by Helen Thorpe
“Okay,” said Ghasem.
And then we let them go. They had seen so much already, between the pair of them—the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and the Syrian civil war. Making a new home in the United States had proved exceedingly difficult for Jakleen, which seemed terribly unfair after everything she and her family had endured already, but I hoped she had put the hardest part of the transition behind her. The two young lovers set off into the unsupervised afternoon, visibly more carefree, delighted with their liberty. They would make their own way forward from here on.
A few weeks later, Ebtisam stood trial on the charges of assault and endangering the well-being of a minor. Back in the plush courtroom, she huddled into an olive-green winter coat throughout the proceedings, as though seeking protection. Ebtisam had depleted herself while nursing Jakleen back to health, and she was too fragile to take the stand; she chose not to testify on her own behalf. The security guard with whom she had difficulties turned out to be a barrel-chested man with black hair and a receding hairline. He walked across the courtroom with a swagger, as though he owned the place. I felt put off by his manner. Perhaps members of the jury felt the same way; after deliberating for less than an hour, they returned with a verdict of not guilty on all counts. Ebtisam’s worried face broke into sunny relief. She could not stop smiling. “America, very good country!” she told me, as we walked out of the courtroom.
Shortly after that, Eh Klo helped Ebtisam secure a new apartment through Section 8 housing. This allowed her to devote her time to chauferring Jakleen to her frequent medical appointments. After leaving her job, she also went back onto TANF. Because Jakleen qualified for Medicaid, her hospital bills were subsidized. Out of all the refugee families who had been represented in Room 142, Ebtisam was the only parent I knew of who was not working. As soon as Jakleen’s medical situation resolved, however, Ebtisam hoped to move off TANF; the maximum amount of time she would be allowed to remain in that program would be five years. By then, one or more of her daughters would probably be working, and with multiple incomes it was easy to envision the family achieving self-sufficiency in the long run.
* * *
Mr. Williams had welcomed two dozen students during the prior year, and the bulk of them were sailing along in their second year of instruction. When I returned to Ms. Hijazi’s morning class, to see how the students in 2B were faring, I found them discussing The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
“What is hope?” Ms. Hijazi asked.
“Like, you hope your country gets better,” said a student from Iraq.
“Yes,” said Ms. Hijazi. “I hope you all go to college. Who’s going to college?”
Only one boy raised his hand. I felt surprised to see that neither Solomon nor Methusella raised his. Apparently so did Ms. Hijazi, for she demanded, “You! Solomon! Are you going to college?”
“Yeah,” he said very quietly, without much conviction.
I asked Methusella why he didn’t raise his hand.
“I know that I am going,” he replied in his imperious tone.
Ms. Hijazi asked the students to take out their journals and dictated the following assignment: “How do lowered expectations and feelings of hopelessness affect people? Explain.” For several minutes the room was entirely soundless, as the students bent over their desks to write. Ms. Hijazi took attendance, noting that everyone was present except Ksanet. Level 2B had been challenging for the older-than-everybody-else Eritrean student, but she had never missed a class. Fatuma, the paraprofessional from Somalia, called out to report that Ksanet had just withdrawn from South. When I wrote to her on Facebook, she confirmed this was true. She had moved to Utah because a friend had told her that although she was now twenty, there was a high school there that would allow her to earn a degree before she turned twenty-one, and aged out of public education. Her younger brother Yonatan remained in Ms. Hijazi’s 2A class, but Ksanet never returned to 2B, because at South she had felt demoralized.
She wrote to me on Facebook:
Miss I miss you so so much guys especially miss hjazi class. Please say hiii for all my classmate and miss hjazi . . .
I just decided to came hear becuse my age like if I stay there I can’t graduate that’s way I came hear miss thank you very much for everything
I know my english is bad, but I hope it will be fine for you miss becuse you know me like my English is limited
In her admittedly imperfect sentences, I could hear both the loneliness of Utah and the despair she had felt at South after being told she couldn’t move forward quickly enough to finish school. Ksanet had a habit of tilting her chin up as she spoke, which gave her a look of stubborn, angry determination. I thought her life would have been easier if she had remained in Colorado, where she had friends and family, but I also thought her implacable drive would take her far, wherever she lived.
After the students wrote in their journals for a while about hopelessness, Ms. Hijazi held a more extended conversation about college. She said this question of harboring hope or despair did not apply only to Junior in The Absolutely True Diary. They should look at their own aspirations. She wanted her students to aim high; she wanted them to take full advantage of the opportunity they’d been given. It turned out the entire room believed college out of reach, because of the expense. Ms. Hijazi pointed out that higher education was virtually free for students from low-income families. This appeared to be news to every student in the room—in fact, some looked dubious. But Ms. Hijazi insisted they could go to college, and by the end of the class, she had half of them convinced. I had no trouble believing in a future that included college degrees for Solomon and Methusella. Other newcomers who had shown a similar capacity for growth had made the leap to higher education. That fall, Kimleng—the former newcomer who had once served in the Student Senate—had enrolled at the University of Colorado in Denver. I believed the two boys from the Congo would follow in his footsteps.
For the rest of the semester, Ms. Hijazi continued to berate, sweet-talk, and interrogate the teenagers in 2B into doing their utmost. Right after it snowed for the first time, when one of the students kept forgetting to employ the past tense, Ms. Hijazi exclaimed, “Agghhh! I’m going to start doing bad things to you, like throwing you out the window! And the snow is soft, so you won’t die!”
She kept going over new words, too. One day, she asked her students to define the following list of new vocabulary: spontaneous, susceptible, decrepit, mutilated, translucent, eccentric, scintillating, souvenir, and ecstatic.
“What does ‘eccentric’ mean?” quizzed Ms. Hijazi.
“Weird!” chorused the class.
“What is ‘scintillating’?”
“Exciting!”
And that’s what it was, to see the words that Ms. Hijazi wanted her students to grasp. When I had first met the two brothers from the Congo, my own expectations for them had not included such spectacular progress; they had far surpassed what I imagined possible. As Ms. Hijazi told them to form sentences using their new words, I watched Solomon write careful, well-constructed phrases, while his younger brother effortlessly scrawled sentences that were more playful.
“My teacher is eccentric,” wrote Methusella, to the amusement of Ms. Hijazi.
She squeezed him by the elbow, and then said fondly, “This one is amazing.”
* * *
During the same time frame, I happened to meet a man from Africa named Francis Gatare, a charming, well-spoken, exuberant forty-nine-year-old who served as a cabinet member under Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda. He was visiting Colorado and coincidentally we attended the same dinner party. We chatted a bit and then I mentioned having recently visited the Kyangwali refugee settlement.
“Oh, I grew up there,” Gatare said.
During his high school years, he had won a scholarship to attend a boarding school in Hoima. He used to walk to that city from the settlement; the distance was forty-seven miles, and walking there took several days. Pa
ul Kagame had grown up at Kyangwali, too. The settlement had been founded by refugees who had fled Rwanda in the 1960s, and now those former refugees were leading Rwanda. That two men so influential in the remaking of Rwanda had both started out as refugees in the very settlement I had visited made me revise yet again my already sky-high expectations of what Solomon and Methusella might achieve. Someday, a new generation would try to repair the damage that had been done to the Democratic Republic of Congo, and I would not be surprised if individuals who had grown up in Kyangwali turned out to lead that future renaissance. If, despite the odds, they managed to get an education.
On November 8, 2016, the day of the presidential election, I returned to South to visit the Student Senate, figuring that if anybody would be discussing politics that day, it would be those civic-minded students. When I visited the Senate, I saw Methusella wearing the same uncertain expression that I remembered from his early days in Room 142. The American-born students chatted effortlessly about matters that he found inexplicable—things they called hat day, twin day, pajama day. Or the allure of dodgeball and Pop-Tarts. Methusella remained mute, as if he had returned to the silent receptive phase of learning. Eventually, he would find his voice in this room, but it had not happened yet.
In honor of Election Day, the Senate held a mock debate. The student who played Donald Trump spoke passionately about creating jobs, while the student who impersonated Hillary Clinton argued woodenly that she had a nice résumé. It was an apt parody of the past year and a half. The majority of students at South were ardent Clinton supporters, however, and they could not stomach the idea of Trump winning the election, so they voted instead to have “no president.” The atmosphere in the room was jolly, but that was before the actual election results were tallied. Several million people who had voted Democratic in the previous election cycle stayed home and did not cast ballots, and many were African American or Latino. Meanwhile, 80 percent of white evangelical voters cast votes for Trump—that bloc went for Trump by a higher margin than for any other candidate in a decade. Turnout spiked in rural counties and dropped in large cities. This combination of trends handed Trump a narrow upset victory, secured in the electoral college, stunning everyone at South High School.
I found it hard to absorb the outcome myself, so unlikely had it seemed. My first instinct was to give Trump a chance. I wanted to see if he could rejuvenate parts of the American economy that had been stagnating and bring jobs back to places where employment was sorely needed. Right after the election, however, a series of incidents took place on the city buses that South High students rode to and from school. Trump’s election had created a distinctly unfriendly climate for the very kids I cared so much about. Some students were called “dirty,” while others were told to “go home.” A student wearing a hijab was denied admittance to a city vehicle by a bus driver who said she “looked like ISIS.” Another girl was told by a fellow passenger, “We are going to kick your ass out of this country.” There were many cases of mistaken identity. One girl was told by another commuter that she should “go back to Mexico.” Someone else intervened to say the girl being addressed was actually Arab, and then she was called “a terrorist.” In fact, the girl was Bangladeshi.
The faculty at South did everything they could to help their charges grapple with this unleashing of vitriol upon the foreign-born part of the student body. The number of kids who sought counseling reached levels that nobody had ever seen before, and two students attempted suicide. Jen Hanson hired nine temporary counselors to augment her existing staff. “That was probably the hardest week I’ve ever experienced in a school in seventeen years,” she said afterward.
Hanson had grown up in a small town in Illinois. She believed that her own parents had voted for Donald Trump. She said her parents rarely traveled outside Illinois and had not been exposed much to other cultures. Once, when Hanson had been an ELA teacher herself, she had overheard her mother tell a friend, “Jenny teaches language-disabled kids.” Hanson did not think the kids she taught were “disabled,” but that’s how they appeared to her mother. “They are never around people who are not just exactly like them,” said Hanson. “Ever.”
The new principal led an institution that depended upon the steady inflow of refugees for its collective identity. What impact was the election going to have on the future of South? On every front, in terms of the big questions facing the students I had gotten to know, Donald Trump represented the opposite of resolution. Lisbeth and Saúl, for example, longed to receive the blessing of a federal judge to remain in the United States. With Trump as president, however, the outcome of their cases suddenly seemed far less certain. Shortly before the election, both Lisbeth and Saúl had been granted a second reprieve by the same federal judge, and they were not due to appear before the court again until after the conclusion of their sophomore year. What would happen at that point was suddenly completely unclear to their lawyers, however, as laws pertaining to immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers were now in flux. The lawyer who represented Lisbeth, Alejandra Acevedo, viewed the outgoing student as a younger version of herself, and she was encouraging Lisbeth to consider a career in law. Before the election, Acevedo had felt confident that Lisbeth had a good legal argument for remaining in the United States, but Trump instigated so many changes with a flurry of confusing executive orders, tweets, and off-the-cuff statements that the outcome of Lisbeth’s case was now impossible to predict. “Here is somebody who has the potential to be an amazing leader,” Acevedo said, “and we don’t know what’s going to happen to her.”
In the school’s refugee community, those who had already resettled had the security of knowing that their existing visas were not likely to be revoked. But families divided by the world’s conflict who longed to be reunited suddenly faced much greater uncertainty. When I had first met Fatuma, the paraprofessional from Somalia who helped out in Ms. Hijazi’s 2A class, it had been hard for me to see past her floor-length dresses and long-sleeved cardigans and the omnipresent head scarves, because her studiously modest attire struck me as alien. Over time, however, I grew used to her style of dress and stopped noticing it. Instead I became aware of how much Fatuma knew about what was going on with the students in her care.
In January 2017, Fatuma had been expecting to welcome her older sister to the United States. Her sister had been scheduled to board an airplane in Nairobi three days after Trump’s initial executive order banning refugees and immigrants from Muslim-dominant nations went into effect. Fatuma’s sister had been living in Dadaab for a quarter of a century, and after an extensive, multiyear vetting process, including interviews with representatives from both the United Nations and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, she had been cleared to leave the refugee camp and resettle alongside the rest of her family in the United States. Because she was originally from Somalia, however—one of the banned countries—she was not allowed to board her plane. Instead, she was rebuffed and sent back to Dadaab. Fatuma was stoic on the outside and heartbroken on the inside. “I’m still hoping for the best,” she told me.
Staff members at resettlement agencies such as the African Community Center and Lutheran Family Services were flabbergasted by Trump’s stance. The idea that terrorists would choose to camouflage themselves as refugees made little sense to aid workers, because there was no more onerous path into the United States. Refugees were subjected to a process that often lasted for as long as a decade, with slim odds of success—less than 1 percent of those with refugee status were chosen to resettle. Meanwhile, the refugees had to subsist on rations that barely constituted a livable diet. The idea that anybody would deem this an easy route by which to gain admittance to the United States was hard to fathom for someone like Ebtisam’s case worker, Yasir Abdulah, who had gone through the arduous process himself. Trump’s actions also struck people like Yasir as wildly ahistorical, for if there was any part of the global crisis that the United States owned, it was the chaos that was unfolding in the
Middle East. The United States had not played a direct role in the ethnic cleansing that had taken place in Southeast Asia, or the wars that had broken out across Africa. But the United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria. If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in the ban.
Over at the African Community Center, frustrated staff members, including Troy Cox, confronted something they had almost never seen: an empty bulletin board—no more Arrivals Notifications. Trump had suspended the entire refugee resettlement program for 120 days and capped the number of refugees that would be admitted that year at 50,000, instead of the 110,000 goal set by the Obama administration. The emotional torque of the empty bulletin board was hard to bear, for the staff at the ACC had never felt a greater sense of urgency about their work, and at the same time had never been given so few people to resettle. The world was asking the United States to do more, and Trump wanted to do less, and Troy Cox could hardly stand it. The election created a lack of resolution for everybody working in refugee resettlement—people who felt their work to be a genuine calling and were grief-stricken by the actions of the newly elected president.
If there was any hope of boosting the number of refugees admitted into the United States in the future, it seemed likely that parishioners of churches such as New Life would play a role. Many evangelicals believed the Bible stated clearly that the task of a Christian was to welcome the stranger. Given that evangelicals had voted for Trump in such large numbers, I believed that if anybody could sway the new administration, it was going to be leaders of the evangelical movement.
* * *
When I dropped by Mr. Williams’s new classroom one last time, I saw that he was having a tough year. He expressed nostalgia for the days when he had wondered at the progress of Methusella, and worried about the well-being of Jakleen. His current cadre included several boys who presented behavior problems. There had even been one actual fistfight. Mr. Williams had taped a new poster to the wall. It said:
