“That’s a fork, this is a spoon, and the table is set like this with the fork on the left and the spoon and knife on the right.” Such formalities must have sounded fussy to someone who’d been eating cornmeal with his fingers for fourteen years. They picked up each utensil, repeated the name and practiced the placement with a sincere desire to learn.
Use of the spoon came naturally and the squash soup was gone right away. Then the turkey sandwiches. When I brought out a plate of sliced papaya, Benson said, “Very common fruit in Africa,” and it disappeared like the rest. Such a pleasure to see them eat like the young men they were.
“In the camp,” Benson said, “we queued up at four in the morning to get rations.”
Lino said, “When the water pipe broke, we didn’t have water for three days.”
Presence of food often brought out stories of their time in the camp. Benson was the storyteller and shared a lot of details. His perpetually smiling eyes and cheerful tone made it strange hearing about hardships. From Lino, on the other hand, I heard outrage, a sense that what he’d been through wasn’t right. Alepho was quiet with a far-off stare, like he’d seen and experienced things he didn’t want to talk about.
“The grain wasn’t ground,” Benson added rather flatly. “One needed money to grind it.”
“Cooking took hours,” Lino added, “or it gave a serious stomachache. That took a lot of firewood. People were robbed collecting firewood.”
Listening to them relay conditions in the camp reminded me of their uncle’s predicament. If a refugee camp was that bad, how were his children surviving in the middle of a war?
Yet, how could I know if the whole story wasn’t made up to get money out of Americans? I couldn’t imagine these earnest young men scamming me, but the so-called friend of their uncle, some desperate guy in Africa, might be trying to get six hundred dollars out of some naive guys in America.
“So,” I asked, “once you get jobs and save up, how will you get the money to your uncle?”
“We will wire it to Uganda.”
That didn’t sound secure.
“We must find jobs,” Lino said.
“Yes, that’s a really good first step. What kind of work interests you?”
“Any work is good,” Benson said. “I need forty hours.”
Forty hours. Of course. James and Daniel’s situation at the hotel with only one or two days a week had made a big impression on them, had them worried. “Yes, we’ll look for full time.”
I pulled out the classified section of the newspaper. Even though I’d worked most of my adult life, I’d never searched the classifieds for a job. I’d never even filled out an application. One day after school when I was fifteen, my friend Stephanie and I decided we wanted to work. She stopped into a convalescent home, first business outside the school grounds, and got a job helping distribute food to the patients. I went a few more blocks down the street into a grocery store. Even though I was underage, my job in the deli started that afternoon and lasted three years. During college, my dad “asked” one of his tenants, a start-up computer company, if they could use some help. That was my second job, and I ended up staying with that company for nineteen years. Connections sure helped. I hadn’t known or appreciated how lucky I’d been.
Things were different now. “Let’s see what’s in the paper.” I read out loud, “Accountant, auto mechanic, clerical, construction. Construction, that might work.”
“I like to build houses,” Lino said. “I build in Kakuma.”
Interesting idea. Talented with his hands and excellent in math, helpful skills in that industry. I called on a few ads under construction. “Does he have welding experience?” “We could use an estimator.” “Got a backhoe opening.” All wanted experience. Many two years. Nothing for day laborers.
“Okay. I’ll make calls later about that,” I said. I read on. “Customer service, dancer, dental …” I skipped hotels, too unreliable now that tourist season was over; we were in a recession, and not to mention the whole unknown impact of the World Trade Center attacks. Three janitor positions wanted experience. Ads under general labor required driver’s licenses or specific skills. I moved up to restaurants. Bartenders, experienced line cook, hostess, sushi maker. They probably didn’t advertise for dishwashers—too expensive—maybe they just took walk-ins. I’d originally thought that taking the boys around to places and filling out applications would be the way to go. Worked for me forty years earlier. But there were many reasons to expect rejections these days, and how many rejections would it take before their confidence would be in the toilet?
Toward the end of the alphabet, past the jobs that held the most promise, I realized this was just as big of a mistake with the three of them looking over my shoulder. I closed the paper.
Alepho said, “I could pick your oranges and sell them?”
That sounded so simple, so logical, so right. Just not possible. “I’d be happy to let you have them, but I think selling them would be a problem. No one is buying. When is that job-training class at IRC?”
“Job preparedness,” Benson corrected me, “is next week.”
“The week after you finish the class, we’ll look again. By then there’ll be more jobs.”
Hopefully. There had to be something three smart, strong, English-speaking young men who were eager to work could do.
“Want to swim?” They’d said they wanted to go in my pool so outside a local drugstore, on an end-of-the-season special, I’d bought the last three men’s size medium swimming trunks for a dollar each. They were all red, the only choice. “Here you go. Get changed. We’ll work on jobs in two weeks.” After they’d finished the class. After I’d done my homework. And hopefully when the country had resumed a more normal life.
At first touch, they complained the eighty-degree water was too cold but soon our pool had never looked so full as it did with three six-foot men splashing around. Their slender dark bodies glided through water as elegantly and gracefully as they did on land. Even though Alepho claimed he couldn’t swim, he moved like a dolphin in the shallow end. They tried to climb aboard flimsy blow-up rafts, and when I brought out a pair of fins they fought over them like siblings. Fortunately, I had three face masks. They spent a lot of time below the surface looking at everything.
I sat down in a lounge chair and reveled in the joyfulness bursting from the pool. With all that they’d been through in their lives, and all that had happened in the last few days, a delight at being able to give them this moment came over me. Moisture pooled in my eyes. I went in the house for my camera. And a tissue. Three young guys wouldn’t understand tears. It’d spoil the moment for sure.
I took lots of pictures. They loved getting the photos the next time we met. Always a copy for each of them.
School would be out soon and I needed to go pick up Cliff. They were having so much fun, I didn’t want to make them get out. But leaving did not feel right somehow. Did I still picture them as those five- and six-year-olds in the video? Alepho said he couldn’t swim. He was doing fine. They were young men now who had crossed rivers with crocodiles while being shot at. They could take care of each other.
“Hey, guys,” I said. “Going to pick up Cliff. Towels are on the lounge chairs. Be sure to shut the door so the cats don’t get out.”
THE MEDIATION
Alepho
After we ate the food, Judy showed us how to look in the newspaper for jobs. There were so many, I didn’t know which one I wanted. How did I get the job? It was there in the paper, but then what did I do?
Everywhere I looked, I saw the news that shocked America and shook the world. The attack on New York grieved me. Some said that North Sudan was involved in the plot to attack America. Others said the attackers might have been citizens of America like the ones who blew up a building in Oklahoma. That idea of an enemy from within sent
greater fears into my soul. It’d been my own government that had sent the militias that had attacked our villages.
What would happen now that America had been attacked? I couldn’t be at peace with anything that led to war or destruction of human lives. Why couldn’t the world use dialogue to solve every disagreement, from individuals to countries? They could find a good mediator, like my father, and bring lasting peace. Maybe we were sworn enemies or simply hated one another, but there had to be a common ground where resolution could happen.
My father had been a mediator up until his death. A respected man in the Bahr al-Ghazal region for knowing how to find that common ground. That day he took me with him to solve the dispute over the killed cow, everyone had nodded in agreement. No one argued with my father’s solution. But the talking went on. Their voices grew aggressive, they used big words like “racism,” “religious discrimination,” “resources,” and “oil,” which I didn’t understand. The discussion grew louder and louder. I became eager to leave.
One man rose and walked toward another in an aggressive way. My father stood and raised his arms. “We must depart in order to reach home before dark.”
The men quieted. The villagers gave my father a bag of grain and thanked him for his services as a peacemaker.
On the way back to our village, my father asked, “Did you learn anything today?”
I didn’t know the right answer.
“What did you see happen?” my father asked.
“You stopped the fight.”
“Yes, that’s right. Did you see how important it is to listen respectfully to all sides of a disagreement? Blame and revenge should always be avoided. They are a never-ending cycle that causes worse conflict and harm. The goal is a compromise that settles the issue permanently. Both parties must feel like they have won.”
As I walked, listening to my father’s wise words, I stepped around an acacia thorn as long as my finger.
“Alepho, stop,” my father said. “Pick it up and throw it to the side of the trail. We must be sensitive to the ones who follow us and might not see the danger.”
We walked on and he continued to instruct me. “Do not step on bugs. Everything around us means something, and it matters. If you are big and strong, you must take care to not harm those who are smaller and weaker.”
He told me never to pluck flowers. “If you don’t need it, you don’t have to play with it. They are there for us to see.”
He cautioned me about dangers. “A warthog may be small, but he can be as dangerous as the lion. Beware what you eat; it too can take a life.”
“Father,” I asked, “why were the men still angry after the dispute was settled?”
“They are worried and angry about other things.”
“What things?”
My father stopped in the middle of the trail. “This is important,” he said. “Listen carefully to me and obey my instructions. If anything ever happens, you must run and hide in the bush until I come for you.”
“Why, Father? What will happen?”
“Danger may come to our area. Just follow my instructions. You see, a child must be guided from fire until death.”
He walked on, and I followed behind. I didn’t understand then what he was telling me. I had imagined it meant that he’d guide me away from the fires that sometimes swept over our valley. I’d listened and tried my best to understand, but I was only five then, the youngest of all his sons. Still, I was the fortunate one receiving my father’s wisdom gifts, and I didn’t want to lose a single one. How could I have known then that he was warning me about the attacks that were about to come and change our lives forever?
The feelings of those times surrounded me now after the attacks in New York. What would happen next? Would fighting begin? Could war come to America?
THE GILO
Judy
“Do you have much homework?” I asked Cliff in the car on the way home from school.
“Only a little,” he said.
Oh good, he’d have plenty of time to visit with the guys before I took them home. He liked to procrastinate doing his homework anyway.
We entered the house through the garage. The sewing machine whirred. Lino had gotten out of the pool and was back at his project. He showed me his backpack. I couldn’t see where it’d been repaired. He must have taken the whole thing apart and put it back together. “Lino, this is outstanding. Where did you learn to sew like this?”
He straightened and a proud smile spread across his face. “In Kakuma camp I take sewing class for one year.”
Great skill, but not a job possibility anymore in Southern California. Most clothing manufacturing took place in Mexico these days, or in the sweatshops in Los Angeles that had made the news lately for keeping Asian women as slaves. A used sewing machine would be nice for him to have in the apartment though. That could be a reality.
In the kitchen, Alepho surfed the web. I’d shown him how to access my computer. Benson came in from copying tapes just as Cliff came from the garage. I had been limiting my volunteering time to the day, so they hadn’t seen Cliff since he’d started school. They greeted Cliff and shared some tentative guy hugs.
Cliff convinced Alepho to go outside for some basketball. They were back soon—September was our hottest month, and that garage courtyard baked. They washed the asphalt off their blackened hands, leaving the sink a gray mess. Alepho cleaned it up with a sponge. How thoughtful. I’d noticed their apartment was always clean, except for the towering pile of Coke cans. Beds made, dishes put away.
“Let’s play pool,” Cliff said.
“No,” Alepho said. “I went swimming one time.”
“The other kind,” Cliff said and beckoned him outside.
Alepho refused to move. His eyebrows knit with a determined look. They’d been that way most of the day, a sort of squint that looked like I felt when I had a headache. He looked perturbed that Cliff had ignored him. A brief standoff ensued.
Cliff shrugged and headed out to the pool table on the covered patio. Alepho watched him through the French doors. As soon as he saw the colorful balls roll around, he was out the door as well.
I watched from the kitchen. Cliff, cue stick in hand, showed off his shots, going from one to the other in rapid-fire sequence with his mouth moving just as fast. He could use some work on his teaching skills, but his pool game wasn’t bad.
Alepho stood rigidly, observing with a skeptical look, brows still pinched together.
Cliff stopped shooting and handed Alepho the cue stick. His first shot missed the ball. Cliff picked up another cue stick and showed him how to hold it. Alepho tried a few awkward shots.
Seeing them interact made me smile. I’d wanted Cliff to meet people who had grown up without all the comforts and privileges he’d always enjoyed, to see firsthand that those things shouldn’t be taken for granted, and to break down the feelings of entitlement that came from good fortune.
I hadn’t given race much thought. We had a few African American friends, but maybe these were the first black people near his own age Cliff had interacted with personally, other than at places like McDonald’s.
Although growing up my family had little money and we’d lived in a small trailer park, my childhood hadn’t been that different from Cliff’s. San Diego in the 1950s, especially in the beach towns, was white. I don’t recall seeing a black person other than on TV.
Snippets of my family life came to mind. Sunday dinners at my grandmother’s house had been a tradition. My grandfather had died in Philadelphia during the Depression, and his sons, including my father at age fourteen, fled to California on foot and by hopping freight trains, to pick fruit and send money home to their mother and younger siblings.
Many years later my grandmother married my step-grandfather, Frank, who had a little shop where he repaired broken televisions. When we wen
t for Sunday dinner, Frank was distant if he even bothered to acknowledge us kids at all. My mother excused his behavior by saying he just wasn’t used to children.
Frank always finished eating first and immediately left the table for his chair in front of the television.
Sunday nights meant Lassie, my favorite, and afterward The Ed Sullivan Show, which bored me, so I’d play with the toys from the trunk my grandmother kept for us.
When the show featured black entertainers, which was increasingly more often, Frank would jump out of his chair and yell at the television. Shaking his fist, he’d let words fly in his gravelly smoker’s voice, hurling them at the screen like stones.
My mother would cover my ears and hustle me away, leaving my two-year-old sister, Tamara, crying on the floor. In the back bedroom, I received a lecture.
Those experiences confused me at first. Black people came on television, my cranky grandfather exploded, and I was taken away from my toys and into a back room like I’d done something wrong.
Eventually the essence of my mother’s message came through. Frank was the one misbehaving. And I knew I didn’t want to be anything like the person who despised children, put my mom into a tizzy, and was bigoted to boot.
Cliff took up the cue stick again and made an impressive bank shot. He teetered on adolescence. My friends, experienced with older teens, warned me that the entry into teenageness was not necessarily a gradual thing. The suddenness could shock both parent and child.
Cliff and Alepho took a few more shots, but the pool lesson never evolved into an actual game, and the two came inside.
Alepho paced around the family room. Maybe it was time to get on the road to their apartment before the traffic got too heavy.
Alepho stopped in front of the television and the twenty or so videotapes stacked on top caught his attention. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to the 60 Minutes segment about the Lost Boys.
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