Refugee High

by Elly Fishman

  Later in the morning, a detective from the Chicago Police Department arrives at Sullivan. Tall with blonde hair, she stands inside the school metal detectors beside a security guard who sits at the front desk. She wears a black Chicago Police Department vest with blue jeans. It’s never good when a detective shows up at the doors of a school. She’s arrived from the hospital where she interviewed Esengo. Matt suggests they talk in the ELL office in the library.

  Once there, she tells Matt what she knows: Esengo was likely shot near Ridge and Touhy Avenues, and Esengo gave descriptions of two black men, one tall and the other short. The detective also tells Matt she knows Esengo was attacked earlier in the week, and she believes the shooting could be the result of gang recruitment gone awry. The meeting is brief. Before the detective leaves, she tells Matt she’ll be in touch.

  Elsewhere in the building, Sarah and Josh visit Esengo’s classes. Josh has come up with a simple, scripted version of the events.

  “Esengo is alive,” he tells the students. “We don’t know what happened to him. He is in the hospital. We are doing everything we can to support him and his family and all of you. And if anyone wants to come talk to me, please do so.”

  One student raises his hand, sheepishly. “I didn’t know this happened in America,” he says. Another asks if she can visit Esengo in the hospital. The news has sent a shockwave through the room. It’s not an easy message for Sarah and Josh to deliver. How do you tell a group of students, some of whom have witnessed friends shot and killed, and others who have fled war zones, that violence besets their new home, a place that promised sanctuary and safety? Sarah and Josh stick to the script. But they know the students have plenty of trauma to read into it.

  Asani

  Asani, who is lanky with a gentle gaze, and Samuel, a shy freshman with round cheeks, arrive in the ELL office in the back of the library on Wednesday afternoon. The small room, cluttered with uniforms, bins of school supplies, headphones, and shelves filled with old textbooks, is out of sight, but wondrous things can emerge from it. Sarah refers to the room as the ELL “womb.” Sarah settles into her desk chair at the end of a table. Matt sits beside her while Josh plops down next to the boys. Asani sits quietly, barely moving. Both he and Samuel grew up in Nyarugusu, a place where, rather than protect the refugees in the camp, police often demanded bribes—money, sex—to keep from hounding them. For the boys, police were an equal threat to gangs.

  This is the first time Asani has left Mama Sakina’s home since Friday evening. As Mama Sakina put it just a few nights earlier, Asani’s father, Tobias, and their fellow Congolese refugees came to America for a safer life. But now, they no longer feel safe.

  When the detective arrives, she comes with a colleague. The two introduce themselves to Asani and Samuel. The interview cannot start before a translator shows up on the phone. Several still moments later, an accented voice greets the room over the speaker and the questioning begins.

  The interview unfolds at a glacial pace. It’s slow in both languages. The detectives ask for basic details of the day that Esengo was beat up. The translator, whose voice is muffled by a bad connection, poses the question to the boys. Asani starts. He speaks quickly, barely pausing for breath. His answers verge on manic. He explains, in Swahili, that two weeks ago, Esengo was approached by a group of four boys. Esengo exchanged a few words in English with them, but Asani did not understand what was said. The boys then lunged at Esengo and he began to run. Soon, one of them caught Esengo and punched him in the face. He only got in a few hits before Esengo managed to scramble away. Before the translator explains, Samuel interrupts. He shakes his head and offers his own version of events. When the translator speaks to the adults in the room, he tells them the boys do not agree on when Esengo was beat up, nor where it happened.

  The conversation does not get easier from there. The boys continue to interrupt each other, and while the translator attempts to keep up, he struggles to keep their answers straight. It takes almost an hour for the detectives to establish Esengo’s route home from school. According to a neighborhood gang map, Esengo’s path home crossed through three different gang territories: the blocks surrounding Sullivan High School are claimed by PBG, or the Pooh Bear Gang, a set of Gangster Disciple members named for the fifteen-year-old rapper Pooh Bear who was murdered in Rogers Park in January 2012. On Ashland, Esengo crossed through a several-block radius where Ashland Vikings, a mostly Puerto Rican gang, runs its operation. Closest to Esengo’s apartment building is an area known as “the jungle,” a large swath of blocks run by Loyalty Over Cash, or Loc City, another off-shoot of Gangster Disciples, locked in a nine-year war with PBG. In Asani’s version of events, Esengo was attacked in Touhy Park, an area that falls just within Loc City territory. But the fact does not address why Esengo was targeted in the first place.

  The detectives push ahead. One of them pulls out a set of pictures that Matt reluctantly printed earlier in the week. The images, without names, depict every male student at Sullivan. The detective’s request had irked Matt, but the notion that the shooter could be inside the school compelled him to comply. Matt’s clunky machinery, however, printed the images so dark that the students’ faces look barely visible and not always distinguishable. They also show the Congolese boys another set of images depicting individuals—teenagers and adults—who the Chicago Police Department has identified as active gang members. The line-up is hardly precise or blind. The detectives still ask Asani and Samuel if they can identify anyone. The 3:04 p.m. bell signals the end of the school day, but in the “womb” the sound is faint. The boys’ day isn’t over yet.

  Asani and Samuel take their time with the pictures. They hold each image up to the light, shifting the pages from side to side. Different angles illuminate unique contours. The boys study the faces, consulting with one another in Swahili. They eventually identify two individuals, both Sullivan students, who they believe they saw the day Esengo was assaulted.

  The interview ends just past 4:30 p.m., and the school is mostly empty. The detective offers to drive both boys home. They accept. The incident has left them terrified of walking through Rogers Park.

  Matt follows the boys out. He can’t help but absorb some of that fear, though he only has to walk a hundred feet to his car, which sits in the staff parking lot. As he makes his way there, his mind returns to a detail from earlier in the morning: midway through the meeting, both Asani and Samuel were visibly flustered. They had tried, unsuccessfully, to describe the moments before Esengo was punched. In an effort to clarify the details, Josh asked the boys to draw a picture of the scene. Samuel took charge and drew four stick figures in a diamond shape just below a fifth figure representing Esengo. He then drew an arrow pointing to the figure closest to Esengo and wrote the word “shooter” above it. Matt wonders how Samuel, who was not present when Esengo was shot, would know who shot his friend.

  Sarah Quintenz

  Shaking the news of the shooting proves difficult, but Sarah must shift her focus. Life inside Sullivan pushes forward. Sitting toward the center of the large, communal table in the library, her shoulders slightly hunched over her laptop computer, Sarah kicks off the agenda for the afternoon meeting. The first two weeks of October have come and gone, and Halloween decorations now hang throughout the building. The school gym is particularly spooky, thanks to a spread of Party City decorations, including string spiderwebs, giant plastic spiders, and a pin-the-hat-on-the-witch game. Perhaps most fearsome is the regular appearance of mice, which seem to have claimed the ELL office as their den. Josh and Danny Rizk spent a recent afternoon Googling how to trap the tiny creatures. One search suggests using Lactaid or peppermint sticks as poison. Another lays out instructions on duct-taping a hole. So far, however, the mice have evaded capture.

  This afternoon’s gathering marks another weekly discussion that Sarah has introduced in her new role as chair of the expanded ELL department. Sarah spent her summer break building up the department. Now she oversees
an eleven-person staff and consults with another three who teach classes that include both ELL students and others. Collectively, the group works with over three hundred students, nearly half the school population. And there are lots of meetings.

  Sarah starts with the good news. The department finally has its own printer. “We waited four years and we got it,” Sarah tells the group of ten sitting around the table. “This is a big deal for us.”

  Sarah explains that she’s working with Friends of Sullivan, a volunteer group of alumni and neighbors, on a Thanksgiving dinner. ELL is not all about language learning. Sarah firmly believes that students learn better when they feel a connection to American traditions. The Thanksgiving dinner is meant to bring together refugee students, alumni, and community members to share their traditions.

  “So, can I ask a non-PC question?” one teacher asks. “Is this Thanksgiving dinner to teach kids about Thanksgiving or for us to show up for politicians and get donations?”

  “Uh, neither,” Sarah responds. “It’s about Thanksgiving before all the killing and disease. Like, the sharing of culture and the Native Americans teaching the pilgrims how to live safely.” This history is fiction, but it presents a version of America Sarah hopes to offer her refugee students.

  Helping students feel welcome and safe has long stood at the center of Sarah’s own pedagogy. During her time in the classroom, Sarah adjusted almost every lesson to make them relatable for refugee students. She once edited a standard reading exercise about visiting a laundromat to one that asked students to detail how they cleaned their clothes in their home countries. Or the country they fled, or the refugee camps they lived in. The students dug in, comparing stories of white shirts, dirty walls, and seeing underwear on the line. No matter the lesson, her goal was to help students feel confident and know that their traditions were just as valuable as what was outlined on the page.

  Student safety has been a particular concern for Sarah and her staff, since Esengo was shot. Earlier in the month, Josh addressed the shooting through a series of role-play scenarios with students. In one, Danny jumped out of an alley as the students walked down the street. The lesson, Josh told the students, was to “stay away from danger.” In another, Josh mindlessly walked into a street intersection while wearing headphones. As he stood there, another staff member drove through the intersection leaning on the car horn. The lesson? “Stay aware.”

  For Josh, planning lessons on city dangers must include elements of fun for students, so that his efforts don’t retraumatize kids whose families may have been jumped, robbed, threatened, or worse before they arrived in the United States.

  Sarah tells everyone that the Thanksgiving plans are still shaping up. They have to work out the details, like where they can find a halal turkey and how to gin up some media attention. Just then a group of boys wanders through the door, their eyes glued to their phones.

  “Hey, guys, you have to go somewhere else,” Sarah says, turning toward them. They don’t respond. “The library is closed,” she continues, raising her voice louder. “Goodbye!” Looking up, the boys smile and leave. “Love you!” Sarah calls after them.

  Sarah then turns to the biggest agenda item: writing a new ELL curriculum.

  “In the last three years, we have been working on cleaning up our reputation,” she says. “We’ve been building our program, and now we want to design cross-curricular units and focus on what we want to teach.”

  When Sarah first stepped into her role as chair of the ELL program four years ago, the department adopted what is known as the “cohort” model: ELL students travel together throughout the day, not just to English but to all core classes, where they receive language support. The idea was to keep students with similar English-language skills in the same classes. But new conflicts around the world created new crops of students, and what worked for Nepalese students didn’t always work for Syrian kids. Building a curriculum that both addressed the basic needs of students, and remained nimble for changing demographics, would be a serious undertaking. Sarah enlisted the help of a lecturer at the School of Education at Loyola University, one of the city’s big Catholic schools that serves thousands of first- and second-generation students from families who had to learn the ropes. Loyola is nearby, so must grapple with the same concerns, too. It’s a place where Catholic kids from Latin America and Eastern Europe walk side-by-side with kids in turbans and hijabs. In some ways, Loyola is a bigger version of Sullivan, and a place where many of Sarah’s students could thrive if Sullivan does its job right.

  Sarah instructs everyone to cue up a worksheet she’s written on Google Drive. She’s outlined questions such as “Who are our students?”; “What do we want them to learn?”; “What are their biggest challenges?” But at its core, the exercise works to answer one crucial question: What does it mean to offer a refugee student their best chance for a good life in America?

  The question Sarah and her staff cannot answer, however, is how severely the political tides against new immigrants will impact Sullivan High School’s hundred-year-old purpose. Or whether Washington’s public distaste for refugees will deny the city and nation of a group of young people made to survive and, with the school’s help, thrive.

  Chad Adams

  Chad leans against the podium at the front of the room packed with Rogers Park community members, most of whom are longtime Chicagoans of every ilk who have come to advocate for their newest neighbors. The meeting, which Chad and Rogers Park Alderman Joe Moore lead together, is a response to the outpouring of concerned, often seething, emails from neighborhood residents. The alderman’s office suggested a meeting where community members could voice their concerns. He titled the event “Support Refugees Resisting Gangs.”

  Chad wears a button-down shirt under his navy-blue Sullivan track jacket. The former suited the solemnity of the proceedings and the latter dialed it down. The most urgent questions of the hour—how and why the shooting happened—will be hard to answer. The principal knows that anyone can be a victim. When he worked at Harper High School on the South Side of the city, Chad saw how gun violence traumatized students and their families. He lost count of the number of meetings with parents and neighbors who have wanted answers. He’s heard over and over how gangs appeal to his students. All kids want to fit in, and for many, gang culture promises community and security. It often appeals to the most vulnerable and those who are outsiders. Refugee students are often both unprotected and unfamiliar. At Sullivan, Chad has watched as refugee boys—some from the Congo, others from Myanmar—begin to emulate the styles and cadences of some of their American classmates. Sometimes they don’t even know the meaning of the lingo or the gestures they’re trying on; more than anything, they try to belong. In any case, it signals to gangs that they have a way in. Chad always told himself he needs to expect calls like the one he got after Esengo’s shooting.

  From the podium, Chad nods to acknowledge a woman in the front row.

  “So, my question is, you said you wished the family of the boy who was shot had reached out to you earlier, and I guess I’m wondering, what could you have done if they did?”

  Chad’s answer reflects that he understands the sense of panic among students and their families, and it also asserts the school’s role as one of the students’ protectors. The last thing he wants is for parents to think their children are less safe in school than out of school.

  “Hearing from the family would have allowed us to do a little investigation, and make sure it’s not one of our kids,” responds Chad. “It would allow us to get a head start. We could have asked about who beat him up, what they looked like … We didn’t have any of that information.” Chad pauses. “I don’t blame the kid for not telling us. The family didn’t know to tell the school. But if we don’t know, we can’t do anything.”

  A man toward the back of the room stands up. “The bottom line is a young man ended up getting shot, so what could have been worse than that?”

  A staff membe
r from Joe Moore’s office steps in. She explains this is precisely why she set up this meeting: her hope is to connect those working with refugee families with the Sullivan staff. Chad can feel the temperature rise.

  “I can give everyone my card,” Chad says from the podium. “I’ll make sure you have my contact information.”

  “I volunteer with a Syrian family and they’ve got little kids. I’m wondering does recruitment start at a young age and are there any ideas for little kids?” one woman asks.

  “I’m sure it starts early,” Chad responds without any condescension. “But I don’t know what age exactly.”

  Just then, a slight man toward the front of the room stands up. “My name is Pastor Jim Larkin, Christ Church,” he tells the room. “We have ten Congolese students attending Sullivan and gang recruitment usually starts around age twelve. What happens when you’re recruited is you get beat up, and [after that] it usually turns into a five-year commitment. You have to go to meetings and pay dues. They say, uh, ‘Once a King, always a King.’”

  A voice from the other side of the room adds to the mix. “We also have to be aware that there are a number of African kids who are actually in a gang,” he says. “They speak Swahili. Some are Rwandan, okay. I think we gotta be careful that we don’t say they are totally, you know, American kids sucking in African refugee kids.” He pauses. “And lastly, how come the police are not at this meeting?”

  Next, a Congolese man, clutching his shoulder bag against his stomach, chimes in from the back of the room. “My name is John and I work for RefugeeOne. I think this is so difficult for parents coming from Africa. There are cultural issues here and children start going through the school system and they want to adjust and be like other American teenagers. This is hard for parents because they do not speak the language and they do not understand American culture.”