I should have put that in a drawer; he didn’t miss a thing. Too late. “That’s a documentary. A news show about you guys.”
He pulled it out of the pile. “I want to see it.”
Would they know people in some of those awful scenes? “It’s kind of long,” I lied. “You sure you want to watch that?”
“We want to see it.”
Benson and Lino came over. The three of them tried to figure out where to stick the tape in. I gave in and helped them.
Cliff gave me a Really, Mom? look and said, “I have homework.”
Even homework beat watching an emotional story in their presence. I eyed the tissue box.
The four of us sat on the couch. The tape began with scenes in the camp and their villages. They leaned forward, excited, talking all at once, pointing and saying, “I know this guy,” “That’s like our house,” and, “Dinka cows!”
“Lino’s father had the best bull,” Benson added. They all agreed and explained how the bull, black and white, was the most prized color.
The thought crossed my mind that this would be a good place to stop the tape. I knew what was coming. I had the remote in my hand. Oh, whoops, sorry the tape broke. But I couldn’t do that. If they could live it, I could watch it with them.
As I knew it would, the scene switched to tanks crashing through mud huts, explosions, grass roofs bursting into flames, and people fleeing for their lives. They sat back. A quiet as thick as fog descended on the room. I had an urge to escape like Cliff. But whatever I felt, they had to feel exponentially worse. Was watching this the wrong thing to do? A PTSD trigger?
The video skipped to the crossing of the Gilo River, where boys were shot by soldiers or eaten by crocodiles. Lino said, “I was stuck in the grass on the Sudan bank after I crossed from Ethiopia. I watch two thousand people die in that river.” I wanted to ask how he got across in the first place. He’d only been five. The question caught in my throat.
Original footage from 1992 showed tens of thousands of desperate stick-figure children streaming into Kakuma camp in Kenya. I looked over at the three young men intensely focused on the TV screen. Did they wonder who had filmed this yet hadn’t done anything to help? I did. I also wondered why I hadn’t seen this on the evening news when it was happening.
During the scenes from the camp, they pointed out old friends, but didn’t mention Peter, their brother who was stuck there. Would he ever be able to join them here? The New York attacks might impact refugee resettlement.
The last portion of the video showed Lost Boys exploring their new home in America. One boy turned on a noisy vacuum cleaner and the other boys fled its path. Another opened a can with a manual can opener and declared it an “amazing machine.” Benson and Lino laughed out loud. Alepho was quiet.
When the credits rolled, I let out a sigh of relief. The first time I’d seen the video, I’d been wiping tears. With Cliff, I’d mostly been looking for his reaction, hoping he’d get excited about meeting them.
Sitting beside the survivors, my practical side wanted to say to them, “Put all that behind you. You’re in America now, life will be different. Don’t think about those horrible things happening in other parts of the world that you can’t control.”
Be like us.
I knew they never could.
“Time to head home?”
They agreed.
In the car, Alepho was quiet and looked as though he still had a headache. “Are you feeling okay?” I asked.
“I have headache, and my stomach is not good.”
I asked a few questions but he seemed hesitant to speak more about it. I’d try another day when we were alone. Chronic headaches or stomach problems in a nineteen-year-old did not make sense to me, especially now that he was eating regularly. I’d ask Joseph about what could be done. “Next time we all get together,” I said, “let’s go to the grocery store and you can learn about American food.” Good nutrition would benefit all of them.
That evening, as soon as Cliff was in bed and Paul was working in his home office, I pulled out the pages the boys had given me and settled on the couch. I’d seen the documentaries and read news stories, but I wanted to know more about their individual experiences. I began with Alepho’s writing.
CLAY CAKES
Alepho
In the car on the way back to our apartment Judy asked me if I was sick. I shared my suffering with her. That led her to ask a series of questions that made me regret giving her truthful answers about my condition. I felt an invasion and sweated my embarrassment.
In the refugee camp, when we had stomach pains from no food, we went to the clinic. At first they gave us a Tums, but then they shooed us away after that. As a solution, we went to the stream outside camp and collected clay. Clay neutralized acid. We’d bring a whole chunk for each person and make mud cakes that we put on the ledge of our hut. We could eat some whenever we wanted. Our giant candy. It tasted good and the elders said it had vitamins.
One day an elder told us, “You’re eating too much mud. The little particles of sand will get into your appendix and it will burst. If it bursts, you’ll die.”
We stopped eating mud for a while, but went back to it later when the pains returned.
In a place like the refugee camp there was no room for complainers; you had to find your own solutions.
CORNFLAKES
Judy
I read the writing that Alepho had given me. Then I read it again.
I couldn’t stop thinking of their mother. First, she lost Benson. A year later, her husband. A year after that, Alepho. No wonder Alepho thought his mother favored Benson. He’d watched her grieve for her lost son the last two years Alepho had been with her. More grieving when her husband was killed. With just keeping their family alive under such horrible circumstances, she couldn’t have had the time or energy to satisfy the emotional needs of a young boy.
It explained why Alepho couldn’t forget what he perceived as favoritism. As a mother, I wanted for him to understand her anger, her fear, and her certain love for him. But for him to believe he was loved, it needed to come from his own mother. Was there even a possibility of finding her in Sudan, where there were no phones, no mail service, and in the middle of an ongoing war? The odds were stacked against us.
• • •
On the way back to their apartment we’d discussed our next steps.
“American food and cooking,” they’d said.
The next time we got together, I took them shopping and talked to them about getting the best value, dollars per ounce, budgeting their available money, etc.
At their apartment, we unloaded the groceries from the car. “Have you heard anything from Benjamin?” I asked.
“No,” they responded. “Joseph said the group went to Canada when they couldn’t land in New York and should be here any day.” It’d been almost two weeks since they’d left Africa. How much longer?
“Please,” Lino said, “may I have photo with the cornflakes? I want to send it to my friends.”
He posed at the bottom of their stairs and held the cereal box in front of him as though it were a trophy. I took his photo. Alepho selected a package of catfish and stood in front of my car. I took his photo. Grinning, Benson held up two bulging bags of groceries. I took his photo, too.
Photographing these smiling and laughing boys, who’d been deprived for so long of things I found common—and mostly took for granted—was such a privilege. So, I’d come to realize, was being able to just walk into a store and buy food. I’d never complain about a long grocery line again.
These weren’t things I’d anticipated when I’d first met them and had doubted whether I had the time for them at all. They deserved whatever time I had to give. Not only because they’d been through things no child should even know about, but they were trying so hard to make a new life an
d they had so many challenges ahead. They’d need the kind of support every child did.
Going up the stairs with the rest of the groceries, Alepho whispered to me, “I will keep my photo here. I don’t like to show that we have so much now.”
READY TO EAT
Alepho
I’d never seen so much food as I saw in America. A person could just walk into a restaurant and ask for whatever they wanted to eat. Or go into a store. Or it was in our kitchen just a few steps away.
Until war changed everything, food was everywhere in Sudan also, but you had to find it, pick it, grow it, catch it, or kill it. Then you had to prepare it. In America it was ready to eat.
When I was on my journey, food was sometimes nowhere to be found. We survived on leaves or tubers. I became an expert rat catcher. I’d find their paths in the grass and create a little tunnel with my feet. When one came through, I grabbed it by the back of the neck and squeezed. They cried and died easily. A problem came when I trapped two at once and had to grab them by their tails, and they’d bite me. We’d put them right on the fire and watched them carefully until the fur had burned off and they were cooked. Then we divided them into pieces among us. They tasted like the dark meat of birds or chickens. There was never enough; rats only teased our hunger.
Often, we needed to find new ways to get food. When we were in Torit town, the rebel soldiers organized us into groups each day to work or look for food. I liked to climb the lang tree and take its sweet fruit, even though its thorns grabbed me. If too many got me at once, someone had to come get me out. I figured out a way to brush against the thorns in the right direction, like a serpent gliding through. Once at the top, I’d shake the tree and everyone on the ground gathered the fruit.
My cousin Joseph—who I had found along the way—and I became expert mango-tree climbers. We collected the fruit and sold it in the market. Business was good until the rains came and the river flooded the mango-tree area.
The adults said, “No one can pick mangoes when the river covers the ground. Too dangerous. Fire ants stranded up in the trees are very angry. If you climb they’ll bite you, and you’ll fall and break your leg or arm or even die.”
Hunger had us again.
“Come,” Joseph said. “I know how we can get some mangoes.” We waded to the base of a big mango tree. He showed me a tin can.
“Are you going to catch ants in that?” His plan didn’t seem like a good one.
“No.”
“What’s the can for?”
“Pee in it.”
“What?”
“Pee in the can.”
I peed.
“Now splash that pee all over your legs and arms.”
“What?”
“The fire ants will run away from you. Watch.”
Joseph peed and spread the urine all over his body and climbed the tree. I didn’t know how he figured that out, but he was right. The fire ants ran away. We picked mangoes, and we were the only ones selling them in the market, so we made more money than before. With that money we bought grain and corn.
In Palataka, a boy’s camp in the middle of Sudan where Joseph and I were forced to go by the soldiers, there had been no rations. Five thousand boys constantly searched for their own food. There was never enough. Boys became unruly. To calm things, the soldiers began a small distribution of dried corn, though not nearly enough. Bigger boys stole from smaller ones. We ate together in circles to enforce fair shares. Each boy took a pinch of food when his turn came. If one boy became greedy, the others grabbed his hand. Our stomachs burned from the emptiness, our heads ached, and our bones stuck out. The soldiers didn’t protect anyone. Groups formed for protection.
Sometimes we were given no food. When we weren’t working, we searched in faraway places for something to eat, anything to eat. We ate grasshoppers, leaves, and fruits. The most delicious was a dark fruit called kunyuk that grew in very large trees. Kunyuk was a tricky tree: it didn’t want its fruit stolen. The branches looked sturdy, but when we climbed out on them they broke. So did the legs and necks and arms of many boys.
If we found a hive, we smoked the bees out to get the honey. That was a great treat, but the smoking needed cleverness or the whole tree and hive burned down.
If no food at all was to be found, we stole yam leaves from the local people. On lucky days we found a whole yam or a cassava. We had to be cautious because the locals had guns and they used them.
Hunger made our eyes able to detect new things. We observed birds eating unfamiliar fruits, or a rabbit nibbling leaves, and that way we knew they were safe. Some boys became so hungry and weak they ate things they didn’t know: strange leaves, ugly roots, or fruits we’d never eaten before. Some died from that. I was careful to eat only what I knew to be safe.
In America, food was always right there and ready to eat. I knew it was safe, but I had to learn to adapt to new tastes. My stomach was giving me pains. It wasn’t learning about the new foods as fast as I wanted it to.
WAR
Alepho
The video of Sudan that we had seen at the church brought back both good and bad memories. I began to think more about war and all its consequences. When our village had been peaceful, people had looked after everyone’s children and helped each other out. War changed that. Desperation made people hateful and angry. I even saw adults take food from children.
After the attacks on New York happened, our moods changed. In the apartment, we spoke of war in terms of politics and our opinions, but down in our guts we knew it was just blood, destruction, and death. We’d been exposed to violence in our homeland. We knew the danger it posed to a good way of life. The thing called war destroyed prosperity and took from people the potential to become what they wanted. It robbed people of life and destroyed everything they’d built. War meant the end of the world for somebody—a child, a mother, or a father. It meant loss and deprivation without logical reason.
It seemed like the fight was always between two leaders. If two dogs wanted to fight, why not put them in a cage and let them have it out with each other instead of including every other dog on earth? Yet, it never worked that way.
We had received the news from IRC that our cousin Benjamin was on his way in September, but we didn’t know what day. Then we found out that he’d been coming to the US on the day it was attacked. What were the odds of such a thing happening? We thought we’d outrun our past. Our past was mimicking itself right before our eyes, as though it had slipped forward, gone ahead of us, and waited for us in ambush.
I called a friend who was still in the Kakuma Refugee Camp. “My friend,” I said, “America is different than what they told us. It is different from our jungles in Africa, but it is also a jungle and requires new sets of survival skills in order to make it out here.”
He reminded me of how important it was to go to school.
Going to school in America had been my dream. Now, so many other things distracted me from that goal. Life here was not clear to me. Daniel and James were desperate to find jobs to work every day. They said the first three months are free. Our rent was paid for. I still thought the food stamp card was just an extra thing until we got our green cards that could buy anything. I was eager for my green card to buy things and send them back to the refugee camp.
IRC gave us classes to prepare for working. Judy seemed worried and talked a lot about jobs.
I had trouble learning and using my survival skills in America because my head hurt all of the time and I didn’t know why. I had food now, but that food gave my stomach a problem.
Attacks on New York, jobs, rent, and sickness distracted me, but I could not forget my goal to get my education. I had to keep that first in my vision. My father had faced lions. I could do this.
LUNCH WITH FRIDA
Judy
Sharon from IRC invited me to lunch. She’d been in th
e Peace Corps and had worked in San Diego with refugees. I gladly accepted; I needed all the insights and advice I could get to help Alepho, Benson, and Lino. Sharon’s advice would be helpful.
We met at a Mexican restaurant in a transitioning area that lay between the roughness of City Heights to the east, where Benson, Alepho, and Lino lived, and the artsy upscale atmosphere of Hillcrest to the west. Patrons were an eclectic crowd when judged by any measure: race, age, style, or sexual orientation. Unlike east of here—with its standard uniform of jeans baggy enough to fit two people, paired with oversized basketball shirts—identity in this area was expressed through punctured and adorned body parts and a vast array of skin art. If anyone could stand out in such a diverse crowd, I felt like I did with the blond hair, chinos, a T-shirt, and a blazer. An SUV-driving soccer mom who didn’t fit into either world.
Inside, the café’s rustic atmosphere simulated a Puerta Vallarta hideaway and created a charming oasis from the center-city streets. Plants dripped from Talavera ceramics hung on terra-cotta colored walls, fountains burbled to classical Spanish guitar music, and every inch of wall space was covered with Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits.
Sharon, in her midthirties with chin-length brown hair and large, warm bluish-green eyes, was easy to talk to, smart, fun, and quick to laugh. We chitchatted about lighter subjects through a lunch of enchiladas with the best mole sauce I’d ever had.
“I didn’t realize,” I said, “how little I knew about refugees, their finances, health care, education, and, oh man, job-hunting. I thought I’d have that one nailed, but I haven’t done it in years. Things have changed. I feel like the newcomer.”
She laughed and sipped her iced tea.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I added. “Your mentoring class was really valuable. I made those mistakes you warned us about. You know, running them around to too many activities in one day, like I was taking a class of second graders on a field trip. I totally wore them out and I’m sure they were dreading my next visit.”
Disturbed in Their Nests Page 17