Unlike in Canada, where school is free, families in Sierra Leone have to pay for their children’s school tuition fees and uniforms. Almost all of the lessons were taught in English, Haja told me, even though Krio, Mende, and Temne are Sierra Leone’s languages. Haja said that was because English is the universal language. “Sierra Leoneans need to know how to communicate in business,” she said. “Don’t you want to have a job one day?”
Of course I did. I just didn’t know what I would be good at, if anything.
One night I confided in Abou, who worked for the Canadian government, that my family was depending on me to support them. “I need to get an education, and then a job right away,” I told him.
“Ahh, slow down, Mariatu.” He winked. “I support most of my family back home, too. That’s what everyone in Sierra Leone expects when one of their own moves to the West. But school will take years; it’s better if you do it right, graduating from high school and then university or college. If you go out and get a job too soon, it won’t be a high-paying position. Only your education will get you that.”
“How did you get your job?” I asked.
“I went to university in Canada to study political science and economics.”
“Do you think I’ll ever be able to do that?” I asked.
“Mariatu, you can do whatever you put your mind to,” he said, taking off his glasses and looking me straight in the eyes. “In North America, a lot of kids take getting an education for granted. But when you’re from a poor country, you know what an education can do. It can open doors. You may not have hands, but you still have your mind. And I think you have a very sharp mind. Make the most of what you have and you will make your way in the world.”
Despite Abou’s words of encouragement, when Suad, Fanta, and Haja started getting up in the mornings to go to school, I rolled over and went back to sleep. As autumn stretched into winter, a great heaviness filled my heart. I spent many days staring out Kadi’s living room window, watching as the leaves turned yellow and then red, and eventually fell to the ground. When the snow began to fall, it was nothing like I had imagined. The snowflakes were not heavy, like grains of salt, but light, like feathers that glittered in the sun. Occasionally my eyes would trace the path of an individual flake. I imagined I was that snowflake in the big sky of so many others, and I tried to guess where I would land.
I was scared to go to school. Since Haja, Suad, and Fanta already had some education, they’d been placed in a higher grade. I would be alone, in a class with strangers. I dreamt of being able to read books and write, but I wondered how I would do it with no hands. With no one by my side to help me, I was afraid I’d make a fool of myself.
At night, I’d listen to the nieces recount their days and bemoan the homework they had to do. I’d shake my head when they asked if I wanted to go to school too. “Not yet,” I’d reply. “Soon, I promise.”
I enjoyed living with Kadi and Abou, whose home was always full of Temne-speaking Sierra Leoneans. Some, like the nieces, stayed for a long time. Others stayed just for a few days or weeks, until they found their own apartments. Our evening meals were always big plates of Sierra Leonean food. We’d eat together, before Kadi and Abou ran off to look at an apartment or to fill out some immigration papers for a new Sierra Leonean arrival. After the nieces had done their homework, we’d flop ourselves down on Abou and Kadi’s comfortable couches and watch music videos. Some of them featured female hip-hop artists. Now, hip-hop I liked. All the women in the videos were black. Their music had a rhythm I could move to.
My mind often floated back to Sierra Leone. I missed Mohamed’s jokes. I wished it was Marie cooking in the kitchen and not Kadi. I longed to feel Adamsay’s warm body snuggled up beside me at night. I knew I had to get going, if not for me then for Adamsay, who was still in Sierra Leone. But she seemed so far away. I wondered if she wouldn’t be happier if I just came back to be with her.
One Saturday morning, I was jolted awake by five girls jumping on me. “Get up! Get up, lazybones!” Haja, Suad, and Fanta had been joined by two other female relatives, Umu and Kadiatu, or KK, who had just arrived from Sierra Leone.
Usually, the girls were quiet in the mornings, showering in the downstairs bathroom before heading upstairs for breakfast and then the bus to school. But this was the weekend. They had me surrounded on all sides and were poking me, playing with my hair, tickling my neck and stomach.
“Get up, sleepyhead!” Umu said, blowing into my ear.
“Not yet,” I growled. I pulled a pillow over my head, but Suad grabbed it and started hitting Haja with it.
“Time to get up,” Fanta sang, hip-hop-style.
Next they broke into a Temne song, one I remembered well from my childhood. “I was born a virgin and I am still a virgin,” Umu sang.
“If that’s what you say you are, prove it,” the others chorused.
It wasn’t a song you would hear in the West, but it was one of our village staples. The five girls sang another Sierra Leonean classic next.
“My boat is somewhere in Makeni,” they chanted in unison, clapping their hands and slapping their knees to make the beat. “Oh, how I wish I could be with my boat.”
I couldn’t help but smile as I watched these young women, so bright-eyed and perky so early in the morning.
“It’s not early,” Umu laughed when they were done singing. “You sleep all the time, so you don’t even know what time of day it is anymore.”
All the girls together pulled and pushed me into a standing position. “Brush your teeth and get ready,” Fanta ordered. “We’re going to braid your hair, and then we’re going to the library.”
Several hours later, I sat wedged between Suad and Haja in the back seat of Kadi’s blue minivan. I wasn’t sure what a library was, so I asked them. “When you finally go to school, you’ll have to use the library,” Umu said, wagging a finger at me. “The library is where you borrow books to help you study and learn.”
“But don’t be late returning the books,” Kadi called over her shoulder from the driver’s seat. “Haja, the last time you took a book out, you were a month late. I had to pay a big fine. I can’t wait until all of you start working,” she said, making a clicking sound with her tongue. “I’m planning on retiring on what you girls owe me.”
“Of course, Auntie Kadi,” said Fanta, who was sitting in the front seat. “Weeee love you,” she sang.
Haja started playing with my hair, neatly braided with chestnut-colored hairpieces. “You know, Mariatu, you are actually very pretty.”
“When we can see you,” Suad teased. “Most of the time, you’re buried underneath the blankets. You don’t like us?”
“Of course I do.” I smiled. No one had ever said I was pretty before. I never thought of myself that way.
“Good,” said Fanta, turning around and grinning at me. “Because on Monday we all want you to go to school!”
Kadi continued in a serious tone. “I’ve enrolled you in an English as a Second Language course. When you graduate, you’ll go on to high school with the others next September.”
“But Auntie Kadi—” I started to say.
“No,” she interrupted. I could see her dark brown eyes in the rearview mirror. Her face was solemn, her expression no-nonsense. “It’s time to get moving, girl!”
I knew by now that Kadi was like the mother of all the Sierra Leoneans in Toronto. Many people credited Kadi and her family with saving their lives.
“If Kadi says you have to do something,” muttered Haja, “you better do it, or else she will send you back to Sierra Leone. She’ll drop you off at the bus stop and say: ‘Go. Find your way to the airport on your own.’ Not something to look forward to.”
I shivered at the thought. It was February, cold and gray and snowing outside.
As we made our way from the parking lot into the library, I ducked my face inside the collar of my bulky purple ski jacket, one of the items of clothing the imam at the local mosque h
ad collected for Sierra Leonean refugees. When we got inside the front doors, Kadi took my arm and led me into the section of the library that she said was for children. It was a sunny room with fictional characters painted on the walls, including Mickey Mouse, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and a turtle Kadi told me was named Franklin.
Kadi started pulling books off the shelves and piling them into my arms. “The best way to learn a new language is to start at the beginning,” she said. “Read what the children are reading.”
I must have been holding about 15 books by the time she said, “That’s enough for now.” At a small table, we sat down on some children’s-sized chairs.
“Okay,” she said, picking up the top book. “This is a good one. It’s called Baby Sister Says No!” She flipped it open. “Can you read any of these words?”
I shook my head.
“Mariatu,” Kadi said sharply, “you can do better than that!”
I focused on the page. “This is an S, and here’s a T,” I said, pointing my arm at the letters.
“Very good,” Kadi said. She turned the pages of the book, explaining that the story was about a funny porcupine-like creature whose baby sister won’t let him do anything he wants. “Kind of like you girls living in my house,” she joked.
“Now,” she continued, picking up another book, “this book is about a monkey named George. And here’s The Sneetches, by Dr. Seuss! I used to read this to my children when they were little.”
Kadi was lost in thought for a moment. “The Sneetches don’t want to associate with their own kind, because their own kind look different. Kind of like how the world works. Sometimes all we see are our differences. I can only dream of a time when that’s not so.” She sighed as she piled the books into a stack, then smiled. “When you can read these books to my granddaughter, you’ll have made it. Let’s go check these out.” Ameenatu had given birth shortly after I arrived to a baby girl named Kadijah. If I didn’t hurry up, the baby would catch up to my reading level. “Umu’s right,” I thought. “I need to get going!”
CHAPTER 19
On Monday morning, Kadi drove me to my first ESL class. “Most of the people there will be adults, and they come from countries where English is not spoken,” she told me as we waited for a set of traffic lights to change. “All these people will be new to Canada too, and some have suffered greatly. Many countries have had wars, and many people escape those countries by coming to Canada. You’ll see.”
She was right. My classmates were young Asian women, grandmothers from the Middle East, and men from southern Africa. No one spoke English. The class was for beginners.
Kadi stayed with me for the first two days, sitting beside me at the back of the room. As we drove to the school and back, she followed the same route as the public buses, pointing out the bus stops along the way.
Over dinner at the end of the second day, she announced: “I have to go to work tomorrow!” Kadi also worked for the government, at a different location from Abou. She thrust some bus tickets into my pockets. “Just follow the directions I’ve been showing you and you’ll be fine.”
I gulped. “But Kadi, what if I get lost?”
“Then you get lost,” she answered matter-of-factly.
Toronto is a big city. The population of 5 million is nearly the entire population of Sierra Leone. I imagined myself hopping on the wrong bus and ending up at the other end of the city, not knowing the telephone numbers of people to call, stranded, shivering in the cold.
On a blank piece of paper, Kadi wrote down the name of the bus I had to take to school and the street at which I needed to get off. On another piece of paper, she did the same for the return trip home.
“Show the piece of paper to the bus driver when you get on,” she instructed. “He’ll make sure you’re on the right bus and let you know when to get off.”
I was so nervous that first day I had to find my way all on my own. I dressed in a pair of Haja’s snug jeans and a pink sweatshirt, then pulled on my purple ski jacket. I donned an oversized wool hat and wrapped a big wool scarf around my neck and face. All that showed were my eyes! I had taken the double-decker buses in London many times, but I’d always been with Yabom. Now I was alone.
I stood motionless at the bus stop, watching three buses slow down and then speed by, before I gained the courage to step forward, indicating to the bus driver that I wanted to get on. My arm shook as I gave him Kadi’s instructions. The driver grunted “yes” and pointed to the seat directly behind him.
I was so afraid we were going in the wrong direction, I couldn’t look out the window. After a while, though, the bus driver motioned for me to get off. As I stood up, I breathed a sigh of relief. There in front of me was the school.
The teacher just smiled as I sheepishly entered the class a half-hour late. She pointed for me to take a seat in front of her.
From that moment on, I listened to my teacher more closely than I have listened to anyone in my life. My mind would churn over the English words long after class ended. During breaks, I would spin around in my chair and practice talking to the person behind me. At first we communicated mostly through gestures, but soon we were saying English words to each other, and within a few months we were forming sentences.
At night, I’d read the children’s books I’d checked out of the library. Soon I’d advanced from individual letters to identifying entire words like the, and, girl, boy, doll, and sneetches. I learned how to write these words in class. One of my proudest moments came when I wrote my name, MARIATU KAMARA, in a workbook with a pencil held between my arms.
I had come to Canada on a six-month visitor’s visa. One Saturday afternoon I approached Kadi and Abou and told them I wanted to remain in school. “Maybe I’ll go home when I can speak English,” I said. They were so happy. That night we had a party with Kadi and Abou’s entire family.
I applied for refugee status, eventually becoming a landed immigrant on humanitarian grounds; that meant I was a victim of war and had a better chance of a good life in Canada than back in Sierra Leone. My sponsors were Kadi, Abou, and a man named Alimamy Bangura from the Sierra Leone Immigrant, Resettlement and Integration Centre in Toronto, which Kadi and Abou had helped start.
On a muggy June evening 10 months after arriving in Canada, I graduated from my English as a Second Language course with a diploma. Our graduation ceremony took place in the school auditorium, and all of the students contributed potluck dishes for the feast afterwards. I made rice and fish with peppers. I couldn’t wait to sample the Middle Eastern rice dishes and Cajun chicken from the West Indies.
Before we got to the food, though, each student had to give a short speech in English, on any topic he or she wanted. When it was my turn, my eyes scanned the audience until I found Kadi, Abou, and the nieces. “Thank you for giving me a home,” I said, “and accepting me as one of yours. You are my sisters. I will always love you for the fun you bring to my life. I wouldn’t be here, on this stage, getting my ESL diploma if it weren’t for all of you.” I thanked my ESL teacher and all the friends I had met in the class too. “Canada is a very nice place to live,” I ended. “I’m glad it turned out to be everything I expected, and more.”
CHAPTER 20
When September rolled around, it was time for high school. I wasn’t alone this time. KK, Umu, and Mariama, Umu’s sister who had just arrived from Sierra Leone, accompanied me on my first day, and it turned out that KK was in three of my four classes: English, science, and math.
I liked high school from the moment I stepped into the main foyer. The long, narrow hallways were lined with lockers and students of all nationalities, sporting cell phones, Walkmans, fashionable jeans, and purses. I seemed to fit right in. KK and I were the eldest in our grade nine class, though we are both so tiny that nobody guessed. Many of the students spoke English like me, with thick accents from foreign places.
Because of my disability, the school assigned me a special tutor. She sat beside me in every cla
ss, taking notes and working with me one-on-one to figure out math equations, define English words, and explain the procedures in biology class. I liked science and math best. I had a natural ability to count things out in my head, I learned—perhaps, I mused to Kadi one night, from my two years of begging in Freetown. If Abibatu needed four peppers for dinner, I knew I had to earn at least 500 leones while begging to pay for them. I don’t like the sight of blood, but I wasn’t squeamish in biology class when I had to dissect a frog or look at graphic pictures of the human body, probably because I had seen so much in the hospitals in Sierra Leone.
My tutor was very patient as she taught me cursive writing, with a pencil or pen held between my arms. Just like when I learned to print, my first major accomplishment was writing my own name: Mariatu Kamara.
My teachers gave me extra time to complete tests and examinations. I think I may have failed the first semester. While the other students received report cards with marks and written comments, my teachers merely said I was doing well.
But by June, I did get a report card, and I’d earned Cs across the board.
“This is a computer,” said the resource center instructor, an older woman with glasses and short black hair. We were sitting at her cluttered desk, full of papers and computer parts. She had cleared away some of the debris to make room for a black laptop—my laptop—that the War Amps of Canada had bought for me.
It was winter 2004. I was still living with Kadi and Abou, but all five of us young women had moved upstairs into Ameenatu’s bedroom, so that she and her family could take over the basement. While the nieces and I fought over the bathroom in the morning, we also shared clothes, boots, jackets, and purses.
I knew what a computer was, since the nieces used an older PC to do their homework in the living room. Several students brought laptops to school, too. The teachers forbade them to use their computers during class, but on break they’d sit by their lockers or go to the school library and type away. I couldn’t help but watch as their fingers flew over the little keys. I wished I had fingers that could do that.
The Bite of the Mango Page 14
