The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  Ebtisam assumed that Jaramana would be a way station, but her family remained there for six years. During that time, they grew close to many of their neighbors. Jakleen and Mariam became especially fond of two girls named Haifa and Noor—sisters their ages who had also escaped from war-torn Iraq. The Arabic spoken in Syria was slightly different from the Arabic spoken in Iraq, but it was not hard for the girls to adapt, and they thrived at school, completing all of their elementary education in Jaramana. The older girls started middle school there, too. All around them, however, many Iraqi students were dropping out of school. One-third of the children living in Iraqi refugee households quit school before graduation, due to the price of tuition, overcrowding in the schools, or pressure to work in the informal labor market to supplement their family’s income.

  Fadi and Ebtisam kept hoping for a phone call from the United Nations. They heard that Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the United States were accepting refugees from Iraq, but years slipped by, and nobody contacted them. Fadi checked regularly with the UN to make sure their case remained active, and each time he was told to wait. Rumors circulated in the expatriate community that refugees could pay bribes to speed up the process of getting chosen by the local branch office of the United Nations—supposedly it was controlled by relatives of President Bashar al-Assad—but Fadi was not well connected, and even if he had been, he could not have afforded a bribe of any significance.

  Then Fadi and his brother fell afoul of the Assad regime. Ebtisam recounted a long story about her husband’s lending $400 to a Syrian, then getting crosswise with the other man after he sought repayment; supposedly the man said he didn’t owe Fadi any money and then insinuated that he could make the refugee’s life difficult. Ebtisam believes the Syrian man made a false report about her husband to the secret police, claiming that Fadi and his brother opposed the Assad regime. Actually, like most residents of Jaramana, well known as a stronghold of support for Assad, Fadi preferred him to the alternative, especially as ISIS grew in power. Whatever the origins of their disfavor, in 2010 both Fadi and his brother were arrested by Assad’s security forces.

  Their woe was not unique. The Assad regime reportedly jailed hundreds of thousands of alleged dissidents, and it is popularly believed that inmates were tortured. Ebtisam sold her last few remaining pieces of gold jewelry to bribe jail officials, but even after she turned over the money, she did not manage to secure Fadi’s freedom. She tried many times to visit her husband, yet was never able to see him. Seven months elapsed. When Fadi finally returned home, Ebtisam found him thin and anxious but otherwise himself; his brother, however, was missing several teeth and exhibited signs of mental illness, she said. The brothers reported that they had been kept in underground cells and beaten.

  Upon his release, Fadi was instructed to leave Syria. He told Ebtisam that she should remain in Damascus, to await the outcome of their case with the United Nations, while he traveled back to Iraq. He thought it would be easier to find work in a country where he had friends and relatives. Because several years had passed since the assailants had visited their apartment, he hoped that returning home might be safe. Ebtisam did not want to stay in Syria without Fadi, but her husband said that any day she might get the phone call that would change the rest of their lives. So Ebtisam remained in Damascus, and Fadi departed for Baghdad.

  Fadi grew a beard, put on a hat and dark glasses, and returned to the city where the two of them had first met. Ten days after he arrived in Baghdad, he vanished. Ebtisam’s brother-in-law mounted a vigorous search, but even after visiting every morgue and hospital, he could find no trace of his missing brother. Ebtisam believed her husband had been killed. She did not often say this out loud, however, because her daugh-ters wanted so badly to imagine that their father was whole and well.

  By the winter of 2010, Ebtisam was living as a single mother on the edge of Damascus with three children and no steady income. One-third of the Iraqi refugee households were structured similarly—women and children, scraping by. She cobbled together a living by cutting hair, giving manicures, cleaning houses, and watching other people’s children. It was hard to earn enough to pay for both rent and food. The family’s diet became restricted to whatever Ebtisam could afford. That same winter, in Tunisia, a fruit vendor set himself on fire, sparking protests that flared into a full-blown revolution. The following year, the revolt fanned widespread protests around the region, known collectively as the Arab Spring.

  Across the Middle East, governments started to wobble. Dissidents waved signs and gave speeches; armies dispatched tanks. Huge crowds assembled to demand change in Damascus, but when Bashar al-Assad tried to quell the insurrection, the conflict erupted into a full-blown civil war. For the second time in her life, Ebtisam found herself living in a war zone; conditions in Jaramana had been onerous already, but soon the situation became unbearable. Life expectancy in Syria dropped from seventy-six years old to fifty-five. The country’s economy spiraled off course, reaching an 80 percent poverty rate and a 58 percent unemployment rate. More than 60 percent of school-age children stopped attending school, including Jakleen and Mariam.

  In other words, the girls’ relatively casual attitude toward attendance and their failure to show up regularly in Room 142 was in fact a product of the refugee crisis in the Middle East. As the UNHCR report stated, the Iraq War had resulted in a regionwide tragedy:

  There is considerable cause for concern in relation to the education of Iraqi children. Many of the refugee parents, both fathers and mothers, have completed secondary and tertiary education themselves and have high ambitions for their offspring. But the destruction of the Iraq education system . . . coupled with the difficulties they are now encountering keeping their children in school, has created a risk that those young people will grow up without an education . . . Many refugees refer to the fact that the future of an entire generation has been squandered.

  Jakleen and Mariam first described what had happened while they lived in Jaramana during one of our early conversations at South High School. We spoke about this over lunch one day in Room 142—before I met their mother. Nabiha was there to serve as our interpreter. As we sat in their classroom, I shared with Jakleen and Mariam how my interviews with their classmates conveyed so much about what was taking place around the world. The way their classroom led outward to all these other countries and every kind of turmoil on the globe fascinated me, and I tried to convey this phenomenon to Jakleen and Mariam. Whose story could I share? There was Lisbeth, sitting nearby, wearing earbuds and nodding in time to the Spanish-language music playing on her cell phone. I waved at Lisbeth to get her attention and she pulled out one earbud. I told her in Spanish that I had an Arabic-speaking translator, and asked if we could recount her story to Jakleen and Mariam. Lisbeth gave us a thumbs-up.

  “Lisbeth is from El Salvador, and her mother worked as a police officer there,” I said in English. Nabiha repeated everything in Arabic to Jakleen and Mariam, as I turned back to Lisbeth to let her know what I was saying in Spanish. I told Jakleen and Mariam about the extraordinary level of violence in El Salvador, and how Lisbeth’s mother had arrested several gang members. “The gangs threatened to kill her mother, so her mother left and came here—and then they threatened to kill Lisbeth, too. So Lisbeth’s uncle put her and her little brother on a bus and sent them to America. And immigration authorities picked up Lisbeth and put her in prison.”

  “Oh! She has been through all this!” cried Mariam, instantly sympathetic.

  “She is very strong,” observed Jakleen.

  From their suddenly more alert expressions, I could see that Jakleen and Mariam thirsted for stories about their classmates. They looked at Lisbeth with new regard. The newcomers had not been able to communicate directly, even though they had been learning alongside one another for many weeks, and they were keenly interested in having these sorts of interactions—but they needed both me and Nabiha to facilitate communication across the language barriers that
separated them from one another. I translated what the Iraqi girls had said about her into Spanish for Lisbeth.

  “Piensan que tú eres muy fuerte!” I told her.

  A tangible bond formed among the girls, because Lisbeth had been willing to describe her journey.

  “We thought only Iraqi people went through these kinds of things,” marveled Jakleen. “Our story is like this. It is also a big story. Big, big story. Maybe even bigger than hers!”

  Jakleen and Mariam conferred about something and then turned to Nabiha. The translator said, “They say, ‘Can you tell Mr. Williams that we understand everything when he explains, we understand when he is teaching? But we cannot make sentences to answer him.’ ”

  “I will tell him,” I said. “Also, I can see that. I know that already. And because you understand so much—that’s why the speaking is going to come very fast. Pretty soon this class might even be too easy for you.”

  “In sha’ Allah,” Mariam said.

  “We hope so,” Nabiha translated.

  I knew that in sha’ Allah (sometimes spelled inshallah) meant literally, “if God wills.” It was interesting to me that Nabiha had chosen to translate the phrase into a more secular form. The girls spoke several varieties of Arabic; their mother and father had spoken two different dialects, and they had learned a third version while living in Syria. Throughout our conversation, Nabiha checked and rechecked things the girls were saying to make sure that her understanding was accurate. She was highly conscientious, and if she said that in sha’ Allah meant “we hope so,” then I believed she was conveying her best sense of what the girls had meant. And yet I wasn’t getting a literal translation. Never in my life had I had to work so hard to understand the people I was trying to write about. In almost every interview, I caught moments like this—small issues that highlighted the difference between my culture (highly secular) and another’s (habitually religious).

  I asked the girls what they remembered about Syria.

  “They tried to kidnap her while we were in Syria,” Mariam replied, pointing to Jakleen.

  I asked what had happened, and Jakleen spoke at length in Arabic. Her voice was more fierce, more propulsive, than Mariam’s, and it had a slightly deeper pitch. Nabiha gave a little groan of sympathy at something Jakleen said.

  “I was walking to the grocery store to buy some stuff for my mom,” Nabiha said to me, speaking as Jakleen. “It was dark, there was no electricity. A car started following me. The car was dark, the windows were dark, I couldn’t see inside. Then they called out to me. And one of them got out and grabbed my hand and started to pull me over to the car. And I hit his hand and I pulled my hand back and then I ran away.”

  “Right around that same time, they kidnapped two girls in our neighborhood,” Mariam added.

  “What happened to the girls who were kidnapped?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” Jakleen said. “They never came back.”

  “They raped them,” Mariam supposed.

  “All right,” I said. “So the country was getting more dangerous.”

  “A lot more dangerous,” agreed Jakleen.

  “We were at home, and there was a big explosion,” said Mariam. “It was a bombing, close to us. And the school . . . going to school was dangerous, because my friend, she got killed by the bombing. They bombed the schools.”

  * * *

  Later, when I read news articles about the bombings that had happened while Jakleen and Mariam were living in Jaramana, I learned that during the month of November 2012, eight different car bombs had been detonated in that neighborhood, killing more than one hundred people. Home to many Christians, Druze, and Sunni Muslims, the neighborhood was being held by the government’s forces, and it was considered a loyalist stronghold, a place supportive of Bashar al-Assad. The lethal car bombings were among the bloodiest attacks to take place anywhere in Damascus since the start of the civil war. Although no group formally declared credit, they were thought to have been orchestrated by a group linked with Al Qaeda known as al-Nusra Front.

  Four of the eight bombs went off on November 28, 2012, the day Mariam had remembered. The first blast—a Mercedes, packed with about twenty pounds of explosive material—ripped through a crowded central square, close to a gas station, at 6:15 A.M., during the morning rush hour, when it would hurt the greatest number of people. The second bomb was deliberately timed to hit the crowd of would-be rescuers who rushed to the scene of the first catastrophe. It blew up only a few minutes later, at a nearby roundabout, more than doubling the number of casualties. Soot covered the walls of nearby buildings, and the force of the two blasts sent buildings crumbling down onto the cars below. Blood lay spattered over the dusty vehicles, and body parts were strewn everywhere. Two more bombs went off an hour later, at the gates of nearby schools, timed to coincide with the start of the school day.

  Mariam and Jakleen lived close to the square where the first bomb detonated, so they did not go to school that morning. The explosion they had heard from their apartment was the first one.

  “It was near to our house,” Mariam said. “We saw all the bodies.”

  “Was anybody that you knew hurt?” I asked.

  “We knew all of them,” Mariam responded. “Jaramana was a small city. We knew each single person who died.”

  I didn’t ask them any more questions. They were fifteen and sixteen years old, and it was the middle of their school day; what they had seen had to have been deeply disturbing. Afterward, I told Mr. Williams and Miss Pauline what the girls had said. In the wake of the disasters, their mother kept the girls at home, as did many parents in Jaramana (half of Iraqi refugees living in Syria had personal experience of bombings). It had become too dangerous to attend classes. The girls stopped going to school before they completed the seventh and eighth grades. For them, the period from the fall of 2012 to the fall of 2013 was a lost year, spent mostly hiding inside the apartment.

  They resumed their education when they arrived in Turkey, where they were placed into the ninth and tenth grades, skipping over the time they had missed. They learned Turkish quickly and stayed in school for two full years, completing the tenth and eleventh grades. Then they dropped out of school for a second time, so that they could work. Mariam washed dishes at a restaurant and Jakleen worked at a hair salon. I asked if the girls had hoped to go to college in Turkey. They said no, that was not possible—college cost too much money. Mariam, Jakleen, and Ebtisam had been able to find only informal work in Turkey, nothing that would have enabled the girls to afford higher education.

  The sisters resumed their schooling upon arriving in the United States, but they were dismayed to be ranked as freshmen at South because of their lack of English. This was galling to Mariam in particular, who thought she should have been a senior. Also, their education wasn’t proceeding at the pace to which they were accustomed. In Syria and in Turkey, they had progressed swiftly. Here, the kinds of sentences Mr. Williams asked them to form seemed infantile, and the girls laughed to hear themselves say such childish things as “I can walk” or “I can sing.” Yet it was all they could manage. And knowing it was all they could manage made the task of mastering English seem insurmountable. They had so far to go before they would reach competency, and their pace of learning was slow. “We relaxed more in Turkey,” Mariam said. “It was easier for us.” The United States was, by comparison, profoundly discouraging. “We thought we were going to learn fast, we thought it would be easy for us, but it is the opposite,” Jakleen said. “We are depressed right now.”

  * * *

  PART II

  * * *

  Winter

  1

  * * *

  Delicious Stick of Butter

  Language proximity, education level of family members, whether schooling had been interrupted, degree of trauma—all these matters shaped how fast a newcomer could learn. There was another critical factor that drove the speed with which students in Room 142 gathered English wor
ds: motivation. Closely related to self-worth—or hope—this quality colored all of their goals and shaped their own beliefs about how far they could go. Over time, as I became a more frequent visitor to the classroom, I became increasingly aware of each student’s level of motivation—who believed in herself the most, who was failing to live up to his potential because he did not believe in himself enough. And I learned a lot about how far the newcomers might go after they left Room 142 by visiting other classes at South.

  One afternoon early in December 2015, just as Europe was becoming less hospitable to refugees and the United States was debating whether to do the same, I walked over to another wing of the high school to observe the Student Senate, where students were practicing public speaking. An Iraqi-born senior named Oula had come up with the idea of holding an impromptu speak-off in which contestants would debate whether Coke was a better drink than Pepsi, whether students believed one AP instructor at the school was better than another, and whether or not the United States should elect Donald Trump as its next president.

  Especially during the early part of the campaign, students at South High School did not take seriously the candidacy of a person like Trump, who represented the opposite of their hypertolerant school culture. Political divisions within American culture had grown so extreme that the country functioned like two separate nations, and students who attended South had little or no contact with voters who supported Trump. Newcomers never discussed the ongoing campaign or any aspect of national politics in my hearing; it was hard for them to follow, especially while they were busy trying not to get lost on the bus system, trying to figure out the right kind of clothing to wear in America, and trying to understand what Mr. Williams was saying. At several junctures, Ebtisam asked me distractedly when the election was being held—for her the whole concept of having a primary season and then a general election proved to be highly confusing—and she wondered out loud about what would happen to Muslim refugees living in the United States if Trump were elected. Would they be deported? Otherwise, none of the students in Room 142 or their parents brought up the election. Trump’s campaign came up often elsewhere in the building, however, and the main tool South students employed to deal with Trump was generally scorn, as I learned from visiting the Student Senate.