by Helen Thorpe
Thus confronted, the principal reversed himself and dispatched a teacher to find Stivin. Within minutes, the teacher returned, bringing a boy dressed in navy shorts and a red, short-sleeved, collared shirt. The boy’s face wore an expression of puzzled apprehension. He feared he’d been summoned to the principal’s office because of a transgression.
“Are you Stivin?” I asked.
“Eh,” he said, which I recognized as the colloquial way of saying yes.
“Do you know Methusella?” I asked.
Stivin looked at me blankly. Tamari translated my question into Swahili, but we still got no response.
“Metu?” I ventured, trying the family nickname.
“Eh!” cried Stivin.
I took out my iPhone to show him the same pictures that had delighted his grandfather. The photographs had a curious effect on Stivin. At first, the sight of his cousins’ images caused his body to relax and his face to break into a sunny smile. Stivin’s expressive countenance was alight with the same playful intelligence as Methusella’s, and he was clearly pleased to see pictures of his cousin. But his face clouded as I described how well his relatives were doing in the United States. Noticing his obvious intellect, I felt sure that Stivin would have been capable of the same achievements, if given the chance to prove himself. But he had not been given that chance. The American classrooms in my photographs had wall-to-wall carpeting, glass windows, colorful chairs, shelves of books, and carts filled with laptop computers. The classrooms at his school had concrete floors, no lights, and no windows. There were no books and no computers. I was showing Stivin a glimpse of a paradise to which he had not been invited.
I told him that his cousin Methusella said hello.
But Stivin’s face hardened, because looking at these images of his cousin’s flush new life was hurtful.
“Tell him to work hard and send me money for a school uniform!” Stivin replied, in a slightly bitter tone.
Carelessly, I had thought the pictures would have the same heartwarming effect on him that they had on his grandfather, but he was a child and he felt the difference between Methusella’s circumstances and his own too keenly. My sense that Stivin’s ability to pursue higher education would be highly compromised was confirmed when I found an academic case study of education at Kyangwali conducted by Meital Kupfer while she was a graduate student at the School for International Training Graduate Institute in Kampala, Uganda. According to Kupfer, only 68 percent of children between the ages of six and thirteen at Kyangwali were enrolled in school, compared to 94 percent enrollment for children of the same ages elsewhere in Uganda. Enrollment in primary schools at the settlement dropped significantly after third grade, when older children started staying home to help with chores. Of the students attending school, 26 percent reported they could not focus on their education because they were hungry. Only 16 percent of adolescents were enrolled in secondary education, which involved bigger fees. Also, the secondary school at Kyangwali did not continue to the point of a degree. To qualify for college, a student had to leave the settlement and complete two final years of high school in Hoima, many miles away, at schools that charged even higher fees.
In other words, Stivin was almost certain to become one of those children the world was going to leave behind. I believe I caused him real heartbreak, showing him pictures of all that he was missing. Stivin came to stand in my mind for all those who had not been chosen, all the children who would spend their days collecting firewood and filling yellow jerricans with water. That night, I wrote an email to the friend who had loaned me books about the DRC. “Isn’t the Congo the saddest, most beautiful, magical, friendliest place in the world that’s also tortured in one thousand ways?” he wrote back. Yes. But that place and the one I called home were also more closely interrelated than I had imagined. Our histories were one shared story. Europe’s wealth had been gained at the expense of its colonies, and the electronic device that I had used to show Stivin those photographs—the fancy phone for which I had paid such a hefty sum—had subsidized the very wars that had put Stivin into his dusty, hopeless predicament, where he found himself stuck without a viable future, unable to get the attention of the developed world.
* * *
PART V
* * *
Fall
1
* * *
Careless Driving
On August 22, 2016, the first day of the following school year, I walked into South High School and unintentionally crossed paths with Mr. DeRose and Mr. Speicher, who were busy shepherding a clump of bewildered-looking students around the vast building. The two teachers were giving a tour to the latest batch of newcomers the world had sent to South.
“Miss!” someone cried excitedly.
It was Shani. She had not placed into one of the more advanced classes upstairs, so she was returning to the newcomer room for one semester. She had big news, though: “From Tajikistan, more people, here! Here, my brother! My friend, boy, here, and girl, here. More, my country, my apartment, here. Very fun!”
Mr. Speicher and Mr. DeRose and the new newcomers were on their way to the gym. The students were clutching paper printouts of their schedules and trying to follow along as Mr. Speicher pointed out critical aspects of high school.
“Locker room!” he announced.
“A la derecha, hombres,” Mr. DeRose translated. “Damas, a la izquierda.”
A couple of boys from El Salvador pretended to assail the girls’ locker room, sniggered about this, and then froze as the bell rang.
“How long do you have to get to Mr. Williams’s class?” asked Mr. Speicher. He answered his own question, bellowing, “Five minutes!”
Then he showed them the way. This year, Mr. Williams had moved to a new room, one closer to the front office. After the latest newcomers settled into their chairs, he began all over. He went around the room, introducing himself to the mostly silent arrivals, saying, “Nice to meet you.” Then he asked where they were from and pointed out artwork he had displayed by students from their home countries. On the first day of school, Mr. Williams had thirteen students, twice as many as the year before. Among the brand-new arrivals was a young man who possessed so little English that he could not answer the question: What language do you speak? Shani looked around at this collection of strangers and said wistfully, “Maybe, tomorrow, come Lisbeth, all the girls.”
* * *
As Shani soon discovered to her dismay, Lisbeth and all the girls had moved upstairs. The only student from the prior year who also remained in Mr. Williams’s room was Mohamed, the once motherless boy who had sung from the Qur’an. I found him wandering the hallways, bewildered as to where he belonged, and escorted him to Mr. Williams’s new location. All the other students Shani knew from the previous school year were spread across ELA levels 1B, 2A, and 2B.
I found Jakleen and Mariam in Noelia Hopkin’s sunny, colorful, second-floor classroom, a place mysteriously accessed by a door located inside a stairwell. The sisters had performed well enough on the end-of-year evaluations to test into 1B, along with Grace, Hsar Htoo, Abigail, Bachan, and Plamedi (still huddled into his gray ski parka even though it was balmy). Bachan appeared far more engaged and alert, possibly because he was sitting beside a nearly identical-looking boy who turned out to be his cousin—at last, he had someone with whom he could speak. Meanwhile, Jakleen had dyed her hair blue black and was wearing bright red suspenders. Sporty Abigail had discovered makeup, and Grace had gotten red extensions that fell to her shoulders. Grace looked unsure about finding herself in a room without her sister Nadia, who had moved to 2A, but she quickly befriended several other girls from Africa placed in the same class.
The move upstairs had a galvanizing effect on Jakleen and Mariam. Pictures of pink flamingos brightened the walls of the classroom and Ms. Hopkin kept her instruction as lively as the décor. She had grown up in Puerto Rico, was bilingual in English and Spanish, and also had an Arabic-speaking paraprofessional working in h
er room. Ms. Hopkin was not shy about expressing anger if the students got out of control, and if they were slow to perform she was as likely to hector as cajole. She was highly entertaining, and Jakleen and Mariam immediately began saying they adored their new ELA teacher. Ms. Hopkin began the school year by asking the students to write about themselves. She suggested they could tell her what they liked to have for a snack or about the best moment of their summer vacation.
“Miss! What is snack?” Mariam asked.
“What do you like to eat?” replied Ms. Hopkin. “Do you like pizza? Hot Cheetos?”
Mariam nodded happily—she knew about Hot Cheetos—and began wiggling her heels back and forth rapidly under her chair as she wrote. Jakleen sat beside her chewing gum vigorously and wearing red lipstick in a shade that exactly matched her red suspenders.
“How do you spell ‘cafeteria’?” Jakleen asked.
Ms. Hopkin leaned over to see what Jakleen had been writing.
“When you’re on vacation, do you go to the cafeteria?” the teacher asked.
Ms. Hopkin turned to the rest of the class and asked the room, “If you are not here, where do you go to eat?”
“Home,” whispered Grace.
The teacher laughed—that’s right, these kids did not go out to eat very often.
“Ideally, home, yes,” she acknowledged. “But if I have to go out, I would eat in a restaurant.”
She turned back to Jakleen. “Restaurant? Is that what you mean?”
Jakleen nodded. She wrote: “The best vacation I had was go to a garden and then go with friends to a restaurant.”
Ms. Hopkin showed the class a picture of a white beach bordered by curved palm trees and an aquamarine ocean. “Colorado is home, but my heart belongs somewhere else,” she admitted. “What language is spoken in Puerto Rico?”
“Spanish,” Grace replied, in her near whisper.
“Correct,” said Ms. Hopkin. “And what number of countries speak Spanish?”
The students made a few wild guesses and then Ms. Hopkin said actually there were twenty countries in the world that spoke Spanish, plus Puerto Rico.
“Jakleen, what do you do to relax?” asked Ms. Hopkin.
“Sleep!” Jakleen said immediately.
“What do you do?” the teacher asked Mariam.
“I sleep!”
“You sleep, too? Okay. Here’s what I do to relax,” said Ms. Hopkin. “I get in my car, I put on my sunglasses, I turn on the radio, and I sing. The only problem is when I do that I tend to drive too fast.”
Ms. Hopkin quickly reviewed how to conjugate the verb “to be.” In the PowerPoint she had prepared, she showed a slide that said, “Today I will be able to utilize the verb to be in sentences to communicate information about myself and others.”
“In Spanish, utilisar, right?” she said to Abigail.
Abigail dimpled, smiled, and nodded.
Noticing that her students had gotten a little sleepy, Ms. Hopkin said, “Tired? Cansado? Been a long day? All right, party people! We are going to practice using the verb ‘to be.’ ”
She asked for a volunteer. Jakleen raised her hand.
“All right, I appreciate that,” Ms. Hopkin told her. “You get a purple mechanical pencil.”
She waved the pencil at Jakleen, and Jakleen sauntered over to receive the gift.
“Okay, I need you to tell the class who you are.”
“I am Jakleen,” said Jakleen. She added, “I am really happy.”
“Nice job,” said Ms. Hopkin.
In the days that followed, Jakleen and Mariam quickly befriended several Arabic-speaking girls from Somalia and Sudan. I often saw them conversing with their new friends in the hallways, seeming far more joyous than they had the previous fall, when they had spent so many days wrapped in sadness. I thought their difficult transition was complete. As the former newcomers adjusted to their new rooms, the change also caused a reconfiguration of their social lives.
One day, Jakleen told me, “Lisbeth, she has new friends. She forgot about me!”
“Do you miss Lisbeth?” I asked.
“No! She always talking,” Jakleen said, laughing. “This is better.”
* * *
Lisbeth had been placed into a class that met on the opposite side of the same stairwell, with a firecracker of a teacher named Jenan Hijazi. She taught ELA levels 2A and 2B. Ms. Hijazi had been born in Kuwait but had grown up in the United States, and at the start of the year she told her students that her first name meant “beautiful gardens” in Arabic. She was a runner with an athletic body who favored skinny jeans, and she kept a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses perched on top of her head. Ms. Hijazi had a big heart but could be acerbic. Her voice hopscotched from sounding warm like a caress to sharp like cut glass, or brassy like a trumpet. She darted around constantly, clutching a travel mug filled with coffee, and from time to time even jumped on top of furniture because she was not tall and that was the only way she could reach the upper part of the whiteboard. Moving directly from Mr. Williams’s room into Ms. Hijazi’s room involved a certain adjustment. Everything happened at a higher velocity.
Ms. Hijazi taught level 2A in the afternoons, and that was where I found Lisbeth, Nadia, Saúl, Kaee Reh, and Yonatan. The 2A cohort was big—thirty-three students. Because she felt lonely without Jakleen and Mariam, Lisbeth gravitated toward Nadia, who felt similarly bereft without her sister Grace. Nadia and Lisbeth sat together every day. After a while, Nadia began translating everything the teacher said into Spanish, because Lisbeth could not follow Ms. Hijazi’s rapid-fire English. Translating was perfectly acceptable in Mr. Williams’s room, but not Ms. Hijazi’s. “Nadia! Stop!” the teacher snapped one day. She wanted Lisbeth to comprehend English on her own.
Yonatan lolled in his chair on the far side of the room, surrounded by other students from Eritrea. Ms. Hijazi heard that he was a star runner and attended one of his cross-country meets. When she returned, she told the whole class that Yonatan ran so fast, he almost zoomed by without her noticing. Yonatan wore a new T-shirt that said ALL IN on the front and DENVER SOUTH DISTANCE on the back. My son also ran cross-country, as it happened. One day, when they both had a meet in Colorado Springs, my son ran the 5K in twenty minutes, and placed 103rd overall (not bad for a freshman). Yonatan ran the same race in sixteen minutes and placed 3rd. I told Yonatan this, and he joshed about the fact that he had placed exactly 100 runners ahead of my son. “Miss, you tell him, ‘Good job,’ ” Yonatan instructed me. “ ‘Next time: Run faster!’ ”
Floating around the 2A classroom was Christina, the young woman from Burma who had served as my interpreter with Hsar Htoo. I had stumbled across Christina on the first day of school, looking professional in a sheath dress and a blazer. She had brandished a plastic ID badge that she wore around her neck daily and declared proudly, “I’m working here now!” Back when Christina had entered the high school as a freshman, she had been placed into the classroom of an energetic young ELA teacher named Jen Hanson. One of Ms. Hanson’s first acts as principal had been to hire additional paraprofessionals who spoke a variety of languages commonly used in the building, including her former student Christina, who spoke Karen, Thai, and Burmese. Whenever Kaee Reh had a question about what Ms. Hijazi was saying, he consulted with Christina in Burmese. It was the first time in Kaee Reh’s career at South that he had a staff person with whom he could communicate easily in his ELA classroom.
Christina also spent a fair amount of time teasing Lisbeth.
One day, when Nadia began translating for Lisbeth again, Christina walked over and said, “Lisbeth! Speak English!”
“I have nerves when I speak English,” Lisbeth told her, in nearly perfect English.
“That’s because you don’t speak English enough!” Christina chastised affectionately.
Because her class was so large, Ms. Hijazi had a second paraprofessional, a woman from Somalia named Fatuma. She wore floor-length dresses and a hijab ev
ery day, even when the classrooms were sweltering. After fleeing from war in Somalia, Fatuma had grown up primarily in Dadaab, Kenya, the largest refugee camp in the world. An older sister was still living there, although Fatuma was hoping that her sister might join her in the United States soon. While Christina helped various students from Southeast Asia, Fatuma went around the room helping students from all over Africa and the Middle East.
A few weeks after the start of school, Ms. Hijazi asked her thirty-three students in 2A to take out their journals and write in response to the question, “What would you do if you could fly?” A boy from the Congo wrote that he would fly back to the Congo, and a boy from Iraq wrote that he would fly back to Iraq. Lisbeth surreptitiously took out her phone and tucked it into an outer pocket of her backpack, so that she could consult Google Translate clandestinely. In Ms. Hijazi’s room, the use of cell phones was strictly forbidden, even for translation, so Lisbeth searched secretly for the English words she needed to say that she wanted to fly back to El Salvador to see her beloved abuela.
Yonatan was also struggling to come up with the right word for wherever it was that he wanted to fly, but it was not home. He wanted to go to allyrium.
“Is it a place in Eritrea?” I asked.
“No!” said Yonatan, looking slightly scandalized.
“Is it in Africa?”
“No! It’s in the sky.”
“Is it a real place?”
“It is God place.”
“Oh, heaven,” I told him. “We say, heaven. H-e-a-v-e-n.”
