Exiles on Main Street
Roughly 4,500 refugees will resettle in Texas this year, but few will have a tougher time adjusting than Ali Mohamed and his family. When they arrived in San Antonio from Africa in February, they didn’t know how to speak English. Or read or write. Or use a telephone or an electric stove. And in a few months they would have to start paying the rent.
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This is how it goes: Someone tells you that the Kenyan border is that way, so you walk that way, not because you’re sure there’s safety there but because there’s no place else to go. You walk for ten days, fourteen days; you really don’t know where you’re going, but in time you get to the border, where there are men and women in white T-shirts with a baby-blue logo that says “UNHCR”—the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. They put you in a truck and take you to a camp, a vast, enclosed plain where there are tens of thousands of people like you. They give you a tarp to sleep under and rations every fifteen days: maize, vegetable oil, and porridge, and the night you get them you don’t sleep, because bandits will come around and shoot you for your food. You settle down there, and there you stay, living just like that. You use a trench for a toilet, carry water from a spigot a hundred yards from your little settlement. You create a life, a community, without ever leaving the camp. Ali and Madina met at a camp called Kakuma and were married two weeks later; her dowry was 1,500 Kenyan shillings, about $20. All four of their children were born in the camp and raised under that strangely mixed aegis of charity and captivity.
If you’re a Bantu, you’ve been living in the camps for well over a decade now, getting food from CARE International and medical treatment from Doctors Without Borders. If you’re young and strong, you can get a job digging slit trenches, and you’ll be paid about 8 cents for every meter you dig. If you’re a woman, you do a little laundry for anyone who has a few coins to spare and you take care of the kids; if you’re a kid, you do nothing much at all. Then one day you hear that people are being let out of the camps at last, so you apply, and you start to get processed, by UNHCR, by the International Organization for Migration, by the Department of Homeland Security. You’re questioned, your health is checked, and then you’re sent back to the camps to wait again. And while you wait, unbeknownst to you, a huge cantilevered contraption, made up of acronymed American governmental organizations—ORR, which is under ACF, which is under HHS—along with a dozen or so not-for-profit charities, is deciding where you will go, sending messages back and forth. We can take two hundred here. This family has relatives in that city. There are jobs to be found here. Your paperwork is being processed, money found, apartments lined up. You’re traded among local organizations like playing cards in a game of Go Fish. A winning hand keeps families together in affordable housing in a city like San Antonio, which is willing to host them and has the means to help.
At last everything is settled, and they come for you. You and your family are put on a small plane—you have never been on a plane before, and everyone gets sick—and sent to Nairobi. In Nairobi you wait some more: two months in a building that you are not allowed to leave. And then the jet, the transfer, a sleepless trip over an ocean you have never heard of, another transfer, and here you are in a city called San Antonio, an immense settlement full of white and brown and black people; cars, lights, and stores; and an apartment, relatives waiting, in time a home.
I HAD WONDERED HOW YOU DO THIS: how you take your family, put them on their first airplane, and bring them to a country about which you know absolutely nothing, with no language, no money, no skills. I wanted to know what the Bantu could have been thinking, but it turns out they were thinking mostly about food—always about food, always worrying about where the next meal was coming from and if it would be enough. Beyond that, it seems as if your soul goes into a kind of hibernation, where it can stay for years. “We Bantu,” one of the refugees who had been in San Antonio for a little while told me, “we do what we’re told. ‘Go here.’ Okay, we go there. ‘Go there.’ Okay, we go there. We really don’t think about it.”
And then gradually the soul comes awake again. The morning after he arrived, I went back to Nob Hill and picked up Ali and his cousin, who spoke enough English to act as a translator. They were a neat and dapper pair, the two of them, Ali in a borrowed blue checked shirt and green checked pants, the cousin in a white dress shirt and beige pants. They were polite, compliant; Ali seemed a little nervous as I ushered him into the cab of my pickup, but I had someplace special I wanted to take him, and his cousin was complicit. In they went and away we drove.
Still dazed from the plane ride, still dazzled by his surroundings, Ali was almost perfectly silent as we drove along the I-410 loop. Just once he spoke up. “The cars,” he said. “There are so many of them.” He paused. “They move like goats,” he finished, and I, not knowing how goats moved, made a noise of assent. After that, nothing, but he stared intently out the window, and as he did, I couldn’t help but wonder how the world looked through his eyes. It was an adventure in empathy: All these things, and what did he make of them? Sushi restaurants, laser car washes, cell phone emporiums. This was a man who had never opened a book, let alone been in a bookstore; and how would he react to bicycles, contact lenses, pornography, or poodles? We drove through the ragged strip malls of San Antonio, and absolutely everything looked new and strange to me, because I knew it looked new and strange to him.
I thought I would take Ali to the very apex of American superabundance, the symbol and instantiation of all that we as a nation hold dear: freedom, choice, democracy, capitalism, consumerism—the summa summarum of our country’s two and a quarter centuries on the continent. He watched the traffic, the passing signs, the garish buildings going by, and soon enough, there it was, rising up in the distance, an El Dorado with fluorescent lights. The cousin said something to Ali in Mai-Mai, a barrage of syllables that sounded strikingly like English played backward, until he reached the three letters at the end. Wada wada wada wada, the cousin said, his voice rising in excitement. Wada wada wada, H-E-B.
Once inside the store, with its endless bins of fresh produce, its towering aisles of imported pasta, its enormous, frigid lockers stuffed with frozen garlic shrimp and pizza rolls, Ali broke his silence only to giggle at a carefully arranged display of mushrooms. “These cost money?” he asked. “In Africa,” his cousin explained, “these are everywhere. We don’t eat them.” On through the store we went. Ali visibly shuddered at a package of bacon (Bantu, being Muslims, don’t eat pork), but gradually his cart filled up with foods both familiar (mangoes, bananas) and unfamiliar (guacamole, baby formula).
Then we came upon a ceiling-mounted TV monitor, which was playing a DVD of Shark Tale, and Ali stopped, transfixed, his head craned back, while on the screen the colorful animated creatures sported and joked. He stood there watching for a good ten minutes; I stood beside him and reflected on the unstoppable cash-making machinery of the Hollywood studio system, the juvenility of American mass culture, the enduring appeal of gangster stories—until at last Ali turned and asked me what, apparently, he had been wondering all along: “Those fish,” he said. “Are they edible?”
THE UNITED NATIONS ESTIMATES that there are about 17 million displaced people worldwide, collected in camps around the globe. The United States agrees to take about 70,000 a year, far more than any other country, although new security protocols after 9/11 have effectively clogged up the system to the point where only half that many, or less, actually get here. Still, there are refugees from all over the world being resettled in this country, about 4,500 in Texas alone: Cubans on the run from Castro, Bosnian victims of the war in Sarajevo, Burmese and Bangladeshis and Afghans and Iranians, Liberians crawling out from under that country’s complete collapse, Chinese escaping what’s left of Maoism, and Turks and Thais and Rwandans and Vietnamese. They come to San Antonio, to Dallas and Houston and Amarillo (the meat-packing plants hire lots of refugees). They settle and they stay: the newest Texans.
In 1999 the United States agreed to take 12,000 Bantu from the border camps in Kenya, but the logjam affected them too. Only in the past year or two have they started arriving in significant numbers; Texas has taken about 1,150. Catholic Charities, which despite its name lives mostly on a combination of federal grants and private donations, helps most of them get started. Ideally, refugees will be self-sufficient within four months. Their children go into the public school system. In a year the adults will have green cards, and in five years they’ll be American citizens. In a generation or two they will be doctors, business owners, congressmen, and America will have performed one of its periodic defining absorptions, some version of which has been going on since this country was founded.
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