Disturbed in Their Nests Read online

  The plane bumped hard. My belly jumped and I grabbed the armrests. What was happening? We were still up in the sky. Had the plane hit something up here? Another plane?

  No one else moved. The white man beside me didn’t even open his eyes. I calmed down, but every time the plane bumped, I held on.

  How long before the plane landed? Fear kept me from sleep and even from moving. People walked in the aisle between the seats, but I stayed in mine because I didn’t want to fall out.

  They gave us a tray with strange-­looking food. Green leaves with orange strips and a red berry on top. Next to it a square thing made of metal. The man beside me peeled back the silver paper. Steam rose. Chicken with rice. In the camp, asida was the food I knew. I hadn’t had chicken in many years. My stomach was eager. I ate all of the airplane food. Some of it tasted pretty good.

  After they cleared the food trays, a flight attendant came down the aisle announcing, “Dessert. Dessert.”

  Desert? Oh no. Just like in war, we had to leave. My heart raced. I grabbed my bag and stood. Where would we go, up here in the sky?

  The white man didn’t move and looked irritated. I started toward the exit at the back. Surely, they would tell us where to go. But no one else moved. People looked at me funny. Someone asked if I was lost. Why weren’t they preparing to leave the plane? Why weren’t they frightened?

  The flight attendant came closer to the back, where I stood and offered a dish. “Would you like dessert? Ice cream or cake?”

  This was dessert? No wonder other passengers looked confused at me standing there.

  I returned to my seat, relieved, and accepted a white square of cake. I’d never tasted anything that sweet. Another Sudanese boy across the aisle took a bite and spat it out. The white people looked at him like, That is rude.

  I forced down my whole piece. I wasn’t going to disappoint any Americans. For a long time my ears buzzed and my body twitched from that white square.

  Later that night I had my first glimpse of America. New York City. Lights reached out to the horizon and climbed into the sky like tall trees. I’d never seen so many lights in my life.

  At the airport terminal, officials led us to an area with chairs. “Sit here and wait for your next flight.”

  We watched the people rushing by. The women walked strangely, and their shoes went kik-­kak, kik-­kak on the floor. “Why are they in such a hurry?” I asked Benson. “They have all of their things with them. Are they migrating?”

  He looked at me like, Don’t ask your silly questions. He didn’t know either.

  I had never seen so many white people. We didn’t have white people in my village. The first time I ever saw a white person was in a town on my journey, after I’d left my home. I became sick and some villagers took me to a clinic. The person who checked me was a white lady with smooth yellow hair. Her blue eyes mesmerized me like a witch. She made me well.

  Now that I was in New York, it was clear there were more white people in the world. I couldn’t stop looking at them, and they looked back at me with an expression that said, You have two legs and two eyes, but you look different. I wore pants and a shirt like everyone else. Did I look different?

  I noticed that people didn’t talk to one another. Why didn’t they sit down and have a conversation? Was this the nature of Americans? Back home, people took time to do things—unless they were fleeing danger.

  I needed to use the bathroom. I walked through the terminal searching for a sign that said toilet. A lot of people went in and out of a door that said restrooms, but I wasn’t about to go in there. In Africa they kept dead people in rest rooms until they buried them. Did so many people die on airplanes that they needed a special room at the airport?

  I returned to my brother and cousin. “There is no toilet.”

  Another Lost Boy pointed back where I came from. “In America it is called a restroom.”

  I returned to the restroom and entered. During orientation in the camp they had taught us about flushing toilets. I had never seen one before the airport in Kenya. I was happy that the lever worked as I’d been told. When I finished, I watched to see what the white people did next. After they washed their hands, they put them near a noisy machine and rubbed them together. I did the same. Whoosh! I jumped back. What was this? Warm air? I looked into the hole to see where it came from and tried again. I felt like an American when I came out of that toilet and wanted to show the others how it all worked.

  After several hours, and several more trips to the restroom, we boarded the plane to San Diego. Soon I would see my city of destiny and know my future.

  THE PILLOW IS EVERYTHING

  Alepho

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  Benson, Lino, and I arrived in San Diego late at night, after traveling for nearly two days. They told us that someone would be picking us up in a car. No one had ever picked us up before. The only people I’d seen picked up in cars were leaders, men of caliber, or the educated. The majority of people walked on their natural feet—no shoes, no cars. My chest swelled at the idea of riding in a private vehicle. I had become special and important.

  Inside the airport terminal people held up papers with names on them. We looked through the crowd for a white person holding our names.

  Benson pointed. “Look. There.”

  Our names were on the paper, but the man holding it wasn’t American. I said to Benson, “Our sponsor is a poor Sudanese.”

  “Shhh,” Benson said.

  The man greeted us. “Hi, I’m Diar Diar.” He spoke Dinka, but with an accent from Bor, a region west of ours.

  I whispered to Benson, “We are not lucky.”

  We followed him out of the terminal and through a field of cars that stood like cows in a herd.

  I asked Diar, “Will we get our cars soon?”

  “Maybe in two or three months.”

  Diar drove out of the car field. Roads went in every direction. How did Diar know where to drive? Red lights and white lights came at us fast. I became dizzy.

  Finally the car stopped at a tall building. Was this our sponsor’s house? If so, clearly our sponsor was rich. I grew excited.

  We carried our bags up steps that connected to the outside of the building. I’d never climbed stairs to a building before. The steps had air between each one and felt strong but I stepped softly so as not to break one and fall through to the ground. Why did they put the entrance to the house at the top? What kept these upper rooms from falling down on the ones below? I didn’t feel safe up there.

  Diar knocked on a door. Two Lost Boys opened it. Sudanese again? When were we going to meet our American sponsor?

  Diar introduced us. “Daniel and James have been in America for several months.”

  Then Diar showed us around. “This is the room for sitting with a television.” In the kitchen he explained how to turn on the water, light the stove for cooking, and put food in the refrigerator. Why would I want my food to be cold?

  Diar took us to a small room beside the kitchen. “This is the toilet.”

  I whispered to Benson, “How can someone use this room for a toilet when it is so close to the cooking?” It didn’t seem clean to me. Benson nodded in agreement.

  There were two other rooms. Daniel and James slept in one with two beds. Our bedroom had three beds. At the end of each was a white puffy thing. Was this the pillow? People in the camp had told us that Americans kept their money in pillows. The money in the pillow would help us in our new life so that we could go to school and get an education. I’d promised my friends back in the camp that I’d send them money when I received my pillow. I claimed the bed with the puffiest pillow and impatiently waited for Diar to leave so I could look inside.

  Then Diar said, “It is late. Goodbye for tonight. I will see you tomorrow.”

  Benson and Lino went to the sitting room; they
didn’t seem concerned about their pillows. Didn’t they know? I walked back to my bed and lifted mine. Not heavy. Perhaps money was light? Or maybe we did have a rich sponsor, and Diar had taken our other two pillows. In the camp we’d always suspected the Kenyans took most of our food and gave us only a little. Diar had dropped us off and disappeared. How could we trust him?

  I took my pillow into the bathroom and closed the door. I patted it. Yes, yes, I was a big winner. The outer cover opened at one end, but the inside cover was sealed. That meant there must be money. I used my teeth to make a hole and widened it with my hands. I searched inside until I reached the bottom. White fluffy stuff flew all over. No money. My heart dropped. How would I live and go to school? My friends back in the camp would think I had lied to them and taken the money for myself.

  After that, I began to question other things I’d been told in the camp. If no one worked in America and everything was done by machines, who built the machines? I had enough common sense to ask that. I still believed that we would receive our own car and house. After all, they had given us food in the refugee camp, so here had to be the same, just more. I really needed to meet my sponsor. That person would surely set me on my path for a future in America.

  The next day Diar picked us up. His quickness interested me. In the camp I had not been exposed to doing things fast. Most days we waited in line at the water tap for hours. And every two weeks we arrived at the food ration line before sunrise and were lucky to receive any food at all by the end of the day. Back in my village, if a traveler arrived at our house, we let him rest for a few days before putting him to errands.

  As Diar drove, even in daylight, I thought we were going in circles because all the buildings were square and tall and all the streets looked the same. The land was flat. There were no hills or trees or rocks to mark the land or tell where you’d been. How would he find our way back?

  We arrived at a place where Diar said we could get a food-stamp card. I’d been told that in America you needed only your green card and that bought anything.

  I asked Diar, “When do we get our green card?”

  “It takes more than a year to get the green card.”

  A year? How could I wait a year? I wanted to buy things and send them to my friends in the refugee camp. There had been nothing in my pillow. How was I going to survive in America?

  By the time we reached the house again my head throbbed, my stomach swirled from the car motion, and I still hadn’t met my sponsor.

  • • •

  We stayed in the house all the next day. Our house was nice and clean and had a soft floor called carpet. One thing still bothered me though: the inside bathroom. That seemed unclean. In the camp we took care of business in the bushes, not inside our huts. You could make the loudest noise and no one would care. How would I do that in the house? And where did the water carrying the waste go?

  I was surprised that no one came to greet us at the house. In Africa, when people find out that you have just arrived, they come from very far away to visit you. Here, the other doors of the big house were closed. When evening came, lights shined from inside other rooms, but still no one invited us to a meal or even talked to us.

  The second day my energy was restored. I told James, “I want to see the whole house and greet our sponsor and the people in this village.”

  “No,” he said. “This is an apartment building, not a house. In America you can’t go walking about knocking on people’s doors if you don’t know them. That’s trespassing. They call 911 and the police come and take you to jail.”

  “Why? I only want to greet them.”

  I doubted what James told me. Maybe he wanted me to fear people in America and think of them as selfish individuals.

  We stayed inside again. There was a lot of food in the apartment—more than I’d ever seen. Bags and boxes of things I didn’t know.

  James said, “Chips are good. You eat them with sauce.”

  I tried one but it didn’t taste good to me. I wasn’t used to so many choices. In the camp we all received an equal share of food every two weeks, and it was always the same thing: corn and wheat that we had ground and then cooked with water to make asida. I had been so tired of asida but now I missed it.

  I didn’t like just sitting in the house doing nothing. I needed to meet my sponsor.

  Finally, on Monday, Joseph Jok, a Sudanese man who worked for the International Rescue Committee, picked us up at our apartment. “Today, you are going to meet a nice lady who will help you to know the town.”

  Finally, I would meet my sponsor.

  Benson warned Lino and me. “You must be respectful when we meet the sponsor. Don’t ask too many questions. You can follow my lead.”

  Benson was older than both of us. I respected that, but he was acting as a chief and I was my own person. We were in America now. Everything was different and we needed to follow the American way. The important thing was that we were about to meet our sponsor.

  WE WANT AMERICAN

  Judy

  AUGUST 13, 2001

  At the San Diego offices of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) they directed my son and me to a couch, where we waited to meet three Lost Boys of Sudan.

  I’d read an article about these young refugees that had piqued my interest and grabbed my heart. I hadn’t forgotten about them when Joseph Jok, a caseworker at the IRC and a grad student I’d mentored at the university, mentioned to me that some of them would be coming to San Diego. He asked if I’d like to meet the new arrivals and show them around. I did, and I especially wanted our twelve-­year-­old son, Cliff, to share that experience.

  “Can we go to lunch before the tour?” Cliff asked from his perch on the couch.

  It was the third time he’d asked that question. Not because he was hungry, but because he’d heard that these young men had never had a soda with ice from a machine. That was unimaginable to him, and he was eager to demonstrate such a miraculous invention. They’d never used a light switch, a phone, or a fork either, but that hadn’t seized Cliff’s interest like the soda had.

  Joseph had called Friday to let me know that three Lost Boys had just arrived. Two weeks remained before Cliff returned to school, leaving enough time for a few days of touring the city, visiting the ocean or the mountains, and perhaps SeaWorld or our world-famous zoo. And, of course, getting sodas.

  “Yes, lunch first,” I reassured him.

  Cliff had many other questions that I did my best to answer.

  “How old are they?”

  “Two are nineteen, one is twenty-­one.”

  “Do they speak English?”

  “Hopefully some that they learned in the camp.”

  In preparation for our meeting of cultures, I’d put on the television segment of 60 Minutes about the Lost Boys of Sudan. I wanted Cliff to see it. Bob Simon, the host, described the young boys’ horrific journey across a thousand miles, barefoot and without parents. I could see that Cliff was moved by their story. Who wouldn’t be? My eyes teared as emaciated boys, holding tattered books they’d carried for years, explained how they wanted to come to America, work sixteen-­hour days, and get an education to become doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Their bodies were frail, in obvious need of food and medical care, but their spirits weren’t broken. In clips from the refugee camp where they had languished for ten years, they played soccer without shoes. I couldn’t do anything about their loss of homes and family, but shoes were within my power. After lunch and the sodas, my plan for our first day together included getting them each a new pair.

  As excited as Cliff was, I was twice as nervous. By every measurement, these young men and I were as different as we could be from one another. They’d come from halfway around the globe and a culture entirely foreign to me. They’d lost their homes and families, survived a war and years in a refugee camp. I’d lived all of my years in
safety and comfort in the same city. They were beginning a new life, and I was in the middle of mine. They were male; I was female. They had nothing, and I had everything a person needs. They had the blackest skin I’d ever seen, and I was one tint this side of albino. It seemed that the only thing we’d have in common was English, and even that was questionable.

  On the television segment, some Lost Boys spoke in heavily accented English, and Bob Simon had to repeat most things so that the audience could understand. Even then I suspected the producer had sought out the young men with the best command of English in the first place. He had sixteen thousand to choose from.

  I wondered too, would they be more like boys or men? Would they be sad and homesick or delighted to be here? They’d witnessed and endured things that adults never recover from. An April 1, 2001, New York Times Magazine article characterized them as “among the most badly war-­traumatized children ever examined.” What would I do if they were withdrawn, unstable, or depressed? Joseph had assured me that the boys Cliff and I would meet today were happy and normal. I was skeptical. Normal (whatever that meant) maybe, but happy?

  Relax, I told myself as we waited on the couch to meet them, we’re just showing them around town for a couple of days, not adopting them. Cliff would get to know people from a very different place. To experience this cultural opportunity we didn’t even need to travel around the world. All we had to do was drive less than an hour down the freeway.

  Fifteen minutes later Joseph walked into the IRC offices with three tall, exceptionally thin young men with short-­cropped hair and flawless black skin. Their shirts, buttoned to their chins, were tucked into pants with hems far too high above cheap canvas shoes.

  They approached, smiling. I should have asked Joseph about basic protocol. In my work and recent travels I’d met a Buddhist monk, an Orthodox rabbi, and a Muslim man, all of whom had declined my outstretched hand. An awkward feeling.

  I whispered to Cliff, “I’m not sure if it is their custom to shake hands. Especially with women.”