A woman cleaning the freezer windows looked at me and asked, “I saw you all come into the store. Where are those boys from?”
I gave her some background.
“If they get the job, I’ll look after them,” she said.
That offer meant so much at that moment. This wasn’t the first time people had been kind, but the accumulation of recent negative experiences made this positive one unexpected and especially nice. Maybe it was the post-911 mood. With rumors of new threats, people were scared. Especially of strangers. Fear and anger permeated the air. Yet, every night on the news there were reports of people pulling together and helping each other. A healthy response to hate and fear.
All I could do in the moment was wring my hands over the outcome of a wrapper interview. Having a minor breakthrough, even just a potential one, was so much better than the recent frustration. I couldn’t do anything about a great battle between the world’s cultures and religions, but a job in a store with more food than they’d ever seen, that would be something.
I wandered for ten more minutes and went back upstairs.
“They’ll need to be drug tested,” Bob said. “If that comes back negative, I can send them to training.”
He said them. Yahoo. More than one. They must have finally spoken up after I left and won Bob over, like they did everyone who took the time to meet them. I wanted to jump up and down, but they looked puzzled. Bob mentioning a drug test might have had them totally freaked out, especially if that hadn’t been covered in their job-readiness class. They wouldn’t know it was standard procedure.
Bob turned around to get some forms out of a cabinet. I gave them a thumbs-up sign and mouthed, “Good job.”
Smiles and relief all around.
Bob prepared their drug tests. Sitting at the round table, drug swabs sticking from their mouths, I wondered what they were thinking. It must have been a strange, confusing experience.
Bob filled out more forms and the longer it took, the more encouraged I became. He wouldn’t go through this trouble if he didn’t plan on hiring at least one of them. Still, it was possible that he tested them all so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings. He seemed like that kind of a guy. Fine. One job was a big break and the others would be having their most positive job-hunting experience yet. Even if no one was hired, Bob Sullivan had made today a day we’d always remember.
“I’ll call you,” Bob said when all the requirements had been completed.
He probably wondered when I’d stop thanking him and let go of his hand. I wished I could thank his daughter too. Her mission to Africa might have been what opened the door in the first place.
When we were all back in the car and buckled in, I said, “You guys did a great job. Congratulations on your first interview.”
Benson noticed my camera on the floor. “Can we take photos?”
“Of course.” We took some under the Ralph’s sign, some inside in various aisles and three in produce.
This was only a first step. I didn’t want to be overoptimistic and have them be disappointed, but we had something to celebrate. “Shall we go to the zoo on Wednesday? You can invite Benjamin, too.”
If they started work, we’d have little time for doing things like the zoo together. Hours in the grocery business were around the clock. They had to have jobs, but I’d miss being able to get together all at once.
“Yes, let’s go to zoo on Wednesday.”
My mind raced with the events of the day. It was Bush Senior who’d first spoken of the “thousand points of light.” I’d run into those lights at Ralphs—Bob Sullivan, Dennis Murphy, and the woman cleaning the freezer doors. I thought back to when I’d been the one who hired people. I tried to recall if I had been brave enough to take a risk like they had. When I’d entered the computer business in 1970, I was the one who ran into one of those “points of light.” Nineteen years old and female, I needed that break. I got one and stayed there nearly twenty years. A woman in business, especially management, was not a common thing at the time.
What had become clear to me walking beside the boys the past month was that it wasn’t the rarer case of outright discrimination, but the more common and subtle tendency to favor those most like ourselves that had the greater impact on people like Benson, Alepho, and Lino.
• • •
After the Ralphs interview, we went to a mall to meet a friend of mine, Lucy, who’d offered to buy the guys some clothing at a store her husband frequented. Perfect timing. They would need black pants and shoes if they got the job.
“I’m excited about the job at Ralphs,” Benson said as we passed stores.
“Me too, Benson, me too,” I said. I just hoped there was a job. Bob didn’t say whether he’d call the next day, the next week, or ever.
Spewing dolphin fountain sculptures caught their attention, but little else at La Jolla’s largest mall did. We had a half hour to waste before meeting Lucy, and they weren’t the least bit interested in the kiosks dripping with everything from jewelry to hairpieces or the storefronts filled with fashionably dressed mannequins. Nor were they as interested in the passing crowd—mostly white here—as the crowd appeared to be in them.
“Let’s go watch the ice skaters,” I suggested. We headed to the enclosed ice rink at the food court. They didn’t want anything to eat or drink. The fajitas must have filled them up. We found a ringside table.
“Where are the sticks for their hands?” Alepho asked.
“Poles are used for skiing down a hill on snow.”
“This is not snow?”
“No, that is ice. Very hard. For skating they don’t use the poles. You’ll see both skating and skiing this winter when the Olympics are on television.”
The food court was a popular hangout for young people. Benson watched this crowd with more interest. “What do you think, Benson?”
“I want an American-style relationship with a woman.”
“Really. What do you mean by ‘American style’?”
“You know,” he said, his expression serious, “some places in Africa, the women are not treated very fine.”
I assumed he was referring to North Sudan, where they lived under Sharia law but he was too polite to be specific. “I’ve heard that. But from what I’ve read, the Dinka value women very much.”
“This is true. They take care of their wives. If a man’s brother dies, then he must marry his brother’s wife.”
“Not here. Only one wife. Or one husband.”
“Just one the whole life?” Lino asked.
“Yes, one. Well, one at a time.”
A disappointed “oh” chorused around the table.
Seemed to me we’d had this conversation before. Maybe the reality hadn’t sunk in the first time.
“Yes, your whole life. Till death do you part. Choose carefully.”
“Only one.” Lino smiled. “I am going back to Africa to marry.” They all laughed.
“One wife works out better in our society. Your wife is your partner, your best friend. Marriage is also a business contract.”
Alepho gave me a skeptical look. “But what if you are president? Even the president has only one wife?”
“Yes, even the president. It is the law. To marry more than one person is a crime called bigamy in the US.”
“But I read in a magazine that George Bush, he has a lady Laura and she is the first lady. Who then is the second lady?”
“She is the first lady of the country. George Bush only has one wife.”
“Even the president, only one? I don’t understand what happened with President Clinton and there was a girl.”
“He had only one wife, Hillary. The girl was an affair outside his marriage.”
They glanced at one another.
“My father had five wives,” Benson said. He looked over at me for m
y reaction.
“Oh,” I said as nonchalantly as I could, but thinking how complicated that could be.
“Our mother was the third wife.”
How did that work out, all those women living together, sharing a husband? Hard to imagine peacefully sharing my husband with four other women. But maybe Paul could handle it. “Did you all live in the same house?”
“Each wife has a house with her children and my father have a big house.”
“You had lots of other brothers and sisters to play with.”
“Yes, many,” he said. “Twenty or thirty. I miss that.”
I bet he did. Great for the children, and the shared childcare duties sounded good to me. I would have enjoyed some help and especially companionship on those long solitary days when Cliff was an infant.
“Will an American girl marry a Sudanese man?” Alepho asked.
I wanted to just say yes, but the answer was more complex. He’d said American girl, not white girl. That could mean any color. I would have thought he’d ask, “Will a white girl marry a black man?” but this question indicated he saw it as more of a nationality issue. Or as a new American rather than a race, religion, or skin color issue. He’d seen many mixed-race couples in the inner city. Alepho was full of difficult questions. I made eye contact with him. “The simple answer is yes.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, that is good.”
“The parents or family might object though.” Brothers in the inner-city gangs came to mind. That discussion could wait. “I’m sure some of this is the same where you come from. Would a Dinka girl marry a Maasai man?”
They all laughed. No, her family would not approve of that, was the consensus.
“With Dinka,” Benson explained, “a man may go with a girl who is not Dinka, but if a man has a daughter, the daughter cannot go with a man who is not Dinka.”
“Aha! Double standard. We call that chauvinism.”
“Chauvinism?” Alepho asked.
“Yes, you said it correctly. It’s when men have rights women don’t.”
“Oh.”
“More important is what kind of person you are,” I added, wishing that it was more true than it was. “If you have a job, don’t get in trouble, are a responsible citizen, those kinds of things, I don’t think it matters whether you are a native-born American or not. Most of us, or our parents or grandparents, came from someplace else anyway, and we are now mixed up.”
“There was very bad fighting in the camp,” Benson said. “It was over a girl. Seven people died. They fight for two weeks.”
“Two weeks? Didn’t the police stop it?”
“The Kenyan police only stop after two hours. So, every day there is fighting for two hours, then they stop it.”
This was a strange policy. Sounded like the police got their entertainment allotment before they shut it down.
“You can’t fight here,” I cautioned them. “It’s called assault and it’s a very bad crime, a felony. One hit and you can go to jail. As a refugee, you could be deported and sent back to Sudan.”
I was uncomfortable lecturing, but a one-way ticket back to Sudan was a near-certain death sentence. I didn’t know if they understood how a fight, even a grab or push, could lead to such huge ramifications for them. They’d come from an opposite situation.
“We know this,” Alepho said. “But we are happy when you tell us these things.”
I smiled, imagining Cliff thanking me for a lecture. But then he hadn’t suffered the consequences first, like they had. They’d come to appreciate the value of prevention at an early age.
We met Lucy at the store. An hour later Benson, Alepho, and Lino had black pants and shoes, polo shirts, and new jackets. Surely those American girls would take notice now.
COMMUNITY MEETING
Alepho
After we survived the escape from Palataka, we found more fighting in Torit and ended up wandering for nearly a year, fleeing bombs, soldiers, and fighting. That was the year I found Benson and Benjamin in Kidepo. We were all together again, but then we were tricked and taken to another camp, a secret one called Natinga, where they trained boys to be soldiers.
Boys were always trying to escape Natinga, but they usually didn’t succeed and were placed in a thorn pen, in the sun, in the center of camp. Benjamin ended up there two times for attempting escape.
I became sick with yellow fever. Benson kept me alive and put me on a truck to Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya for treatment. Once I made it to Kakuma and recovered from my illness, I started school again.
We went up into the hills to find a rock and brought it back to sit on under a huge tree. We found an old cardboard box and nailed it to the tree as our blackboard and made charcoal for the teacher to write with. We even found teachers among the adults in the camp and begged them to teach us. We learned to make our English letters by writing with our fingers in the sand.
After a while I lost interest in school. I never had enough food, my head hurt, it seemed that I was learning useless things. I was too old to believe in magic power anymore. There were no wizards. Besides, what good was school as long as I was stuck in Kakuma camp?
A few years later, when I was at a community meeting, an elder spoke to us boys. “Why do you think we lost our homes and families? Why is your own government killing you? Why have you been stranded in a refugee camp for almost ten years? It is because you don’t have the magic. American people know the magic. They look up at the sky and understand the stars. They go to the moon and come back.” He pointed down. “They even look under the ground and know what is there. We are being killed for the oil under our feet, and you don’t even know it is there. Americans know because they have received the magic of education.”
That man’s message went to my heart. That power was real, and I needed to get that power.
After the meeting, I ran out to Kakuma Road and jumped toward the sky. I couldn’t wait to go to school the next day, even if it meant sitting on a rock scratching letters in the sand.
The Lost Boys in Kakuma camp created a saying: Education is your mother and your father.
We’d lost everything. Our families, our homes, our lands. Everything had been taken from us. But once you had it, no one could take your education.
Now that I was in America and would soon have a job, my opportunity had arrived. I would go to school.
ZOO
Judy
When I’d first spoken with Joseph about meeting the Lost Boys, he’d said, “Just show them around San Diego. You know, the zoo or SeaWorld.”
It’d taken a while to get around to this trip to the zoo, but that day had come.
When I arrived at their apartment, Benson opened the door and said, “In Dinka, panda means home. I want to see the panda.”
“We will, for sure.” They had on the clothes that Lucy had bought for them, including the brand-new wingtips and loafers. “Are those shoes comfortable? We’ll be walking a lot.”
They shrugged.
Right. Silly concern to someone who walked a thousand miles barefoot.
Benjamin came from the bedroom. I hadn’t seen him since the day he’d arrived. He really was tall, at least four inches over his cousins.
“Hello, Ju … dee!” He gave my hand a hearty shake.
“You had a long trip to get here? How was it?”
“Oh!” He flashed that engaging smile and gave me a big powerful high five.
He sure wasn’t as reserved as the others. Or soft-spoken.
“Yes, it was craaazy!” he went on. “I go to Nairobi and then to Brazil. When I come to New York, they do not permit us to land. They say, ‘No, you must go to Canada.’ We go to St. John’s for three day. Very, very cold. Then we take bus to Buffalo, New York. Then other bus to Washington. I take plane to Dallas. That is in Texas. Then I take another plane
to San Diego. I am here now.”
He must have meant Brussels, not Brazil. He told it all as though he’d just returned from a Boy Scout outing. He didn’t seem traumatized, that was for sure. “Wow. Quite a journey.”
“I saw World Trade Center towers burning,” he said flatly.
“What?”
“Yes. From my airplane window. I think they are oil towers on fire. Pilot say to look at the little screen. Airplanes fly into the buildings. I thought pilot telling us that we are flying into a building.”
“Oh, no! That must have been the news you were watching. Wow, Benjamin, I don’t know what to say. We’re glad you’re safe and have finally arrived.”
“We go now?”
A man of action. “Absolutely, let’s go.”
It was a perfect autumn day for an outing. Perfect except that I hadn’t heard from Bob at Ralphs yet. I wore a vest to keep my cell phone close in case he did call.
“May I drive your truck?” Benjamin asked.
The other guys didn’t know how to put a seat belt on. “Uh, well, you need driving lessons and a license.”
“I know how to drive.”
How was that possible? From what I knew, he’d been with the rest of the guys. “Where did you learn?”
“I drove an ammunitions truck. They shot the driver. I drove.”
That was hard to believe, but none of the other guys were responding, or scolding him for telling tall tales, just climbing in the car, like it was old news.
“How old were you?” This story didn’t fit into what I thought I knew.
“Fourteen.”
I thought he’d been in Kakuma camp then. There was so much about their stories I didn’t know.
Benjamin climbed into the back seat with Alepho and Lino, his knees crammed against the seat in front of him.
“Okay, then, I see. You still need a license to drive here. We’ll work on getting you that.”
Benson, the eldest, sat up front as usual, and we headed out. I put in a reggae CD with some Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley.
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