by Helen Thorpe
Yet Hussen had a hard time finding work for Tchiza. By the time Troy Cox returned to the tan clapboard house for the ninety-day visit, on December 9, both Elia and Timoté had successfully found work as “housemen,” cleaning the public areas of a Hyatt Place hotel. They were earning $10 an hour, more than they had been getting from CARES, and both of them had stopped accepting that subsidy. They had also enrolled in English classes at a local community college. Troy spoke to the two young men firmly about not buying material goods. Sneakers, jeans, watches, cell phones, cars—they lusted for all those things. Troy counseled them to buy gadgets and flashy wardrobes later. Right now, they had to help their family pay the rent. Both Elia and Timoté had to give their parents $300 toward rent every month, Troy urged, or else the family could face eviction.
Tchiza felt he should support the family himself and did not want to rely on his sons for money; Troy replied that in the United States they were going to have to work as a team. Using their TANF money and the incomes that Elia and Timoté were earning, the family paid December’s rent without help from ACC. Troy expressed concern, however, that Tchiza had not yet found a job. “Age discrimination,” Hussen said, when I asked why securing a job for Tchiza had proved more difficult than for his sons. Employers preferred to hire young men or women rather than older adults, according to the employment specialist. The other factor, Hussen said, was Tchiza’s desired schedule. Whereas Elia and Timoté had been willing to work any hours, Tchiza preferred not to work on Saturday or Sunday. He wanted time with his family, and it was important to him to attend church. Hussen was having a hard time finding a family-friendly job with weekends off for a refugee who was fifty-two.
At the ninety-day meeting, Troy impressed upon Tchiza the importance of securing employment: “Any job in America will pay more money than TANF,” the case manager advised. Troy also wanted Beya to take a shift at a local day care, but she balked—Beya had never worked outside the home and wanted to devote herself to caring for her own children. Tchiza spent the rest of that month assiduously attending job-training classes at the African Community Center. On December 22, he applied for a position as a dishwasher at a corporate cafeteria, working the day shift Monday through Friday. Early the following month, he was offered the post. He started on January 19, 2016. Once they established the three income streams—Tchiza’s new dishwashing job, and Elia and Timoté’s two hotel jobs—the family achieved what the ACC considered economic self-sufficiency. Tchiza earned so little and had so many dependents that the family still qualified for food stamps, but at a reduced amount.
Money remained tight because of the whopping rent. Instead of following Troy’s advice and asking Beya to work, the family looked for cheaper housing. In January, they found an apartment that cost $1,000 less than what they had been paying. It had only two bedrooms, and the ten family members would be jamming themselves into a smaller space than Troy would have considered feasible, but they deemed the space adequate and planned to move there in February. At that point, their finances would stabilize. In each case, Tchiza, Elia, and Timoté had taken the first job they were offered, as advised. Beya had not yet embraced the idea of working, but by squeezing into a smaller living space, the family found an alternate way to achieve the goal of economic self-sufficiency. Troy received no more phone calls about financial emergencies. In four months’ time, the family had transitioned successfully from living in a refugee settlement in Uganda to living in a large urban center in the middle of the United States.
“It was pretty spectacular,” Troy said.
Meanwhile, a few of the students in Solomon and Methusella’s classroom were exhibiting growth that could be called pretty spectacular, too. And during the second half of the school year, after they had settled into their new lives a little bit, the newcomers began revealing far more of their true personalities.
3
* * *
What Five Times (or, “I Work My Ass Off”)
When school resumed after the holidays, in January 2016, Mr. Williams opened the new semester by asking all of his students to tell him what they had done over winter break.
“Guys, what do we mean by this word, ‘break’? B-R-E-A-K, break?”
“Vacation,” Uyen said promptly.
Uyen had put on her pink Converse High Tops that morning. She was about to leave the newcomer classroom for good, as was Stephanie. The two friends—one from Vietnam, the other from Mexico—had progressed so rapidly that they were being moved into a more advanced ELA class. They would switch rooms in a couple of days.
Mr. Williams asked Hsar Htoo and Nadia to stand at the front of the room and discuss what they had done over the holiday. As the students acquired more facility with English, he wanted to push them to get over their fear of speaking in public. Hsar Htoo said that he had watched two movies, slept a lot, and played soccer.
Mr. Williams asked if he had been happy or sad.
“Happy.”
Then Mr. Williams asked Nadia how her break had been.
“Sad,” said Nadia.
“On my vacation, I felt sad?” Mr. Williams asked. (He was suggesting that she should say it in a full sentence.) Nadia nodded.
Mr. Williams wrote on the whiteboard that Nadia felt sad, but Hsar Htoo felt happy. Then he wrote a lot more sentences like that—sentences involving comparisons, using the word “but” in the middle. The teacher wanted the students to practice using conjunctions to connect clauses. He was also showing them how to use the past tense at the same time. Over his break, Mr. Williams had spent a lot of his free time riding his mountain bike in parks with his son, Owen. By this point I knew him well enough to recognize him as a fellow introvert. That was how he tested on the Meyers-Briggs personality rubric, he confirmed. He had been teaching for fourteen years, however, and the time he had spent in the classroom had caused a shift in his personality—he was now more extroverted than he had been at the start of his career. He still needed to watch his energy level, though, because the hours he spent in the classroom were depleting. Escaping from the demands of his students for a while had allowed him to return filled with new energy.
Mr. Williams asked his students to gather in pairs and discuss their vacations with each other. Jakleen and Mariam were absent, but everybody else had made it to school. Amaniel, from Eritrea, could not stop smiling as he announced that his family had thrown a party and he had danced all night. Ksanet and Yonatan said that for them, the holiday of Natale (their name for the commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ) fell on January 7. I asked what they were going to do to celebrate, and they looked at me in surprise.
“Go to church,” Ksanet said, as if the answer were obvious.
“For how long?” I asked.
“All day!” said Ksanet, like, of course.
Saúl said he had spent his break shoveling snow. I thought it must be hard for him to allow his older sisters to pay the rent, and perhaps shoveling sidewalks assuaged the guilt he carried for letting his sisters support him when he was an able-bodied young man.
Later, Mr. Williams distributed a handout with a story about a soccer game, written in the past tense. Titled “An Upset,” the story concerned a contest in which an underdog team triumphs. Mr. Williams asked if anybody could name a really lousy soccer team, and Methusella said, “QPR!” The Queens Park Rangers were a second-tier British soccer club out of London. Mr. Williams asked Methusella to come up to the front of the room.
“We’re going to act this out, okay?” he said.
Methusella and Mr. DeRose faced each other as Mr. Williams read the story aloud. Mr. DeRose feinted and spun and grimaced and cheered, while Methusella stood still, staring at the teacher’s aide. Perhaps he had never seen a grown teacher behave like this before. Instinctively, though, Methusella dodged when Mr. DeRose approached him. Then he spontaneously faked a goal, and an unbidden smile broke through his reserve.
* * *
Nicole arrived in Room 142 the following day. Like S
olomon and Methusella, she was originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and like the two brothers, she was from the eastern side of that country, the side that had slid into armed conflict countless times over the past several decades. The boys were from North Kivu, and she was from South Kivu; the two adjacent provinces were separated by Lake Kivu. When Nicole first showed up, I had no idea where to find either of the Kivus, or the lake of the same name. American news coverage could be spotty when it came to world affairs, and I had formerly prioritized domestic news over international news in my own reading. As a result, Solomon and Methusella had grown up in circumstances that were unknown to me, even though I was an educated person who considered myself well informed.
Nicole did not join the other students as a peer. She was a senior at South, and she came to the classroom as a volunteer. Mr. Williams thought she could help him manage the room and she could show the other students that you could arrive in the United States from a difficult place and you could heal, grow, adapt. Every day of the week, while living in an apartment that she shared with many other people, without either of her parents to watch over her, Nicole assembled the kind of outfit that one might see on a fashion runway. One day, for example, she arrived in leopard print tights, with a patterned minidress, a short jacket, and electric-blue extensions in her hair; another day she wore paisley leggings with combat boots and purple braids. She had a tough story, but her outfits announced that she wanted to be defined instead by her colorful aspirations.
On her first day in Room 142, Mr. Williams asked Nicole to introduce herself to everyone. Could she say a few words? Nicole told the room that when she had arrived in the United States, she hadn’t known any English, either. “I didn’t know how to say ‘Hi,’ or anything, when I first came,” she said. “Don’t be shy. Keep trying. You should always talk to people, and you should ask a lot of questions.”
When the newcomers did not understand something, Nicole advised, they had to ask. She quantified: “You have to say, ‘What?’ like, five times.”
Nicole spoke Swahili, French, Lingala, Kirundi, and English. Over the days that followed, she moved around the classroom, murmuring to Nadia, Grace, Solomon, and Methusella, the four students who spoke Swahili; later, when others arrived who spoke French, Nicole whispered with them, too. She shared a running side commentary about the day’s lessons with the students from Africa, just as Mr. De-Rose did with those from Central America, making the room more comprehensible.
Nicole stitched together disparate parts of the room. She helped me understand the boys from the Congo better, and she helped various kids from Africa make sense of Mr. Williams’s instructions. A feeling of community was starting to form in Room 142, and Nicole accelerated that process. One day, when we had some spare time, I mentioned to Nicole what I had learned about Solomon and Methusella’s background. I wondered if she was familiar with the city of Goma, where they had said they were from. She was. She had lived in Bukavu, she told me, a city that faces Goma from the opposite side of Lake Kivu.
Goma and Bukavu had turned into battlegrounds at various points in the DRC’s history. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 had sparked mass killings throughout the eastern Congo, a place that is similarly divided between Hutu and Tutsi. After spilling over into the Congo, the situation had grown multifarious, and many different tribes had gotten snared in the widening conflict. “You see blood everywhere and people are running around and mostly people are crying and trying to find a way to go somewhere else,” Nicole said, describing her memories of combat in her home city. “Sometimes the soldiers come to your house and ask you for money, and if you don’t have money they might take your husband or cut you. Some people, they get raped. And they kill some people. Most people were just waiting to die. That’s how it is. Just waiting to die.”
Nicole’s mother and father came from different tribes that began slaughtering one another. One night, some of her mother’s relatives broke into their home and murdered her father. She was awakened by an older brother, who hustled her out of the house, saying they had to run away. Nicole was eight at the time, and she escaped with a jumbled sense that maybe her mother’s relatives had wanted to kill the children, too. Nicole and her brothers wound up walking for several months, until they reached the safety of Tanzania. One of her brothers died along the way, though Nicole did not know why; maybe he had died of starvation, maybe it was dysentery, maybe it was something else. She was too young to make sense of what befell him. In Tanzania, Nicole and her siblings sought shelter in a refugee camp, where an older woman adopted them. Later, this woman told the children that she was their grandmother. Was she truly a blood relative? I was hazy on this—parts of Nicole’s story were hard to verify.
The refugee crisis had been building over many decades, and Nicole’s story represented an earlier chapter in the global narrative. Her flight from the DRC occurred before the civil war in Syria, back when the refugee crisis had been fueled primarily by upheavals in Africa and Southeast Asia. Nicole was part of the hidden side of the crisis, before Middle Eastern refugees started walking to Germany and wound up on the front pages of newspapers in the United States and Europe. The major conflicts in Africa (in Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among other places) had produced so many refugees that Africa now contained the world’s biggest camps. Ben Rawlence, a former researcher for Human Rights Watch, did a masterful job depicting Dadaab, the largest refugee camp anywhere on the globe, in his book City of Thorns. It was hard for me to reconcile an eight-year-old version of Nicole with the kinds of scenes depicted in City of Thorns, but I knew that was the kind of life Nicole had led for six years.
In 2012, when Nicole was fourteen, she and her brothers were accepted for resettlement in the United States. Shortly before Nicole began volunteering in Room 142, a Congolese woman who had recently arrived in the United States shared some photographs with her, and Nicole recognized her mother in one of the images. For the previous decade, Nicole had feared that her mother had been killed, but she was actually living in a refugee camp in Uganda. Nicole had just resumed contact with her mother, and they were now speaking regularly by phone, even though they had not seen each other in ten years.
As we sat at a table in Mr. Williams’s room, Nicole said that she had only just started telling people her story. “Like before, I really didn’t want to talk about it,” she added. When she said this, I realized that Nicole was offering her story to illustrate why I should not ask the newcomers too many questions. Tread lightly in this room, she seemed to be saying. These kids have only just arrived, and you have no idea what they’ve lived through.
* * *
In the second week of January, Mr. Williams spent a lot of time going over the words who, what, when, where, and why, using them in the interrogative form. Known as the Five W’s, the words are understood by journalists as the key questions that must be answered to collect a complete story. As I looked around the room, I realized that I had gathered answers to many of these key questions: I knew who was in the room, when they had arrived, and where they were from. In most cases, however, I did not know why certain students had left their homelands, or what had forced them to do so. I had learned a lot about Jakleen and Mariam’s departure from the Middle East, but I understood much less about Solomon and Methusella’s reasons for leaving their home in Africa. And I knew next to nothing about any of the families from Southeast Asia. Because of the discussion I’d just had with Nicole, however, I decided that it was fine to proceed at an unusually slow pace, by journalistic standards. In time, maybe I would discover more.
The interrogative words were hard for Mr. Williams to explain. Previously, he had smiled in an exaggerated way as he said “happy,” and he had frowned and put his fists on his hips as he said “angry.” At another point, Mr. Williams had used dry-erase markers to show the students words for shapes and colors; he had drawn a red circle, a blue square, and a green triangle on the whiteboard, and wri
tten words for those colors and shapes. But it was hard to act out the meaning of “who” or to draw the meaning of “what.” Instead he used those words in sentences, employing familiar people or routines from South. Then he asked Methusella to stand in front of the class and pretend to be the teacher and ask someone else a question.
“When does school end?” Methusella asked Lisbeth.
Lisbeth lifted her shoulders and her eyebrows toward the ceiling and looked imploringly at Mr. Williams.
In the past, Mr. Williams might have translated the question into Spanish, but at this stage he thought it was time for Lisbeth to find her voice in English.
“You could say, ‘Can you repeat that?’ ” Mr. Williams suggested.
“Can . . . you . . . ,” Lisbeth said to Methusella. Then she turned to Mr. Williams. “Ree-peet?”
“Repeat,” he assured her.
“Can . . . you . . . reepeet . . . that?” Lisbeth said haltingly.
“When does school end?” Methusella asked again, more slowly.
“Ah! School ends at three o’clock,” Lisbeth answered perfectly.
Mr. Williams gave her a high five. Then he asked other students to raise their hands if they could think of a question that began with the word “who.”
“Who is the math teacher?” asked Solomon.
