The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  Jakleen and Mariam already understood everything that Mr. Williams said, they told Sam and Sana. They wanted to move into a more challenging class. Sam and Sana tried to act as go-betweens, and conveyed to Mr. Williams that the newcomer class felt too basic to Jakleen and Mariam. He pointed out that the sisters could not yet answer even simple questions with full sentences. He acknowledged that their comprehension was high, but they were not able to speak or write with proficiency. He gave his students constant assessments, and the girls would have to demonstrate much greater language control (using English words properly) before he would move them upstairs.

  Jakleen and Mariam also expressed to Sam and Sana that they were upset at being classified as freshmen, when they believed they belonged in the upper grades. They wanted to graduate in a year or two, which they felt was justified by their age—but they were being told it would be four years, or possibly longer. Why couldn’t anybody see how old they were and how intelligent? Newcomer class was beneath them! Sara, the former newcomer in the Student Senate, had mentioned having the same feeling of lagging behind her peers. “The age—you think you’re not going anywhere,” she said. “You know you’re going to be like twenty or twenty-one by the time you graduate. Usually at twenty-one years old, you’re like a junior at college. And instead, you’re a senior in high school. That’s, like, a humongous difference.”

  Sam and Sana tried to cheer up Jakleen and Mariam by explaining that if they worked harder, they could move up more quickly. They reported to Jakleen and Mariam the many successes of other students from Iraq. The twins mentioned that Oula had spent summers at Harvard and Stanford. News of Oula’s triumphs lifted Jakleen and Mariam’s spirits temporarily—they dared to imagine that maybe someday they could attend a prestigious college—but when they spoke with Oula, she explained that she had arrived in the United States at a younger age and had begun South ready for AP classes. Disheartened, Jakleen and Mariam’s spirits fell even lower. They could never do what Oula had accomplished, they decided. It was hopeless, so why even try?

  The twins mentoring them grew perplexed about how to be of assistance. They offered encouragement, only for Jakleen and Mariam to counter that they hadn’t faced the same obstacles. The twins watched with mounting concern as Jakleen and Mariam continued to skip school, uncertain how to intervene. Sam told me that she worried about the girls getting low grades, having to repeat newcomer class, and getting so frustrated that they might even drop out of school. “I don’t know how to tell them, you are going to fail at life if you don’t come to school,” Sam said miserably. “I feel like I should say that, but I don’t know how to do it.”

  Jakleen and Mariam were not without aspirations, but their drive seemed to come and go. I also thought they might be enterprising in ways that were simply different from Oula or the twins. Those girls often appeared at school without any makeup, wearing baggy sweatshirts, looking relatively androgynous. By contrast, Jakleen and Mariam took great care with their appearance. Jakleen, in particular, watched her diet carefully, made sure her eyebrows were always sculpted, and coordinated her clothing with her lipstick. If she wore a hot-pink sweater, then she wore hot-pink lipstick, and she might even paint her nails a frosted version of the same hue. In a way that looked effortless but was actually the product of a fair amount of effort, she exerted power over boys. In certain regards, Jakleen seemed as competitive as her mentors—just not as school oriented.

  During the winter, Jakleen and Mariam missed more days due to weather, and when they did show up, they sat around lethargically and announced that they did not like school. One day a Goodwill volunteer asked Jakleen to take a turn reading from a book, and instead Jakleen typed into her cell phone in Arabic, used Google Translate to change the words into English, and then held up the phone so that we could see the message: “I don’t want to read.” Sadness hung over the two girls like a bank of fog. Even while they were physically in Room 142, they spent an unusual amount of time on their phones. They perfected the art of holding the devices low in their laps, hidden under the tables, and texting while Mr. Williams was busy with another student. Sometimes he caught them and confiscated their phones, but often they got away with what I imagined to be silly socializing. I was perplexed by Jakleen and Mariam’s frequent absences, refusal to participate, and obsession with texting until I visited them at home again, and the girls explained that they were distracted because their close friends Haifa and Noor had just departed from Damascus, even though it was the dead of winter.

  Despite the freezing weather and the harsh reception awaiting them in Europe, the other two sisters had just started the risky trek to Germany. They had traveled by bus from Damascus to a border town in Turkey, and from there they had continued west across the length of Turkey to a coastal city filled with Syrians crammed into tents and hostels. They were about to attempt a boat crossing over the Aegean Sea. Criminal gangs were charging tens of thousands of dollars per crossing, often in rubber dinghies filled beyond capacity. Haifa and Noor were hoping to land on one of the islands off the coast of Greece, such as Kos or Lesbos, and from there to find safe passage to the mainland. After that, they planned to walk to Germany.

  Complicating matters enormously, Haifa was eight months pregnant. Several years earlier, at age sixteen, she had married a young man whom she had met in Syria, also a refugee from Iraq. Unable to earn a living in Syria, he had returned to Iraq in search of work. Their relationship had foundered, even though Haifa was carrying their child. Mariam showed me a picture of Haifa and her husband. He wore dark jeans cuffed at the ankles with a white T-shirt, and looked like he could have been an extra in the movie Grease. Haifa and Noor’s father had left Syria earlier, due to his inability to earn a living. The girls’ parents had subsequently divorced. Now Haifa, Noor, and their mother were attempting the trip to Germany on their own because Damascus had become unlivable.

  Jakleen and Mariam knew that thousands of people had died attempting to cross the Aegean. But they also remembered how frightened they had been by the violence in Jaramana and could imagine what several more years of war had wrought. If Haifa and Noor were attempting the dangerous crossing at a time of year when storms were especially fierce, while one of them was eight months pregnant, then the situation in their old neighborhood had to have grown appalling. Jakleen and Mariam could not focus on what Mr. Williams was saying because their hearts were not in Room 142; emotionally, the girls might as well have been en route to Germany themselves.

  Jakleen and Mariam texted their friends constantly. The exchanges were not particularly interesting. They would write, “How are you?” And Haifa or Noor would write back, “We are tired.” Every once in a while, Haifa or Noor would send a picture—like the image Mariam showed me of one of the girls wearing a quilted pink ski jacket and a black fleece hat, while carrying a black backpack and a plastic bottle filled with water, standing beside the blue-gray expanse of the Aegean. The photographs never included a full view of the girls’ faces, because in the Middle Eastern way, they would avert their gaze or hold their hair across the lower half of their faces like a veil. Jakleen and Mariam did the same thing whenever Lisbeth tried to photograph them. They had all kinds of rules about modesty that diverged from American norms—they wouldn’t use their real names on Facebook, for example.

  Jakleen and Mariam wanted to accompany their friends every step of the way, as much as they could, so they replied instantly when Haifa or Noor texted. They told the other girls they would make it, everything would be all right. People who had lived through those car bombings in Jaramana were bonded in a way that transcended all else. When the successive cars had exploded, killing so many neighbors, the blasts had welded Haifa and Noor like family to Jakleen and Mariam. The girls might squabble or go without speaking for a period, but they always reunited. Right now, what was happening in Haifa and Noor’s lives—the uncertainty over whether they would succeed in making the winter passage across that choppy, gray body of water�
�seemed more important to Jakleen and Mariam than anything taking place in Mr. Williams’s classroom. For them, the only story that mattered was what was happening over in Syria, Turkey, and Greece. Would their friends find a boat pilot who knew the best route? Would the craft they boarded stay right side up, or would it capsize? If they landed safely in Greece, would they make it to Germany? And what kind of reception would they find there?

  2

  * * *

  The Realist

  In the second week of December 2015, three days after Donald Trump called for a ban on all Muslim immigrants coming into the United States, putting the subject of refugee resettlement squarely at the center of the election discourse, Troy Cox drove over to the tan clapboard house where Solomon and Methusella had been living for the previous three months. It was time for him to do a ninety-day home visit with the family from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The visit marked the moment when the family was expected to attain self-sufficiency. Troy was a case worker with the African Community Center, a local nonprofit that was part of a national refugee resettlement agency known as the Ethiopian Community Development Council—one of the nine agencies that partners with the federal government to resettle refugees in the United States. Troy had worked closely with the family since they had arrived, because he had been assigned to help Tchiza and Beya and most of their children find their place in America.

  From the get-go, Troy had found this particular assignment more perplexing than most because the family was large and were processed as three separate cases. The oldest child, Gideon, had arrived in the United States on May 20, 2015. Timoté, the next oldest, arrived four months later along with his parents and his other siblings, but he had been considered a separate case because he was over the age of twenty-one. While the family had been living in the Kyangwali refugee settlement in Uganda, Gideon and Timoté had “aged out” of the original application, and could no longer be included in the same file as everybody else.

  Troy had met the bulk of the family when they landed in Colorado on September 10, at Denver International Airport. Their pending arrival had been announced on a rectangular slip of white paper pinned to the bulletin board in the common area at the African Community Center, alongside two dozen similar slips of paper describing other families slated to appear that week. The Arrivals Notifications listed the name of the primary applicant, the number of people in their party, the various languages spoken by the family (many slips of paper listed multiple languages), and the exact date, time, and flight number. Solomon and Methusella’s plane landed at 11:58 P.M. Troy went to the airport with a colleague, Bizimana, who was originally from the Congo and spoke Swahili. Troy and Bizi got credentials that let them go through security to meet the family at the gate. They always did this on a pickup—otherwise, refugees tended to wander around the airport for hours before connecting with their case workers.

  Almost invariably, the refugees were the very last people to disembark. That night was no exception. Dozens of passengers emerged from the walkway before Troy spotted a large group of ten people who looked disoriented from too much travel and starry-eyed at the glass-and-chrome surroundings, all wearing white IOM badges. The International Organization for Migration is an intergovernmental body with 166 member countries that coordinates the movement of refugees between nations. The IOM badges were what Troy looked for when he wanted to find a given family, but this clan would have been hard to miss. They had that glazed look that refugees wore. “There was too much going on, and they had been on airplanes for three days,” Troy said later. “They were pretty quiet.”

  Right away, Troy handed Beya, Tchiza, and their two adult sons, Timoté and Elia (he had recently turned eighteen), each a $20 bill. This was pocket money, to use as they liked. It came out of the funds that the federal government gave to newly arrived refugees, who typically arrived penniless. With Bizi’s help, Troy explained that they could use the money to buy a pack of gum or a bottle of juice or whatever they and the children might need. The money was theirs legally, to spend as they desired; Troy was just going to give it to them in small increments, until they could see the big picture. The following day, Troy would visit the family to check on them (he always did a twenty-four-hour visit, to make sure that refugees knew how to find food in America), and then he would hand every adult another $100 in cash. If he gave them that much money at this moment, when they were exhausted and disoriented, who knew how it might be spent. Tomorrow, after they had rested, Troy would go over the household budget and explain why they should save that $100 for necessities.

  Troy already knew that this family’s resettlement would be one of the most complicated matters he would work on that year. To begin with, he had been handed two separate case files for the ten individuals he was meeting, which in itself was unusual. Beya and Tchiza and their seven youngest children comprised one case, with nine individuals listed in that paperwork; their second-oldest son, Timoté, who was twenty-four, had a case number of his own. Then Troy had dug up Gideon’s file as well.

  Also, the family was especially large, which complicated everything. Each refugee was permitted to bring two checked bags, for example, and most families brought all the suitcases they were allowed. Troy and Bizi had debated how many vehicles they would need. Ten people would require ten seat belts and room for twenty suitcases. The family and their bags were not going to fit into the ACC’s passenger van, which sat fifteen but had limited luggage space, so Bizi brought a second vehicle, and they had a third driver on standby. Troy had loaded ten winter coats of approximately the right sizes into the van, because the nights were getting cold, but as the family disembarked, he saw that some other aid worker must already have given them coats—nobody living in an African refugee camp possessed garments like those—so he would use the coats he’d brought for other families he would meet that fall.

  August, September, and October were Troy’s busy months. The flow of refugees typically swelled at that time because the UNHCR and the IOM moved as many refugees as possible into host countries right before the end of their fiscal years, which concluded on September 30. During the fall, Troy sprinted through his days, without time to eat proper meals. Each night he went to bed feeling as though there was more he should have done, and each morning he woke thinking of all the things he had forgotten to do the day before. He worked at a flat run, every day, from August to November. Whenever I spoke to him, in his small third-floor office at the ACC, he would look at me with a slightly surprised expression on his face, as if to say, You want me to sit still and talk to you without worrying about somebody else’s well-being? Speaking with the aid worker vastly increased my understanding of what Tchiza and Beya were living through while I was observing their sons’ classroom.

  Most of Troy’s cases were simpler. Other families he was shepherding through the process were smaller, the children were closer in age, and they had only one file, not three. Tchiza and Beya’s youngest child was about to start elementary school, while their oldest already had children of his own. The welter of benefits that each individual in this particular family did or did not qualify for was proving bewildering for Troy himself. Trying to explain to the family members the various means by which the ten individuals could receive aid while they adjusted to living in the United States and attained self-sufficiency was going to occupy a lot of his time.

  Troy liked to describe himself as “the realist.” Refugee resettlement work attracted idealists who wanted to make the world a better place, but the job of a case manager was to be unabashedly pragmatic, as Troy saw it. You had to make a refugee’s dreams conform to the day-to-day reality of living in the United States, at the bottommost rung of the socioeconomic ladder. Prospective employers might be reluctant to hire people who spoke foreign languages, and the skills that refugees arrived with sometimes had no utility in the developed world. The streets of America were paved, but just with tarmac. You had to break it to the refugees gently, but they had to get the point, fast:
They must surrender the vain illusion that from this point forward everything would be easy. Not at all. Everything was going to be brutally hard. It would be tough to find a decent place to live that they could afford; it would be difficult to find any kind of job, let alone one they might enjoy; learning English would be mind-bogglingly frustrating. Plus, nobody in this country would understand their story. They would feel so unrecognized, they might as well have become ghosts.

  Then there was the matter of finances. Refugees were given a one-time cash grant from the federal government upon arrival of slightly more than $1,000 per person, administered by the resettlement agency on their behalf. They could also qualify for any assistance program open to a legal resident of the United States, depending on their income level. But they were expected to become self-sufficient within a short time. Moneywise, the main challenge would be grasping that costs were going to be sky-high, and that their cash was going to vanish rapidly. The one-time stipends given to each member of this family would last perhaps three months, Troy had calculated. In other words, they had ninety days.

  Troy felt optimistic about this family’s chances, however, because he had already met Gideon. Whenever Troy or one of his colleagues at ACC mentioned Gideon’s name, they broke into wide grins; Gideon was working full-time, his salary was high enough that he no longer qualified for public subsidies, and he had acquired a working command of English. Plus, he possessed an ever resourceful, unflaggingly cheerful attitude, which the resettlement workers admired. He represented everything that the ACC staffers hoped for, in terms of a successful outcome. At the moment, Gideon was waiting for everybody else to arrive back at the tan clapboard house, where he and his wife were cooking the rest of the family a welcome meal.