Disturbed in Their Nests Page 7

  I wanted to share my thoughts with Judy, but she might think, Oh, this boy just got out of a refugee camp and he’s having all kinds of judgments about us. When you are not sure about a culture or environment, you are always afraid to say the wrong thing. I had to control my tongue so that I did not make my host uncomfortable. We had all been doing a lot of that controlling to be sensitive to Judy and her culture.

  I said to Benson in Dinka, “What an interesting display. They take everything off except just covering those vital places.”

  In our village, women left their tops bare from the waist up. Their bottoms and legs were covered with a decorated sheepskin or goatskin that had been put through a process that made it soft and tender instead of itchy. Sometimes they added other decorations like beads. The skirt was long enough to cover their legs. Once they were seven or eight years old, girls never got naked. The reason was not that men lusted after them. Men were taught not to lust. The reason was because the women respected themselves.

  Men wore wild animal skins for celebrations. When I was born, clothes were available but not everyone could afford clothing, so men often went naked. Boys were usually naked. I’d been naked when I left my village.

  In the refugee camp, everyone wore clothes.

  I said to Benson, “It is strange they do this here. These people are rich, they drive nice cars, everything looks clean, and they have nice houses. Where is the place that people meet each other?” In our village, young people gathered at cattle camp. Boys and girls went there as teens to meet each other. “If there is no other place, maybe this is the place you show yourself.”

  Lino said, “I don’t know, but it looks to me like there is nothing else that is left to cover actually. They are really naked.”

  Judy said, “Let’s go to the park.”

  I wasn’t sure what a park would be. We all said, “Yes, let’s go.”

  The car was warm. I stopped shivering, but a headache was coming so I didn’t talk. Talking makes headaches worse.

  The park was green with plants and big trees. I saw that a park was a place for nature, where it was not paved over like the city, but it was so small. You could walk across it in less than an hour. Why didn’t they give nature big lands? In the park they had rules too. You couldn’t pee or spit like in the nature areas in Africa.

  People walked around. Was this American entertainment? I found my entertainment in nature too. I liked the trees, mountains, and rivers. But more open, not squeezed.

  We went to a place Judy called a museum. There were animal skeletons and some had fur and looked alive, but they were dead. Dinosaurs as well. What interested me was all the information and scientific names they put on the wall. Even though I had a bad headache, all that information gave me joy.

  EATING MUD

  Judy

  I took the shortest route to the park, which meant climbing the steep Laurel Street hill that had terrified me as a child when my mother was learning to drive a manual transmission. No doubt it scared her too. The car angled sharply upward and the engine roared. We were thrown back against the seats.

  “Wow,” Lino exclaimed.

  Across the bridge we entered Balboa Park and parked the car.

  “Benson is hungry,” Cliff said.

  We needed to get our stomachs on the same time clock or eating would be our main activity.

  “Is there a McDonald’s?” Benson asked.

  He got me on that one. I’d told them that McDonald’s was everywhere in the world. “No, not right here. By everywhere I meant to say they are in most countries.”

  He looked at me and tilted his head. “Not in Sudan.”

  I didn’t know, but it sounded likely. We walked toward a little café, passing a photo display of San Diego over the last hundred years.

  “Did you study American history?” I asked, knowing they would eventually have to face it on the GED test.

  “No. We want to learn American history,” Benson said. “Very important. We want to know all about America. We are Americans now.”

  Their enthusiasm was contagious and made seeing my own world in a whole new way fascinating and so enjoyable.

  Alepho wanted a sandwich. Lino settled on Greek pasta salad and Benson only wanted a soda. Wasn’t he the hungry one? He hadn’t yet chosen to eat with us except sodas. What was that about?

  The sandwich arrived. Alepho picked off the top piece of wheat bread slathered in mayonnaise, folded it in half and took a bite.

  Yuck. He wasn’t going to like sandwiches, but I didn’t want to comment so I picked up mine altogether and took a bite. He watched, put his bread back on top and lifted the whole thing to his mouth.

  “What is this?” He pointed inside the sandwich.

  Cliff laughed. Greens weren’t his favorite either.

  “Lettuce,” I said. “Green leaves.”

  Alepho looked suspicious.

  “It’s safe and good for you. What did you eat in the Kenyan camp? Any fish, chicken or beef?” Didn’t one need some kind of protein to survive?

  “Fish no good, make you sick. No chicken or beef. Three kilos of grain and corn every two weeks.”

  Three kilos. Almost seven pounds. Spread over fourteen days came out to about a cup a day. I imagined Cliff trying to figure out how to live off that. They were thin but looked strong. White teeth. Healthy gums. So far, I hadn’t sensed any resistance to my probing questions about the camp, but they hadn’t elaborated either. As eager as I was to understand how small boys survived a thousand-mile walk through the African wilderness, they were trauma victims and our relationship was new. It was hard to know what to ask, yet disinterest felt uncaring.

  “What did you eat when you first left home, when you were walking?”

  They all talked at once.

  “Fruits growing in the wild,” Benson said.

  “Nothing to eat,” Lino added.

  Cliff glanced at me uncomfortably.

  Alepho said, “To keep our stomachs from hurting, we ate mud.”

  TONY HAWK

  Judy

  We walked around the park and poked our heads into a few museums. They seemed tired. Perhaps bored.

  On the way home Alepho slept. He didn’t look well. He’d eaten more than any of them. I hoped the café food hadn’t made him ill. I wasn’t sure what was best for any of them at this point.

  We brought the computer components up to their apartment. Cliff hooked them up and plugged them in. Images of a man skateboarding filled the screen—Cliff’s wallpaper.

  “Who is that?”

  “Tony Hawk,” Cliff said. “Very famous American.”

  “Tony Hawk,” they repeated, as though he might be on the American history portion of the GED test. Benson got out his notebook.

  I’d brought a bag of large composition books and journals Paul had collected from conferences over the years and some pens and handed them out.

  “I want to practice my writing,” Alepho said. “Will you correct my English?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  I’d also thrown in the paperbacks and dictionary I’d bought at the store. Alepho sat down with To Kill a Mockingbird and began reading it at once. I’d suspected he was a reader.

  I glanced into the kitchen. Empty red Coca-­Cola cans overflowed the trash, filled large clear trash bags and climbed the wall in stacks. There was no evidence of food or discarded food wrapping, not even bags of chips. I wanted to open the refrigerator to see if they’d bought any real food but that would have been downright rude.

  “You like Coke?”

  “Yes,” they exclaimed.

  “Did you drink it in Kenya?”

  “Very expensive in Kenya.”

  Not cheap here either. I hoped they had enough money left to buy food. They’d certainly budgeted their corn ration in the camp, b
ut this was probably their first experience budgeting money to buy essentials. At least their indulgence was only soda.

  “Benson, I’d love to see your artwork sometime.”

  He brought out several drawings and showed them first to Cliff.

  Cliff turned to me. “Look at these.”

  Benson’s colors were vibrant and his images bold. In the first picture a boy tended cows. Each cow had unique markings rendered in vivid orange, brown, black, and white. His sense of composition and color was excellent. The second and third drawings were villages of mud wall huts with women cooking and children running around.

  “These are wonderful.”

  Benson had a hint of surprise in his eyes and he grinned. I pointed to a girl in the picture. “What happened to the girls from the villages?”

  “There are Lost Girls,” Alepho said.

  “Where are they?”

  “They are in the camp, but there are not so many as the boys. Maybe only like one thousand. Most were killed in the villages because they couldn’t leave by themselves like the boys.” His voice rose, his tone indignant. “Some of the girls they take as slaves. That is why we run, because we don’t want to go in the northern army or be taken as slaves. When they raid the villages, they take the young girls and boys back with them to the north to work in the houses. My cousin Deng was a house slave. He wash the people and sleep with the goats. Very, very bad for him.”

  House slave? People still had slaves? The girls’ duties no doubt went beyond washing. Boys too, for that matter. “Do you think some of the Lost Girls will come here?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe some will come.”

  Benson brought out a fourth drawing. A tank billowed smoke from the big gun on the front. An explosion in a village sent brown people fleeing or lying dead. In the foreground, a man outfitted in camouflage aimed a gun. The man was undeniably white.

  “Is he a good or bad man?” I asked.

  “Bad man. He is from the north.”

  The shooter’s gun was some type of automatic weapon.

  “Did your father have a gun?”

  “No. My father fight with spear.”

  Machine guns against spears. Lopsided civil war. Sounded more like genocide.

  The time to leave grew near. I gave Lino an eighth-­grade algebra workbook. They looked through it together. “We did that work in the fourth term.” They all beamed.

  Interesting. What did “term” equate to here?

  “What will you do for the weekend?” I asked.

  They looked at me strangely.

  “You know, for fun. Saturday and Sunday.”

  That didn’t seem to clarify my question.

  “We will be here.” Benson had a perplexed look on his face.

  I explained that we would be gone for two weeks. We said our goodbyes and headed out. On the way home Cliff was excited—bouncing around in the seat and waving to cars that passed by. Was this my self-­conscious twelve-­year-­old? When we hit heavy Friday-­night traffic, I smiled and whispered to myself, “Rush Hour, Jackie Chan.”

  Cliff said, “Lino explained quadratic equations to me. He can say his times tables up to twenty-­six.”

  Somehow the camp didn’t have enough food, but the education system didn’t seem to lack.

  I hoped for more traffic so my time alone with Cliff could last longer. I loved to travel, but this day had rivaled any I’d passed in a foreign country. I hadn’t spent thousands of dollars or journeyed days to get there either. I hadn’t even used up a tank of gas.

  At the back of my mind, I was still wondering what I should do. I had two weeks to think about it.

  LOOK INTO MY EYES

  Alepho

  Judy brought us a computer. Our excitement was that of children receiving their first toy. The problem was, we didn’t know how to use the computer. Cliff set it up and demonstrated how to turn it on and shut it down and showed me how to move a thing he called a mouse on the table. That made the little arrow move about on the computer screen. He left it on for us to play with when he was gone.

  When they left, Lino shut the computer down by pushing the power button. Benson said, “Judy said it destroys a computer to do that. You must always shut it down with the mouse.”

  Benson was always keen and warning everybody about taking care of things. He didn’t say much, but when he did, he meant it. His word choice was short, simple, precise, truthful, and to the point. No more, no less.

  We watched television most of the days when we weren’t doing business with Joseph or taking classes at IRC. I could see from the television that there were two ways that people came to know you in America. If you did something good that attracted the admiration of people or if you committed a crime that was widely broadcast in the news.

  Daniel and James worried and talked all the time of the requirements for a refugee to have a job within three months. They had been in America longer than that. They had jobs, but their jobs only gave them one or two days of work. They said that wasn’t enough to make their livings. I began to worry about where to look for a job. I saw people working everywhere, but how did they get that job?

  The IRC programs helped prepare us for the baby steps of our new life in America. We had English class taught by a beautiful American woman who showed us how to ask and answer questions with an Americanized English tone. Another young American woman taught us job-­readiness techniques. She said, “When you go to a job interview, first and foremost, dress professionally. Smile and greet them with high energy and attitude. Look the interviewer in the eyes when you answer questions.”

  The eye-­contact thing seemed strange to me. Especially if the person giving me an interview was older than me. In my country, a young person could not hold straight eye contact with an older person. When I was young, I was not allowed to look at my parents’ eyes for long intervals. That was disrespectful to the elders. Adults are viewed as almost gods and must be revered highly. A child who does not look into the eyes of an adult is regarded as respectful, sensible, and perhaps has an understanding of life.

  When the job teacher noticed that we wouldn’t look into her eyes when we had a conversation, it seemed inappropriate for her to correct us. Was it to be the same with Judy? I did not know what was going on in their minds, but it felt rude to be looking into their eyes. How would I look into the eyes of the most powerful person, a company president or boss, while being interviewed?

  The teacher said, “Looking into the eyes determines if you are being truthful or lying. The eyes are the windows to the soul of a human being.”

  I couldn’t know people by looking into their eyes. I could only know them through their words and actions.

  I practiced, but I was shy. Every time I looked into her eyes I broke out laughing.

  “I can’t look in the eyes,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “It is aggressive to look in a person’s eyes.” Like I was trying to extract something from them.

  “If you don’t make eye contact with the person you are talking to, they will think you are hiding something.”

  We all practiced more and looked into her eyes. Pretty soon, all three of us were laughing together, it was so hard to look into her eyes. The job teacher smiled, but she wanted us to be serious, so we tried to stop laughing.

  The teacher said, “Next you must learn that in America, smiling is the point of contact. Make sure you always smile. Use your beautiful African smiles. That gets Americans’ attention.”

  We practiced and acted those things out in class. I smiled forcefully, but it felt awkward showing my teeth. The teacher said, “That is good. Flashing a smile will impress people and they will smile back at you.” My grin felt like a cat who had swallowed a bird.

  The teacher said, “To be courteous you should say who you are.”

  A
mericans seemed to think people automatically knew how to flush a toilet, turn on a light, and greet people. I had to learn those things and I needed our sponsor to show us.

  BIG FAMILY

  Judy

  Upon our return from the trip, I called the guys’ apartment, eager to see them again. Cliff was already back in school. Alepho answered. “We are about to take the bus to the IRC office.”

  “If you want to wait, I can drive you there.”

  Benson greeted me at the door with a warm smile and handshake. I hugged him and went inside. They all reached out to shake hands but I hugged them instead, I was so happy to see them. They seemed a little uncomfortable, but I decided getting used to hugs was part of their acculturation.

  They wore the new pants, belts, and shoes we’d bought at Walmart.

  “You guys look very nice. How is everything going? I brought a few family photos to share with you.”

  Some of the photos had been taken on our recent trip to Lake Havasu, but they were more interested in one that had been taken in our driveway. “That was my father’s eightieth birthday party with all of my brothers, sisters, spouses, cousins, aunts, and uncles.”

  There were at least twenty-­five of us in the photo. They asked me to explain each person.

  “Big family,” Benson said.

  “Yes,” I said, wondering if I’d just reminded him that his family, for the most part, had been destroyed.

  It must have triggered something because they began telling me about fleeing their villages. The night Benson and Lino left, Alepho was five. He left two years later when his village was attacked again.

  “When did you meet up?”

  “In 1992.”

  “Five years. Wow. That must have been something to see your brother after so much time.”

  Alepho said, “He look so different, but still he was my brother.”