The Middle of Everywhere (9 page)

Each adult is given fifty dollars per week, plus food, rent, and temporary medical insurance. They go through an orientation that explains everything from how to use the city bus and library to marriage laws and taxes. Adults are encouraged to get jobs quickly. The goal of our resettlement agencies is self-sufficiency in four months. In feet, within a few weeks, refugees are often working. In addition to their other financial burdens, all refugees must repay their airfares from the country they fled.

A woman from Kazakhstan arrived in Lincoln with her father. She waited three hours at the airport for her sponsor who was at a party and had forgotten her. Later that night her father had a heart attack from the stress of the journey. From television, she knew she could call 911. Yet even when the translation service finally kicked in, she could give no address. Amazingly, her father lived through this attack.

Zainab arrived at JFK Airport in New York City. Before arriving she and her husband had spent years in a camp in the Saudi Arabian desert. They had two children in the camp and Zainab was again pregnant. She walked off the plane, looked at all the electric lights and the people who were walking fast and talking loudly, and she said to her husband, "Let's go back to the camp. At least there we had friends and family." He said, "I don't own the plane. I don't own anything."

Telling me this later, Zainab laughed. She said, "All he had was money for a Pepsi, so he bought me one. Drinking that cheered me up."

Zainab and her husband had hoped they would be assigned Lincoln, where they knew a few families, but an official sent them to Fargo, North Dakota. They boarded another plane and arrived in Fargo late at night. They were picked up and taken to a hotel room. Too tired to clean up or eat, they fell into deep sleep. In the morning they awoke and looked out the window. They saw green trees, grass, a squirrel, and two dogs. Zainab said, "We had spent years in a place with no plants or animals. My husband asked me if we were in heaven."

They had never seen people in shorts or with dyed green hair. They didn't know how to use a phone. A homeless guy gave them thirty-five cents and dialed for them.

Soon they managed to move to Lincoln. Zainab had trouble with our foods. In Iraq there were not many kinds of vegetables, mostly just tomatoes and cucumbers, but they were fresh and delicious. Zainab said Nebraskans had a huge variety, but nothing tasted flavorful.

Zainab came from an area where men and women did not touch each other except in families. The American handshake was a problem. When a man held out his hand to her, she had to explain that Iraqi women do not shake hands. She learned to hug American women and say, "Hug your husband for me."

When I was in college, I remember reading about a tribe in Central America who thought that Americans never got sick or died. All the Americans they'd seen were healthy anthropologists, tall and well-nourished. They'd never seen Americans die.

Modern refugees often come here equally naive about us. Some have Nebraska and Alaska confused and expect mountains, ice, and grizzlies. Some think of Nebraska as a western state with cowboys, and they are ill-prepared for our factories, suburbs, and shopping malls. Many newcomers have never seen stairs, let alone escalators or elevators. Inventions such as duct tape, clothes hangers, aluminum foil, or microwaves often befuddle new arrivals.

Someone once said, "Every day in a foreign country is like final exam week." It's a good metaphor. Everything is a test, whether of one's knowledge of the language, the culture, or of the layout of the city. Politics, laws, and personal boundaries are different. Relations between parents and children, the genders, and the social classes are structured differently here. The simplest task—buying a bottle of orange juice or finding medicine for a headache—can take hours and require every conceivable skill.

Some refugees believe they will be given a new car and a house when they arrive. Some people ask government workers, "Where is my color TV? My free computer?" Others have seen
Dallas
or
Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?
and think they will soon get rich.

This belief that it's easy to get rich in America is exploited by con artists. An Azerbaijani man received a Reader's Digest Sweepstakes notice informing him he was a millionaire. He fell to his knees and thanked Allah for his riches. A Vietnamese family called relatives in Ho Chi Minh City to tell them the great news that they had won the Publisher's Clearinghouse sweepstakes. A Siberian couple laughed and danced around their kitchen, already spending their expected pickle card winnings on a new car, a dishwasher, and a swimming pool for the kids. Later, when it became clear they hadn't won, they weren't so happy.

Some newcomers don't know the number of weeks in a year or what the seasons are. Others are well-educated but have gaps. Once when I was talking to a well-educated Croatian woman about our history, I brought up the sixties. I said, "It was a hard time with war and so many assassinations, those of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King." She asked in amazement, "You mean Martin Luther King is dead?" When I said yes, she began to cry.

Our casual ways of dealing with the opposite sex are without precedent in some cultures. Our relaxed interactions between men and women can be alarming to some people from the Middle East. Some traditional women are suspicious of American women; it seems to them as if the American women are trying to steal their husbands because they speak to them at work or in stores.

An Iraqi high school student told of arriving in this country on a summer day. As she and her father drove through Lincoln, there were many women on the streets in shorts and tank tops. Her father kept saying to her, "Cover your eyes; cover your eyes." Neither of them had ever seen women in public without head covering.

There are two common refugee beliefs about America—one is that it is sin city; the other is that it is paradise. I met a Cuban mother whose sixteen-year-old daughter got pregnant in Nebraska. She blamed herself for bringing the girl to our sinful town, weeping as she told me the story. And she showed me a picture of the daughter, all dressed in white. A Mexican father told me that his oldest son was now in a gang. He talked about American movies and the violent television, music, and video games. He said, "My son wears a black T-shirt he bought at a concert. It has dripping red letters that read, 'More Fucking Blood.'" He looked at me quizzically. "America is the best country in the world, the richest and the freest. Why do you make things like this for children?"

On the other hand, some refugees idealize our country. They talk endlessly of the mountains of food in buffets, the endless supply of clean water, the shining cars, and the electricity. Flying into a city such as New York or Seattle, many refugees experience their first vision of America and are overwhelmed by the shining stars of light on the ground, more light than they have ever seen. One refugee from Romania captured both ideas when he said, "America is the beauty and the beast."

When I ask refugees what America means to them, many say, "Freedom." This may mean many things. To the Kurdish sisters it is the freedom to wear stylish American clothes and walk about freely. It's the freedom to go swimming and shopping and make a living. To many of the poor and disenfranchised, it is the radical message that everyone has rights, even though at first many refugees do not know what their rights are.

America means a system of laws, a house, a job, and a school for every child. In America people can strive for happiness, not even a concept in some parts of the world. They are free to become whomever they want to become. Refugees learn they can speak their minds, write, and travel. They shed the constraints of more traditional cultures. As one Bulgarian woman put it to me, "In America, the wives do not have to get up and make the husbands' breakfasts."

People from all over the world want to come here. They want a chance at the American dream. They come because they want to survive and be safe and anywhere is better than where they were. However, the process of adjusting is incredibly traumatic. The Kurdish sisters were in culture shock for about six months. After a year, they are still deeply in debt, lonely, haunted by the past, and struggling to master our language and our culture. They are overwhelmed every time their bills arrive. Nasreen and Zeenat still dream nightly of their homeland.

It is difficult to describe or even imagine the challenges of getting started in a new country. Imagine yourself dropped in downtown Rio de Janeiro or Khartoum with no money, no friends, and no understanding of how that culture works. Imagine you have six months to learn the language and everything you need to know to support your family. Of course, that isn't a fair comparison because you know that the earth is round, what a bank is, and how to drive a car. And you have most likely not been tortured or seen family members killed within the last few months.

Picture yourself dropped in the Sudanese grasslands with no tools or knowledge about how to survive and no ways to communicate with the locals or ask for advice. Imagine yourself wondering where the clean water is, where and what food is, and what you should do about the bites on your feet, and your sunburn, and the lion stalking you. Unless a kind and generous Sudanese takes you in and helps you adjust, you would be a goner.

"
I will never see my brothers again.
"

A teacher who loved and respected Linh set up a meeting between us. Linh had been a straight-A student in high school and college, but this year she was discouraged with college. She had been skipping classes and had resigned from many activities, which she had formerly led.

We met at The Mill, a coffeehouse near campus. Linh was tall and thin and wore jeans, a sweatshirt, and a delicate Asian necklace. Like many Vietnamese, she spoke less clearly than she wrote. (This is the opposite of Arabic-speaking people who quickly learn to speak English, but have a hard time with our written language.)

I apologized for scheduling our meeting over her noon hour, but she said that she always skipped lunch anyway, to keep her weight down. I said, "That's a very American thing to do."

She smiled softly. "Vietnamese girls worry about weight all die time."

I thanked her for the gift of her time and asked her how long she had been in this country. She responded, "Five years." Then, without any questions from me, Linh told me about her history. She had five living brothers and one older sister, but only one of her brothers was in Nebraska. One of her brothers had died during the war when her parents were running from soldiers. The other brothers were over twenty-one and not allowed to come to America and her sister had stayed behind with her husband.

Linh was born in a small village far from Saigon. Her dad was a teacher, but because he had helped the Americans, he was sent to reeducation camp and afterward forced to farm. Because of her dad's record, Linh and her siblings weren't allowed to attend the village school. She wanted to study but couldn't afford books.

Linh smiled remembering rice harvest. She was the baby of the family, petted and spoiled. The brothers would carry her to the fields and make a little camp for her. When they could, they would stop and play with her. Her brothers might get mad at her, but no one ever really disciplined her. They would wake up in the night and make sure she was covered with blankets. Shrimp was valuable and caught only to be sold, but her brothers fed her shrimp. Still, it was a hard life, and to demonstrate that point, Linh showed me the scars on her arms from leech bites.

Her second-oldest brother awoke at 4:00
A.M
. to help her with math before he left for work. She smiled remembering how he would stay up all night and work the problems so that when she awoke he would know how to do the work. This brother wrote her often, admonishing her to study. He told her he didn't believe in destiny and that in America she could become whatever she wanted. She pulled his letters out of her backpack to show me. Linh said through her tears that she would obey anything her brothers told her. She looked at me wide-eyed and said, "I will never see my brothers again."

I asked why she came to our country. Linh explained that her dad had been promised a car, a house, and a refrigerator in Nebraska, but at the last minute, her parents didn't want to come. They came only so that she could study. When her parents said good-bye, everyone in their little village cried.

The first thing they noticed here was the snow. Flying into Nebraska, Linh asked her father, "Why is the ground white?" The second thing they observed was our haste. Americans all seemed to be rushing around. Everyone had to be someplace all the time. Linh said, "I wondered if people ever slowed down and talked to each other."

They were taken to an apartment by a man who had served with her father in the army. They couldn't talk to Americans at all and they felt crazy. They never left their apartment and they wanted to go back to Vietnam. In Vietnam, they'd owned nothing, no television or books, and they'd used kerosene lamps. But in Nebraska, they were even more bereft; they didn't know how to turn on lights or use a stove or faucet.

Linh's first day of school, she missed the bus and her dad had to call his friend to give her a ride. Her father said, "You must go to school. You don't want to disappoint us; we came here for you."

Once at school, Linh made friends quickly. Some of the American kids laughed at her accent and clothes, but the teachers loved her. She was bright, hardworking, and focused. In geometry the students who had laughed at her soon wanted to copy her homework. By the end of her first year, she had made all A's. She said, "American kids have no idea how lucky they are to have good teachers."

Linh chose Vietnamese friends. American girls talked a lot about dating and boys. She said, "If I talked that way in Vietnam, I would be considered a bad girl." She explained that Vietnamese teens are more private and conservative than American teens. She asked me, "Why do Americans rush everything?"