The day he leaves Kenya, I am sick with worry. We have sent him a seven-page letter outlining exactly what will happen on the plane in order to ease his fears, saying, “As it starts to move, it will shake a lot and it will feel scary, and then it will get louder and then start going faster and faster. The shaking will increase, but you do NOT have to worry. It ALWAYS does this and this is PERFECTLY NORMAL.” This is the child, after all, who saw his first elevator and water fountain in the American Embassy when doing his visa interview a few weeks before.
My worries abate, however, when we receive an absurd phone message from him in Dubai, in which he says he just wanted to “see what’s up!” and spends most of the time talking about the nice men he has met in the Dubai airport. It is beyond anticlimactic but truly hilarious. No mention of a scary plane flight, no mention of culture shock or fear. Just a teenage boy spending a fortune to call us and ramble on.
My father, after hearing this, tells me, “It sounds like Sammy’s going to do just fine here.”
I take a red-eye after work from San Francisco on Thursday night, and it kills me that my flight doesn’t arrive until the morning after Sammy gets in. When I see him Friday morning, sleepy and overwhelmed and mumbling about a lamp he knocked over, I cannot believe he is really here. There were so many times in those months of stress when I had resigned myself to realizing that the challenges were insurmountable and that this dream was not going to come to fruition. And yet it has.
That weekend is a whirlwind.
The first morning, in the car to start the round of endless chores, we talk to him about prices. What things cost in America, what salaries people make, and how those costs relate to the weekly allowance we’ll be giving him at school. Translating numbers into shillings makes him even more baffled. What he once thought was a fortune in American dollars has now been reduced to the cost of a slice of pizza in this foreign place.
One night we go to Harvard Square and eat takeout vegan food with Lara’s family and buy large Starbucks iced coffees (Sammy puts in six sugars), which he tells us he immediately loves. Coffee becomes a staple for him in Maine.
He brings a large suitcase with him that is nearly empty, and when we open it we find a motley collection of tragically unsuitable clothing items. Sammy says the orphanage matrons had taken him to the storeroom and given him “new” (newly donated) clothes. I pull the items out one at a time—too-small plaid pajamas, a chartreuse green blazer, dress pants five sizes too big—and marvel at how out of place they look in Lara’s parents’ home, here in Boston amidst our excess. None of them will do, we know.
We go to Marshall’s to buy any remaining clothes he needs that we didn’t already collect from friends and family, and he loves everything. Every time I give him a new polo to try on, explaining the dress code at Maine Central Institute, he dances and wiggles his hips.
Quickly Lara and I fall into a rhythm of this bizarre form of long-distance parenting we have gotten ourselves into. Relying on the incredible staff and teachers at Maine Central Institute, we bumble our way through the school years.
Parenting from afar is a challenge that never goes away, and we come to lean heavily on people who see Sammy on a daily basis—his teachers and resident advisors—in ways that other parents surely don’t need to. In Sammy’s first years, he is paired with two guardian angels—Mrs. Pomeroy, a young, new resident advisor at the school, and Declan Galvin, a young teacher who recently graduated college and returned to MCI, where he himself went to high school. Mr. Galvin—it takes us years to call him Declan—studied in Kenya during college and speaks good Swahili. He is a godsend, and he will stay in Sammy’s life long after MCI and save him time and time again.
I quickly find that one of the hardest elements of our parenting is the nature of discipline and consequence setting. I have not had the luxury of raising Sammy with my values during his formative years, nor am I able to live with him on a daily basis for nine months of the year, and both of these issues cause problems. The hardest challenge, I find, is how to effectively discipline him when he makes poor choices in order to teach him to do better next time.
I read a number of books on the topic but come up dry again and again. Shockingly, most are not written for twenty-something women trying to parent teenage orphans. My father is able to describe the situation best when he says that Sammy’s life—in Sammy’s mind—likely feels like one big roll of the dice. The good things and the bad things that have happened to him in life have seemed to him entirely random and outside of his ability to control, predict, or plan for. Thus, he is able to live in the present to an extent that we simply cannot understand.
I grew up believing that if I set goals for myself or behaved a certain way at home or at school, my efforts would be ultimately rewarded with positive things: a good relationship with my family, getting into a good college, a good job, a good life at large. There might be hiccups, but for the most part I could work hard and be rewarded.
For Sammy, none of this has been true. First he was born into a tragic childhood. Then he won a golden ticket and entered a wonderful orphanage. Then he received an abundance of riches when he was given the chance to study in the United States. But why?
Sammy believes fervently in God, but it is hard to reconcile God with the path of his life. Why did God give him a father who died and a mother who abandoned him? And why did God choose him to be the lucky one to enter Imani, when so many other children in his community did not have that opportunity? And then why did God go further and give him a way to come to the United States? We talk about this again and again. The answers, I always say, are harder than I know.
Unfortunately, the nature of his life circumstances means that for him, psychologically, there is a lack of long-range goal setting with an eye toward achievement. On a deep level, Lara and I come to understand, he seems unable to understand the true consequences of not giving his all in a class he doesn’t care about, for example, because on some level he believes success for him really is random, after all.
Sammy lives in the moment in a way I’ve never seen. But the very characteristic that has allowed him to reinvent himself time and time again and be resilient in the face of horror has also brought clear downsides. He is forgetful to a fault, he has trouble planning for the future, and only by our diligence is he able to meet critical deadlines for college applications and the like. He is a wonderful boy, but this becomes a problem again and again.
When we forget to ask him how much money he’s carrying before he leaves MCI for a flight to California for the holidays, he winds up stranded at a bus station, broke. We move mountains to find a way to get his Argentine visa in New York City during a long weekend he has a vacation from school, only to have him show up in Manhattan without a passport and force us to start all over again with logistical gymnastics.
And therein is the second, related issue. What should be the consequence when he fails to meet obligations? Money still feels largely intangible to him, and he lives at boarding school, so grounding is of limited efficacy. No phone, no computer, no allowance—we try it all. But as always, the big question remains: how far would I ever let him fall? The ultimate consequence for Sammy—a boy without a US passport who could lose his visa if he doesn’t do well—is so many million times harsher than the consequence for any of his peers in chemistry class.
Over the years this will be the issue I pray about more than any other.
The years to come are some of the most complicated and joyous of my life. My parents have it right when they say that I signed up for the hardest part of parenting—the teenage years. Sammy’s adjustment to life in the United States goes better than anyone could have ever imagined, and he does so well that we have to remind ourselves—especially in the early months—of the stress we must not even realize he is under. Aside from the overarching challenges we face with teaching Sammy long-range goal setting and the nature of consequences when he makes mistakes, the majority of his problems seem to p
attern themselves after the usual teenage variety: he loses more fleece jackets than I can count, he never has change for the dormitory Laundromat, and he is physically unable to wake up to his alarm clock.
But every so often, there are moments that remind me of his past.
The summer after he graduates from high school, three years after he first arrived in the United States and a few weeks before he leaves for a year of service work in Ecuador, we are at a Mexican restaurant in California and he is talking to me about chicken. “I had never eaten half a chicken before,” he tells me about a meal he had the week before with a new friend. “And so I wanted to tell everyone on Facebook.”
In the past three years, he has grown two feet taller—at least it looks like that, based on the old YouTube videos I have of him from 2006. Eating half a chicken and receiving regular, balanced meals subsidized with dorm pizzas that have tripled the calories of his Kenyan diet have surely helped.
“But then I stopped myself from posting about the chicken,” he says. “Because I thought of people reading it back home in Kenya.”
I feel momentarily blindsided by the turn this anecdote has taken. What I thought was a high school boy’s calorie brag-fest has become something decidedly more somber. It is true, of course. The kids in Kenya are hungry that year. Crops are withering and animals are thin. We heard that even the orphanage’s afternoon cup of weak, unsweetened tea had been cut out in recent months. We were all receiving an increasing number of pleas by phone and email from those we had left behind, asking for help and prayers. Understandably, Sammy takes these pleas the hardest, worrying deeply about what his peers are suffering through at home and what they think of his life now.
Sammy isn’t the only one to edit his Facebook posts for his audience. Over the years Lara and I have been aware of this countless times. At my wedding in Argentina, for example, my husband and I made a point not to tag and post Sammy in endless photos while at the exotic locale. With so many of the Kenyan kids from Imani following our Facebook pages from afar, I knew the reach that “Sammy in a suit with opera singers” and “Sammy in the jungle hotel’s infinity pool” would have, and I dreaded it. Countless other vacations, holidays, and days of “normal” life in the United States with him would reveal the same disconnect. “Sammy learning to drive a car”? “Sammy on yet another plane ride”? “Sammy with his new iPad”?
The conversation reminds me of how uncomfortable I am with the gap between our lives in the United States and the lives of his peers I care about in Kenya. Sammy—and the drastic 180 his life has taken in the past few years—embodies this wholeheartedly.
But not posting about what you had for lunch was a new level. In that moment at the Mexican restaurant, I feel once again how hard the life he has ahead of him will be to reconcile, and I only hope I will be there every step of the way to help him navigate it.
Sammy
Chapter 14
During my junior year spring break, Claire gets married to an Argentine man named José, and I get to go to the wedding in Argentina for two weeks. This is my first time in any country outside of the United States or Kenya, and it is a very strange experience to take a plane from the Portland airport in Maine all the way to Buenos Aires. This time I know what the plane will be like, as I have been on others, and it makes the experience even more exciting than the first time.
Being in a whole new land and a whole new culture—again—is very weird. Claire and José pick me up at the airport, and it is the first time I have met José in person, as I have only seen him on Skype before. José is a soft-spoken, smart person, someone who really knows how to play music and to dance. Their wedding is the first wedding I have ever officially been to. In Kenya, I had never been invited to a wedding except my own parents’ and a few occasions where I attended when people wanted me to videotape the wedding with Lara’s camera. But then again, in Kenya, you don’t really need to be invited to weddings. Whenever people in Kenya eat food in public, it means that everyone can take part.
At Claire’s wedding, I meet all of Claire and Lara’s friends from college. I am also introduced to Argentine beef for the first time, which is quite an experience—I love it. I learn all I can about Argentina, like that it has the widest avenue in the world, which takes three whole minutes to walk across. I can’t imagine that in Kenya.
After the wedding, I go with Claire and José and their family and friends to Iguazu Falls, the widest waterfall in the world, a few hours by plane outside of Buenos Aires and near the Amazon.
Outside of what I see and experience, it is just amazing being there with Claire, José, Lara, and Lara’s husband Louis. In Argentina, I am just so happy to have my whole five-person “Sammy family” in one place. It really feels like we are a unit, all together in person.
Since Lara’s parents only live a few hours from Maine, it is really easy to get to know them, and from my first months in the United States I feel a part of their family, especially on holidays like Thanksgiving.
Since I’ve never celebrated Thanksgiving anywhere else, it is defined to me by Lara’s family—even if they are vegetarians! Her parents, Frank and Melanie, and Lara’s older brother Will, his wife Gabby, and their two kids John and Gracie, are always there. It is fun to be in a family with all sorts of people of all ages who accept me as a member of their clan and not just as a visitor.
On that first Thanksgiving sophomore year, I ask Lara if it is okay if I bring my friend Levan to her house with me. He is one of the postgraduate basketball players on the team I manage, and since he is from the country of Georgia, he doesn’t have anywhere to go on Thanksgiving. At the time, Gracie is really small, and the first thing we do is tell Levan, who is huge, not to step on our little Gracie. When we Skype with Claire and José, we put Levan on the screen and Claire says, “He really is huge!”
We have so much fun that holiday weekend, and I remember the best thing we do is play foosball and have competitions to see who is better. I like being able to bring people to Lara’s Thanksgiving just like I am another member of the family, and these friends become our guests. I do this again and again over the years.
After Thanksgiving, I am always excited for Christmas, and my first year I could not wait to see how people celebrate Christmas in the United States. I love to see all the family together and to spend so much time together celebrating. But even after all my years in the United States, I am still puzzled by the amount of gifts I see people giving each other. Although some places I go people tell me they don’t give many gifts and prefer family time, in other places it seems that people get hundreds of gifts.
I think a lot about how different it is in Kenya, where people spend most of their time at Christmas cooking and eating. For Kenyans, the season is mostly about food, friends, and family, and everyone comes together to cook a chicken or slaughter a cow. At Imani, we ate meat with chapatti and rice and then ate that same meal again and again for a whole week. We all loved it. The schools also gave us more time off—a whole month—so we could travel far to visit our extended families, who sometimes lived days away by bus. My brother and I tried to see our family members at Christmas, but it was always difficult because we knew it put stress on my aunt to find and make food for us.
Even with all the presents at Christmas in the United States, I really miss those times.
During one of these school vacations, I meet a really amazing person who, little by little, becomes like a brother to me. Brian Williams is the founder of an organization called Think Kindness, and he goes around the country promoting kindness. I spend a vacation or two with his family, and Brian begins to take care of me, calling me up at school every now and again to see how I am doing.
Throughout my three years at school, what I learn more than anything is that whenever someone considers you family, you are family, and that’s all that matters.
When Lara and Claire take me in, even though we don’t have official titles for one another, we are a family.
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nbsp; After three years at MCI, I am about to graduate. It feels like I have just started my new life in America, but in reality a lot of time has passed. I have met many people over the years; some have become friends and some have become family.
I apply to a lot of colleges in my senior year at MCI, but I also try for a different type of program called Global Citizen Year (GCY), which is an organization that places high school graduates in developing countries to live and work for a year before college. It gives them a chance to learn, grow, and become better leaders and better people before they start university. Most of all, it gives teenagers a new perspective on the world, and I am excited to be a part of it.
Claire is a supporter of the program and told me about it when I was a sophomore to see if I might be interested someday. As soon as I am old enough, I apply. I am thrilled to be accepted, and I even get a 75 percent scholarship. However, I still need to raise seven thousand dollars. This is hard, but doing this program is my dream, and I have to succeed.
But before I can even think about Global Citizen Year, I have to graduate! One of the requirements MCI has is a senior project, which is a long-term project each student must complete that either helps them learn more about a subject or has a positive impact on the community around MCI. Although I’m not sure what I want to do, I know that any project I do will have to help two of the homes I now have in my heart: Maine and Kenya. What I want most of all is for people in my Maine home to have a little experience of what I went through living in the orphanage. I also dream of helping people in Kenya by giving them a taste of what Maine Central Institute is all about.
Hope Runs Page 15
