “plunging into raging water” was an expression for someone who is full of follies, someone who does not read the situation carefully. A person who acts spurred by instancy. After hearing Benson’s advice, I decided not to ask Judy about my headaches and stomachaches.
BOTOX
Judy
Alepho’s brooding gaze didn’t leave the stack of newspapers with the burning towers.
“The attack in New York wasn’t your fault,” I said.
His eyebrows knitted. “They are angry at America for bringing the Lost Boys.”
I didn’t want to say it had nothing to do with you; that sounded belittling. But … really? “We don’t know who did it yet. Could be an American. No one will blame you.”
Lino held up his torn backpack. “Where is sewing machine?”
I led him to the spare bedroom, opened up the cabinet, and lifted out my Sears sewing machine. Twenty-nine years earlier my mother had given it to me as a wedding gift. For a dizzying moment, I thought of how much she would have liked to meet these three young men. Living through the Depression, a war, and a peripatetic life not of her own choosing had given her a big heart for the underdog. Unfortunately, she’d passed away in 1984. I missed sharing things like this with her.
“I know this machine,” Lino said. “Just like one in Kakuma.”
“Really? Wow. You had one like this? That’s interesting.” I opened the supply drawer. “Help yourself to whatever you need.” He took out the seam ripper and set to work taking apart the backpack.
In the kitchen, Alepho was looking through a research book on Native American medicine.
“Alephonsion sounds Spanish,” I said.
“That name was given to me in the camp.”
“What’s your Dinka name?”
“Awer. Sounds like ‘aware’ in English.”
“Oh, I like that. What does it mean?”
“It means like a window where the light comes through.”
“You’re so aware of things. How prophetic. That means—”
“I know what prophetic means.”
Alepho’s intensity could put me off balance. I was about to make apologies for assuming he didn’t know what “prophetic” meant when he smiled. His smiles were rare and restrained. He had one darkened front tooth, as though it had been broken and bled. Perhaps he was self-conscious. I’d have to ask Joseph if dental care was covered.
He found a newsmagazine and settled onto the couch.
I’d had plans for us today—swimming, taking a walk, and having lunch on the lawn. Within minutes, however, they’d each become occupied on their own, not adhering to my agenda. My purpose had been to give them a nice easy day and they were relaxing. I wasn’t. Why did I feel like I had to organize them?
After a while Benson came into the kitchen from the living room where I’d set him up to copy his music tapes. “My tape is dubbing now.”
Alepho asked Benson a question. A discussion ensued in Dinka that I couldn’t understand but somehow seemed like Benson was giving advice. Or orders.
I went to the kitchen, waited until they were through and asked, “Would you guys like to go in the orchard? Pick some oranges?”
“I will be here,” Benson said.
“Okay. Alepho, would you like to come?”
Alepho and I crossed the lawn, bags in hand, dogs at our heels. The orchard was awash in the sweet pungency of spoiled citrus. Decaying fruit squished underfoot. The branches sagged and the ground was littered with one of our best crops ever.
From trees still laden with ripened fruit, we picked juicy Valencias. Alepho reached easily into the upper branches and his bag quickly filled.
“You will be rich,” he said.
Rich from farming? I wished. The orchard was a lovely money pit. The fruit would be left on the ground this year because the price of oranges was so low it wouldn’t pay for the pickers, never mind the water bills. “No, it’s not like that.”
“May we take another bag for the Bols?” he asked.
The Bols, a Sudanese family with some pretty young daughters, lived downstairs from him. “Yes, of course. We can pick all you want.”
I couldn’t bear to tell him that all of this would rot. Standing beside someone who had once nearly starved, and was now surrounded by trees dripping with potential food, “waste” took on a whole new meaning.
A squirrel darted by and disappeared in the undergrowth.
“What is that?” Alepho asked.
“Ground squirrel.”
“So small. Our squirrels are bigger than your cats.”
“That big?”
“Yes.” He looked a little offended. I’d meant to show how impressed I was, instead it must have sounded like I doubted him. I did wonder about some of the things he and the others said. Not that I thought they were lying. But, for instance, that their mother was seven feet tall. The Dinka are tall, but they’d left home at such a young age. I also thought my mother was tall when I was young and she was only four foot ten. Did they even measure or think in terms of feet? We had so many language issues between us. Our life experiences had been very different. Our perceptions must be, too.
“What other animals lived near your home?” I asked, trying to lighten things up.
“These wild cow, antelope, gazelles, zebra.” He stopped. A homesick look came over him.
“Did you ever see elephants?”
“Yes, they are dangerous. They come into our village sometimes.”
“Wow. You’re kidding.”
“No, it is the truth.” He looked offended.
“I’m sorry. It’s a common saying that really means ‘I’m surprised.’ ”
I picked up an orange from the ground that still looked good.
“A man brought me a baby monkey who lost his mother. I gave him milk.”
I wondered if he saw the irony in that. On his journey, had he hoped someone would take him in like he had done for the monkey?
“The monkey picked up the cup just like people do. Monkeys imitate people.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that. Amazing.”
“The big monkeys got mad that he came to my house. They like to steal our corn. Just one monkey goes in the field so we don’t see him. Just like people do, he ties a vine around his body and puts the cobs of corn in that vine. Very clever.”
“Really clever.” Sounded too clever to believe. “How about giraffe? They’re so beautiful.”
“My father hunt giraffe.”
“Do people know it’s illegal to kill giraffe and those other large animals?”
He gave me a kind look, but with an expression that said, You don’t get it. “The country is in war. There are no laws.”
That shut me up. My Western conscience, concerned with endangered animals, had not grasped the reality of the situation. Of course a country at war was a place with no laws.
“The animals are gone,” he said. “They left because of the war.”
Alepho became quiet but seemed comfortable with the silence. I wanted to be. There were a thousand questions I wanted answers to, but I’d learned from Cliff that asking them was probably the least effective way of getting answers. When Cliff and I were alone in the car, he was the one who ofte
n initiated filling the void, and that had led to some of our best conversations.
Alepho picked until the bags were all full. I reached out to carry a couple, but he resisted and insisted on carrying them all. As we walked back to the house, he said, “My mother loved Benson more than me.”
What? That was out of the blue. He’d survived a genocide. And that was the thing that bothered him? So revealing and personal. So universally human. As the oldest child, I remembered feeling the same way when my little sister came along.
“Oh, Alepho, mothers love all their children.”
“Benson was always helpful to my mother.”
Was that why he insisted on carrying all of the oranges? “I’m a mother. I can say that I’m sure she loved you just the same.”
He looked the other way and didn’t say anything.
Back in the house, Lino was still sewing and Benson was dubbing more tapes. Alepho put the oranges on the counter and picked up the newsmagazine and resumed reading.
As I prepared lunch—butternut squash soup and turkey sandwiches—Alepho brought the magazine over. It was opened to a page with a photo of a needle inserted above a woman’s eyebrow. “Very bad poison,” he said. “Why they want to put this in their faces?”
If he knew that poison was being injected, he’d read the article and also knew it was to treat wrinkles. His observations often probed well below the surface, and yet seemed in the spirit of acceptance and a willingness to adapt. It probably wasn’t intentional, but he tended to corner me with questions that required embarrassing answers, like explaining SlimFast to someone who’d not had enough food. Now Botox. I had to be honest though. “They do it to look young,” I said. “Cure wrinkles.”
“You do that?”
Did he see my wrinkles and wonder why they weren’t cured? Or did he not see them and think I’d been using Botox? “I haven’t done that. I’m afraid of the poison.”
He furrowed his brow and crinkled his forehead. “We don’t like to cure the wrinkles.” He pointed to his face. “The elders like these because you can see their feelings.”
I smiled. Good point. “Americans care a lot about looking young.”
“I see that. My uncle need money to take care of his family.”
“Your uncle?”
“Yes. His friend called from Kampala. My uncle need money to get back to the family in Pageri.”
“Kampala. That’s Uganda, right?” I took the soup bowls down from the cabinet and set them on the counter to fill. “How much does he need?”
“Too much.”
“Where’s Pageri?”
“Southern Sudan. That’s where the kids are. They need food.”
Wasn’t war there too? So complex. I’d ask another time. “How much is too much?”
“Six hundred dollars.”
I turned the magazine page to avoid being asked what it cost to be wrinkle-free for a couple of months.
“I need a job,” he added.
Jobs. A week earlier, before the attack, his prospects had looked dismal. Who would be hiring now? Particularly a young man with no job skills from a country with a Middle Eastern–sounding name? If he did find a job, it would take months to accumulate six hundred dollars.
Benson had shared with me how their uncle had helped them so much. Now he was caring for their orphaned nieces and nephews. Of course, Benson and Alepho would be eager to repay his kindness to them. I wanted to help this guy, and I’d never even met him.
With planes crashing into the towers, the whole world was on hold. Not quite real. I wanted my family around me more than anything, more than ever.
That must be so true for them. Was this how they’d felt for fifteen years?
Six hundred dollars wouldn’t change my life but it might save their uncle and his family.
That meant breaking my vow: Teach them to fish. I’d been so sure that eliminating money from the equation was the right thing. But the right thing no longer felt so clear-cut. If I gave money to help their uncle, why wouldn’t I do the same for all of them three months from now when their refugee assistance ran out? Even if I explained that it was only this one time to get their uncle out of his dire situation, would the underlying message be: My sponsor can easily solve problems with money if she chooses to? That notion was hard to defeat while sitting in the kitchen of our home they thought large enough to house several families. I’d been struggling to keep Cliff from thinking that money came easily and that it could solve all problems. He saw it all around him. That was one reason I’d gotten involved in the first place.
I needed more time to think it over. “Let’s have lunch!”
SEEDS OF LOVE
Alepho
Judy took me to the trees. I’d seen the fruit of lime trees in Sudan, but I’d never seen oranges. They were bigger. The day was warm, but cool in the shade, like under the mango trees in my village. White blossoms sweetened the air. Ripe fruit, turning fuzzy, squished under my feet. Didn’t they harvest their crops in America?
I wanted to ask Judy to help us get our uncle out of Uganda. I was afraid. It was too much money. A friend had been sick for a long time in the camp. We sold our shirts and a pan. We grew okra where water leaked from the water tap. It needed to be protected from thieves until harvest and then we sold it. We saved for a year like that to get six hundred shillings for our friend’s treatment. In America, six hundred shillings was only six dollars. Saving six hundred American dollars would take a hundred years in Kakuma camp.
Judy picked an orange and peeled it. She divided the sections and offered me one. The juice squirted in my mouth and ran down my chin. It wasn’t sweet like a mango. She offered me more but I declined and she threw the rest onto the ground. “Here’s a bag,” she said. “You twist the fruit like this until the stem breaks.”
So that was how they harvested. In our village at harvest time everyone went to the fields. That was the happiest and most content time of the year. My mother roasted the corn on top of the firewood and peeled back the husk. The kernels burst between my teeth, shooting sweetness into my mouth. Food, milk, and grain were plentiful everywhere.
How sweet my childhood had been. My memories so precious. Planting season was my favorite time. Everything became green. The air was alive with the buzz of bees and insects. A type of tall grass called dog tail grew at that time. We kids trudged through it, looking for the rare double dog tail. We plucked those for good luck. When I returned to our house, my mother treated me to my greatest desire: clotted cow’s milk, which was fresh milk mixed with soured milk.
My family were cattle keepers and farmers. Farmers had to be smart. My mother placed the healthiest seeds under the fire. The smoke acted as a preservative. She kept those special seeds safe for the next planting season. Even when we ran out of food, those seeds were never touched. She’d say, “If you want to have a good harvest don’t eat your seeds.”
Without those times, those loving seeds from my family, I don’t know how I could have continued living, considering all the things that I’d experienced and seen. Like corn seeds, every child needs a healthy, loving life with their parents.
I filled my bag and asked Judy if I could pick another bag of oranges for the Bols, who lived downstairs from our apartment. She approved my request.
I carried the bags of oranges back into Judy’s house. She brought a lot of food to the table and invited us to sit down. She showed us the proper tools to use for eating.
Judy was helpful, teaching us cultural ways. Even though I’d grown up in a traditional village with a traditional way of life, I’d always felt like I didn’t fit in. I wanted to fit in in America. Benson learned the cultures and followed the rules. In our village, he always helped our mother. I did what I wanted, and my mother often scolded me, saying that I went against our people’s ways. She loved Benson more for that reason.
&
nbsp; Since I’d left our village in war when I was seven, I’d been taking a bit of culture here and a bit there from different places, but I never felt a part of anywhere. I didn’t like being told the proper way to dress, or to speak, or do things. How did they know? I had to find out those things for myself.
At IRC they were training us to look in people’s eyes when we talked. I told Benson that when I walked down the street in America and looked at a person coming toward me, many times that person gave me a look like, Why are you looking at us? They looked angry, like I shouldn’t be there.
Benson said, “Don’t look at people. You have to look away.”
Benson was wise. He had a way of reading things and going in the right direction. I liked to try things like a blind man, needing to touch and get his hand burned to learn.
I decided I shouldn’t look at strangers here. I didn’t have bad intentions, but some people seemed to perceive they were not good. People didn’t understand what was going on inside me. I lived life more in my head than in the world.
The food Judy shared with us tasted good, but how could I enjoy it? I felt shameful being comfortable in America when our brothers were still in the camp, Benjamin was lost, and our uncle’s kids were suffering.
I needed to find a way to help him. America wasn’t like Kakuma. I couldn’t grow okra; we didn’t even have an outside place and crops wouldn’t grow in the apartment. San Diego was a city. I needed to work. But where did one go to find a job? Who did we ask?
I wanted to ask Judy if I could harvest the oranges and sell them. During the traditional Dinka ceremony when a boy becomes a man, he recites his grandfathers’ names back twenty generations. My people had been farmers all that time. I hadn’t learned yet, but I could be a farmer. But I didn’t have money to buy the oranges so it didn’t feel proper to ask Judy for her family’s crops.
CLASSIFIEDS
Judy
At the table, Benson lifted his fork. “What is this called?”
Until today, we’d only eaten together at fast-food places, nothing yet that required tableware. I wanted them to feel comfortable when they encountered that situation.
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