by Helen Thorpe
As the noisy, rancorous election was unfolding, President Barack Obama announced that he believed the United States needed to play a bigger role in mitigating the circumstances of displaced people. The federal government had admitted 70,000 refugees in 2015, but Obama declared it would take in 85,000 in 2016; later, he would call for the United States to admit 110,000 refugees in 2017 (although he would no longer be in office when it came time to realize that goal). By the spring of 2016, as the students were finishing their first school year at South, the United Nations announced that the numbers of refugees around the world had grown—there were now sixty-five million displaced people on the globe, an increase of six million from the year before. Obama thought the rise in the global displacement meant that all developed countries should expand their resettlement numbers, and he wanted the United States to lead in that direction.
The goals Obama set for the U.S. resettlement program represented a steady uptick in the numbers resettled over the previous decade, but not the largest numbers this country had ever welcomed. Only after World War II did developed nations begin to categorize people legally as refugees. The greatest number admitted to the United States in a single year arrived in 1980, when huge numbers of people were fleeing Vietnam by boat; that year, the United States admitted 207,000 refugees, mostly from Southeast Asia. During the 1990s, the United States frequently admitted more than 110,000 refugees annually, prompted by the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, when large numbers of people sought to escape upheaval in that region. The number dropped precipitously after 9/11, however, due to fears about security. The targets set by the Obama administration represented a gradual return to what had been considered normal levels of resettlement pre-9/11.
Donald Trump made clear that he did not agree with the trend being set by the Obama administration. “I’m putting people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, they’re going back,” he told a crowd at a rally in New Hampshire. “They could be ISIS . . . I don’t know that it is, but it could be possible so they’re going back—they’re going back.” He seemed to believe that because ISIS had taken root in Syria, refugees from that country must be aligned with the terrorist organization. Those who worked in resettlement believed the opposite to be true: Aid workers understood the refugees streaming out of Syria to be running away from ISIS and its confrontation with Bashar al-Assad. Later, Trump said, “We have to stop the tremendous flow of Syrian refugees into the United States—we don’t know who they are, they have no documentation, and we don’t know what they’re planning.” These comments also perplexed those who worked in refugee resettlement, for while Europe was awash in asylum seekers, there was no comparable influx of undocumented Syrians to the United States, and federal authorities had already implemented a twenty-one-step vetting process for refugees coming from the Middle East. Those refugees were going through especially lengthy background searches and multiple security interviews. Trump’s remarks did not reflect reality. Yet his audiences believed him, because he perfectly articulated their fears.
At the same time, as I continued to visit Ebtisam, I kept bumping into Mark, the evangelical Christian from New Life. It struck me as notable that my liberal friends who planned to vote for Hillary Clinton and thought they were pro-refugee were not logging many volunteer hours with families like Ebtisam’s—but Mark was, every single week. Mark and I probably would not have agreed on a variety of matters, but we did agree on one central thing: that to live in comfort in the developed world and ignore the suffering of strangers who had survived catastrophes on other parts of the globe was to turn away from one’s own humanity. In spending time with refugees, Mark found a kind of salvation, and I experienced something similar while mingling with the kids in Room 142. They affected all of us this way. Eddie Williams found his humanity in teaching the students, Miss Pauline found her humanity in providing therapy to them, and I found mine by documenting what was happening in their classroom and their homes. The students and their families saved each of us from becoming jaded or calloused or closed-hearted. They opened us up emotionally to the joy of our interconnectedness with the rest of the world.
That was what was at stake in the election unfolding in the United States, and in the similar-sounding political battles resounding across Europe, as far as I was concerned: the humanity of the developed world. Did the United States, did Europe—we who had inherited such spectacular privileges (hot showers, appliances, electricity, motorized vehicles)—want to turn away from, or turn toward, the rest of the globe? The world was offering us its refugees, due to wars we started ourselves, conflicts we helped to fund, violence we had tacitly condoned, or fights in which we had played no part. Did we want to say a casual no thanks? Was that how we wanted to live, while we had our spate of time on this earth? And if we did choose to live that way, closed-minded and hard-hearted, then what was going on with our qalb?
* * *
There were only three weeks left in the school year. Mr. Williams spent a lot of time evaluating his students to determine what classes they should be placed in next year. Now that most of them had entered the speech emergence phase, language control was the main thing he was looking for, as well as expanded vocabulary and increased linguistic complexity. With summer fast approaching, Mr. Williams also had to work harder and harder to corral the unruly energy that was coursing through his classroom. In the days before Lisbeth’s court appearance, he had constantly redirected the nervous dynamism she had brought into the room. The main way Mr. Williams had grappled with the El Salvadoran girl’s even more extreme than usual effervescence had been to place her next to the room’s latest arrival, a tall shy boy from Africa named Mohamed.
At fourteen years old, Mohamed was the youngest student in Room 142. He had been living in his home country of Mauritania without his mother, in the care of other relatives. His mother had immigrated to the United States seven years prior, and had left Mohamed behind until she could get established, but it had taken her far longer to save the money needed to bring him here than she had estimated. She was ecstatic to have her son with her again. Mohamed showed up with all of his hard-won coping mechanisms fully in place. By and large, this meant that he behaved as if he were still motherless, adopting any available female figure. I became a frequent emotional touchstone—he approached me for advice about how to join a soccer team, how to get a bus pass, and how to register for school the following year (all of which I enabled him to figure out by pointing him toward the right authority figure at South). After Mohamed began sharing a table with Lisbeth, I got used to the sight of her tucking his head into her armpit so that she could play with his short curly hair, or attempting to dress him in articles of her own clothing, usually her hoodie. Mohamed was also drawn to Jakleen and Mariam because they spoke Arabic, one of several languages he knew. He spoke French as well, though his home language was Fulani. Amazingly, Mr. Williams found a student mentor who spoke Fulani, and that settled the boy tremendously.
When I interviewed Mohamed one day over lunch, he proved to be as sweet and vulnerable as it was possible for any semi-orphaned child to be. The matter of why his mother had decided to leave him for seven years appeared so sensitive that I refrained from asking him about that at all, even though it constituted the central incident of his young life. Instead, I asked him what he would like to talk about. What he wanted to talk about was his love of the Qur’an: Would I like to hear him sing his favorite verse? I would indeed, I told him. The boy’s face lit up as he sang. Jakleen came over to join us, and I turned my notebook over to her, so that she could write down the words he was singing in that backward-flowing script.
Then, with my pen in her hand, Jakleen pivoted to stare at me.
“Miss, what you feel?” she asked.
She had become the journalist, and I her subject. The only problem was that I found Mohamed’s singing incomprehensible. I could appreciate why Jakleen wanted to ask me such a question, for s
he had spent the better part of a year being called derogatory names at bus stops and at grocery stores, because of her former habit of wearing the hijab. This was galling, because she had lost the person she loved most on this earth after he had cooperated with the U.S. military in a fight against terrorism. She had been mistaken for the exact opposite of what she was, in other words. Being misread had led her to fear that all Americans might be irrevocably biased against those who were Muslim. It made her wonder: Could an American like me hear the beauty of the Qur’an?
“The verse sounds important,” I told her. “I can’t understand what he is saying, but I can see on Mohamed’s face that the verse has a lot of meaning.” Later, I shared Jakleen’s notes with a friend who spoke Arabic, and he told me that Mohamed had chosen a famous verse known as Al-Fatiha, or The Opening. It read: “Guide us on the straight path, the path of those who have received your grace; not the path of those who have brought down wrath, nor of those who wander astray.”
In the days that followed, Shani, too, befriended Mohamed. The two of them began a running commentary on all they deemed sheitan (devilish) or haram (forbidden), such as the dark red nail polish that Mariam wore to school one day. This was how I discovered that Shani lived in a strict household and was not permitted to wear either nail polish or lipstick, which were considered haram by her devout Muslim father. She also was not allowed to use Facebook or to go on sleepovers. Shani listened enviously as Lisbeth planned a sleepover with Jakleen and Mariam, wishing she could participate. After the sleepover, Lisbeth showed up at South looking transformed, because Jakleen had spent a lot of time ironing straight each of her corkscrew curls. The sisters from Iraq liked to call them “pasta,” because Lisbeth’s ringlets reminded them of fusilli. We dubbed the new look “no pasta.”
For a while, Methusella sat at the same table as Mohamed, Jakleen, and Lisbeth, but there he could not concentrate. Soon he broke away to sit at a table by himself, where he could focus on his work. He still walked across the room to visit me anytime he had a question. One day, for example, Mr. Williams asked the class to rewrite their homework, using more advanced vocabulary. Methusella came over to check and see if the synonyms he had found in a thesaurus made sense. The new words he had picked were “baffled,” “tumbled,” “rambling,” and “guardedly.” He had used each of them perfectly. Most of the room remained in the early speech emergence stage, but Methusella had progressed all the way to intermediate fluency, an incredible feat.
* * *
That month, Miss Pauline finally achieved what she considered a breakthrough with the boys from the Congo. She had been having a lot of trouble working with Methusella, as well as with Lisbeth. During the week when Lisbeth’s court hearing was taking place, Miss Pauline confided that every time she tried to conduct soothing meditation exercises to ground the students, Lisbeth simply fell asleep, which I then thought of as the flip side of her extroversion. The therapist added that Methusella had been avoiding group altogether. I had witnessed an exchange to that effect. One day, Miss Pauline asked half of the class to accompany her to the room where they did artwork.
“Second group!” she called.
“No, no, no!” cried Methusella, who was engrossed in finishing an assignment.
“What are you trying to tell me, Methusella?” asked Miss Pauline.
“I will do it tomorrow,” he replied.
“Can you tell me how you feel about group?”
“Somehow good.” (I think he meant somewhat good.)
“What I’m hearing is you would like not to go.”
“I’m in the middle.”
“Do you want to stay here? Or do you want to go?”
“I will go,” he relented.
The exchange left me with the impression that Methusella wanted to forge ahead with his academic work and felt as though time spent in group therapy was time squandered. Later that day, however, the students returned bearing tissue paper collages, and I watched recently motherless Mohamed rest his creation briefly on top of the frame of the bulletin board where Mr. Williams hung artwork, as if he was looking for a safe place to represent himself. He considered his collage there momentarily, then took it down and put it away. When they lined up at the front of the room, Hsar Htoo happily held his creation high up in the air, as Bachan clutched his over his chest, and Abigail held hers over the bottom half of her face so that only her eyes showed. Lisbeth held hers over her belly.
Methusella wasn’t holding his collage at all; he just propped it up against the wall, on top of a radiator. Miss Pauline urged me to take a look at what he had produced, and I saw a small square of pink at the center, ringed by a lot of yellow, with many darker colors massed on the periphery. Methusella had explained to the therapist that the pink part represented his mother, because she liked that color, and it stood for what he wanted to protect. He added that the yellow part was “in charge,” which in my mind meant it was associated with his father. The dark colors on the edges of his collage seemed to represent the threats his family had faced. The small pink square peeking out from amid all the other colors clearly constituted the center of the collage, though, which said to me that he considered his mother to be the mainstay of his universe. It was one of the few times that Methusella had revealed himself all year. Both Solomon and Methusella exhibited an extreme level of caution socially, but I could see them starting, at the very end of the school year, to open outward a bit.
* * *
While many of the girls in Room 142 had welcomed me into their circles, and some were even sharing important confidences (such as Jakleen’s letter), I got to know the boys best by attending their sports events. That month I watched Yonatan tackle the two-mile again at another track meet. The race took place at South, where Yonatan faced a student from East who was his archrival in a blisteringly fast long-distance duel. As soon as the gun sounded, Yonatan blasted forward and set a furious pace, far out in front of the pack. The only runner who remained anywhere near him was a tall white guy with a mop of curly red hair pulled into a ponytail. This was Harrison Scudamore, a legend in the local track scene. His father had run in the Olympics, and he himself had earned an impressive string of victories. Yonatan ran the first seven laps at top speed, but halfway through the eighth and final lap, Harrison stole the lead right before they both bolted across the finish line.
John Walsh smiled broadly at Yonatan as he congratulated the runner on the race. Then the coach explained that he had made a classic rookie’s mistake, saving next to nothing for the end. Nonetheless, he had completed the race in 10:36—a full ten seconds faster than his previous personal best. That was what Walsh loved about Yonatan: Many of the team’s other runners had hit a plateau, but Yonatan kept improving by dramatic increments. Walsh felt sure the Eritrean runner had yet to show him his best. “He has not hit his limit yet,” Walsh said after the race. “His mental capacity is extraordinary. For his first year in the United States, that was not bad at all.”
Later that same weekend, I visited the church that Yonatan and his sister Ksanet attended. A close friend of theirs named Shambel had invited me. Shambel was an older student at South who had lost his mother and been separated from his father while living in Eritrea, making him effectively an orphan, and he had been taken in by an American foster family. He was a deacon at the church, even though he was only seventeen. He had approached Ksanet on her first day at South, to make her feel more comfortable. “That’s my job, to bring the community together,” Shambel told me. “That’s my passion. It makes me happy. I don’t want to see anybody eliminated.”
“Excluded?” I checked.
“Right,” he said.
The church was located in a redbrick building with a modest exterior. Inside I found a pile of shoes by the door and took mine off, too, and entered barefoot. All of the women had covered their hair with white cotton scarves; I was the only woman whose head was uncovered. At the start of the school year, I had thought that covering one’s hair w
as a Muslim custom, but now I understood that Christian women from many parts of the world also cover their heads as a sign of respect for God. Even though I was bareheaded, I was greeted warmly by the other women and welcomed into the building.
Men sat in pews on the left, women on the right. The entire room smelled strongly of incense. There were three glass chandeliers, and the walls were lined with brightly colored paintings of scenes from the Bible. The service had started at 8:00, and it would continue until noon. People came and went throughout those four hours, though many sat through the entire service. I spied Ksanet in a white scarf on the women’s side. Some of the congregants held tall wooden sticks, and I saw a collection of the sticks in one corner. Most of the service consisted of singing and chanting in Tigrinya; I could understand nothing of what was said, although occasionally I heard a familiar word such as Jesu or Christos. Children played and squabbled on the floor throughout, and the adults did not reprimand them.
From time to time, Shambel stood to bring a large, ancient-looking book over to one of the robed priests, which he held while the priest read out loud. Later in the service, women with small children filed forward, so that the priests could bless the children. I could feel the sense of community in the room, and also the particular kindness being shown to children. After the service, I got the traditional greeting of three kisses on my cheeks from Ksanet, who told me that she and Yonatan had arrived at 7:30—they were among the stalwart worshippers who remained for all four hours. Shambel asked how I liked their church. I told him that while I could not understand much of the sermon, nonetheless I could feel how unifying the experience had been for everyone. I asked Shambel to explain the meaning of various things that had eluded me, such as the long sticks. He said those were to help people stand, if they needed support. “They represent the idea of Mary,” Shambel said. “She is our strength.”
