The Middle of Everywhere (30 page)

"
Education is our mother and father.
"

On Christmas Day 2000, Lincoln received its first refugees from the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. The family was part of a group called the Lost Boys of Kakuma, although I didn't like that name. First, who would want to be labeled a lost boy? It seemed condescending and it made the refugees seem hopeless. Second, in this case, there was a girl, Martha, the sister of Joseph, Abraham, and Paul.

By now the story of the Kakuma refugees is well known. They were children whose parents were killed in the Sudanese civil war, which began in 1983 when the government of the north attacked the southern tribal peoples. Eventually the south formed its own army, the Sudanese People's Liberation Army; both sides used a scorched-earth policy. Caught between armies, 2 million ordinary people lost their lives. Generally, girls were kidnapped by the soldiers, while boys fled into the wild.

The orphaned children banded together and walked first to a camp in Ethiopia, where they stayed for many months. But when new rulers came to power in Ethiopia, they wanted to get rid of the refugees. They bombed the camp and ordered soldiers to herd the refugees out of their country. The fleeing orphans had to cross the Gilo River. Many children drowned or were eaten by crocodiles crossing that river. The refugees walked to various places in Sudan, but in 1992 they ended up in Kenya in the Kakuma Refugee Camp. Of the roughly seventeen thousand kids who began the march, ten thousand made it to Kakuma. The others were killed by soldiers, starved to death, or were eaten by predators.

Kakuma was a large sprawling place with primitive huts and muddy roads. The temperature hovered around one hundred degrees. There was only dirty water that looked like tea and one meal a day, a porridge of lentils and grain. Disputes over food and territory broke out after dark. Of Kakuma, Abraham would later tell me, "I never knew if I would wake up in the morning."

Yet the camp officials deserve some credit. They took in thousands of children no one else wanted and organized schools for them. Many of the boys learned to read and write in English. Kakuma refugees were taught to say, "Education is my mother and father." Still, it was a place with too few resources and too many orphans. In explaining their situation, Joseph said, "We were worth even less than weeds."

The family, who came to our town, had lost their parents when Joseph, the oldest, was twelve and Paul, the youngest, was five. Their father had been killed when their village was first raided. They lost their mother as they all ran from the attack at the Ethiopian camp. She stopped for a moment, there were explosions, and they never saw her again. The children managed to stay together for ten years, crossing back and forth across three countries, eating weeds to stay alive, running from people who wanted to kill them, and finally living in the refugee camp in Kenya.

Our First Visit

The Kakuma family had arrived in Lincoln by plane, what the tribal Dinka and Nuer called "sky boats." The airplane meals had been strange to them. They hadn't seen vegetables or forks in the camps. At our small airport, they were greeted by a large contingent of Sudanese and they experienced their first escalator, cell phone, vending machine, and revolving door. Outside it was snowing and the wind chill was twenty-five degrees below zero. As soon as they arrived, the family began to shiver and really never warmed up until spring.

On a cold sleety day, my husband and I went to meet the family in their two-bedroom apartment near our downtown. Their apartment was furnished with donated furniture, but it was neat and clean. There was a television set in the corner, already turned on. The temperature in the apartment hovered around ninety degrees, but even so, the family all wore jackets and huddled together on the couch.

They had a visitor from Sudan: James, a Nuer man who had ridges of scars on his forehead from manhood ceremonies. In Africa the Nuer and the Dinka might have been enemies, but here in Lincoln the many different tribes mix. The Sudanese are a sociable, fun-loving people. When they are not working or sleeping, they visit each other. They share food, clothes, bicycles, cars, and money with their countrymen.

The Kakuma refugees didn't look like African Americans. They looked like handsome Dinka warriors in sweatpants. Joseph was clearly the leader. He was tall and slender, with a broad smile and a handshake and greeting for everyone. I wondered where he had acquired such good manners.

Abraham was even taller and thinner than Joseph. He looked very much like his older brother, but more winsome and tentative. Martha was pretty and quiet. Unlike her brothers, she hadn't been allowed to go to school, and she spoke almost no English. Paul had an open trusting face and seemed heartbreakingly eager to please. He closely watched his older brothers and did exactly what they did.

Over time I got to know the family very well. Joseph was a wise leader, a workhorse, strong and proud, so proud it hurt him to make a mistake. He had sacrificed his own desires for so many years that he did that now automatically. Margaret Mead wrote that "Responsibility tends to ennoble and absolute responsibility ennobles absolutely." She could have been writing about Joseph. He had kept his family well-behaved and together through a holocaust. And he had done this as a twelve-year-old boy. In America, at age twenty-two, faced with a very different set of problems, Joseph would take the same heroic approach. He did what he had to do so his family could survive.

Abraham was spiritual, moody, and intense. Like most Dinka men, he spoke little, but he was tormented by all he had missed. Sometimes he was angry or heartbreakingly sad; other times his face broke into a sunshiny grin. He was charismatic and could light up or chill a room with a glance. Had he grown up in America, he would have been a poet or jazz musician, someone who made a living being sensitive. But because of his life, he would have a rough time finding a spot in Nebraska.

Paul was a fifteen-year-old hormone-filled adolescent who could really look like a sad sack when he didn't get his way. He was very tall with big hands and feet. He'd been well protected by his siblings, especially Martha, and he was clearly the petted baby of the family. But because of his age, he had to obey everyone in what turned out to be a very hierarchical family.

Martha was six feet tall and looked like a supermodel in her Goodwill clothes. She Wore her hair in cornrows or other stylish African ways. She cooked and cleaned for the family. She was proud and slow to trust. At first, she had the mandatory silence of the non-English speaking, but as soon as she started school, her English improved rapidly.

On our first visit, the family was polite to us in the African way of being polite to elders, which meant they spoke softly and didn't look at us. They answered our questions and nodded as we talked, but they didn't initiate conversation. We Americans think it is polite to make eye contact, and it took us a while to get used to the downcast eyes and short answers to our questions.

That first day we all felt a little strange and awkward. The only whites this family had known were government workers or anthropologists. I pondered the irony that as a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s, I had read about the Nuer and Dinka tribes and now I was meeting them in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Martha showed me their apartment. All the beds, the chairs, and the couches were covered with doilies she had sewn over the years so that when they finally had a home they would have beautiful things.

Jim and I showed them picture books of Africa and America that we'd checked out of the library. Later I would bring them a map and we would trace their travels through Sudan, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Joseph would speak of the days before the war when his family had grazed cattle along the southern Nile.
Their Nuer friend James had walked from Kenya to South Africa to escape the war. He was angry that the United States hadn't helped Sudan. He said, "Your country helped Zaire, Rwanda, and Somalia, why didn't you help us?" Of course, I couldn't answer. I really knew very little about Africa.

We had brought the family some Uno cards. We taught them to play and we left them the cards. They were soon beating us at every game we taught them.

We gave them a calendar and showed them how to write things down on it. I asked about their birthdays and wrote them on the calendar. These birthdays had been arbitrarily assigned to them when they left Africa. (An inordinate number of refugees say they were born on January 1 or the Fourth of July.) Birthday celebrations are a very American idea. They are about time and individuality. Birthday parties are our way of teaching children that the day they came into the world matters.

We took the family's picture—four handsome people sitting on their couch, hands folded in their laps with big smiles. Martha's doilies gave the couch a festive, homey touch. The scene was one of excitement and hope. When we left that first time, we asked if they wanted us to return. Joseph said, "You are welcome anytime."

After our first visit, Jim and I talked about what role we would play in the lives of this family. We had originally planned to be their family therapists. But now it seemed like they needed an American mom and dad. They needed practical help with school, jobs, and managing time and money. They didn't need family therapists as much as they needed cultural brokers.

America was going to be hard for them. We knew of a Sudanese man in Nebraska who had gotten overwhelmed and killed himself. The best mental health plans for them seemed preventative. Fred Rogers spoke of "loving people into existence." We decided to love them into a new life in America. We would teach them to be Americans. We'd have field trips and language and culture lessons. We'd make it up as we went along.

When Jim and I stopped by a few days later, Martha was cooking an omelet. Their canned goods were in the refrigerator and the milk and produce were left on the counter. I explained a few things about food storage. I also gently hinted that it was good to turn off the television now and then.

The family seemed happy to see us. We had brought them a few basic supplies—gloves and hats, scissors, a clock, and Scotch tape. They had never seen Scotch tape before. They put their hats and gloves on immediately. I could see I'd bought gloves that were too small and I offered to exchange them. They said the gloves were just fine and they kept their hats on.

There is a saying that if you want to know something about the Dinka, ask a cow or a woman; the men will not talk. In response to our questions, the family would answer, "Everything is okay." Martha might have been more talkative if she'd known our language. Joseph was unfailingly polite but volunteered little information. Abraham seldom spoke but he communicated a great deal nonverbally. Paul was a loving kid who occasionally blurted out something, such as his request one day that I buy him a Walkman.

One of the lessons I learned from the family was to be comfortable with silence. We Americans tend to talk all the time when we are together. When I tried to do that with this family, I felt silly and they were overwhelmed with the verbiage. I learned to be silent and wait for a topic to emerge. It was restful once I got used to it.

Sometimes they talked about the past in a matter-of-fact way. Joseph told of fleeing Ethiopia and of being stalked by lions. The children had been so hungry they'd eaten dogs, grass, roots, lizards, anything. Paul couldn't remember life before he lost his parents. All the years he should have been in elementary school, learning to play ball and swim, and just having a childhood, he was on the run. He reminded me of a line I'd once read: "I was born with a war in my eyes." He never complained, but when he was first in Lincoln, Paul woke in the night shouting, "Run, run." One morning, Abraham asked me how to get rid of nightmares and painful memories. He said, "I pray all the time for them to go away, but my prayers are not answered."

I said he would feel better with time. I reminded him that he was safe now. I showed him how to breathe deeply. I hugged him.

All of the Kakuma refugees had supercharged arousal systems. In a new place they had trouble knowing what was dangerous and what wasn't. Martha and Paul were especially afraid of animals. In the spring when the tornado watches and warnings came, the family were alarmed. They called tornadoes, "the big wind." We would call them and say, "Don't worry. What you see on television is just a watch for a county far from us."

On one visit we taught the family to play slapjack and solitaire. We showed them how to put a jigsaw puzzle together. These gifts seemed like a good idea because it was twenty below outside and they had no car. They needed ways to fill their time until they went to work or school. But I wasn't sure how much they enjoyed the gifts and how much they were just being polite to us. I worried that we were "inflicting help" on them, that when we left they were asking each other, "How do we get rid of these nutty Americans?"

One afternoon I asked the brothers to read to me. Joseph and Abraham could read well. Joseph had actually taught English in the camp and had read many African and European novels. Abraham read softly, but with confidence. Paul refused to read alone, but when I read to him, he repeated exactly what I read. I learned later that the Kakuma kids hadn't been taught any phonics, only to repeat in rote fashion what the teacher had read.

That day Jim taught them how to change the burned-out lightbulbs in their living room. I showed Martha how to cook a frozen pizza and peel an orange, which she called a lemon. When we left, we gave them good-bye hugs.

Later at our three-story house filled with books and CDs, with our two cars in the driveway and our well-stocked refrigerator, I thought about the Kakuma refugees' humble situation. They had endured hardships I couldn't even imagine and, in our state, they were facing difficulties that they surely couldn't imagine—difficulties with education, work, money, culture shock, and prejudice. I truly hoped they would let us help them and that our help would be of some genuine use.