"Have You Seen War?" — Books by Helen Thorpe

Final edited version published by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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THE NEWCOMERS, Chapter Five: “Have You Seen War?”

by HELEN THORPE

At about nine o’clock one Saturday morning, I knocked on the door of the rental house where I believed that Solomon and Methusella were living with their family. Nobody answered. The house had a weathered clapboard exterior painted tan, but not recently. The yard was filled with dried brown leaves over bare dirt, surrounded by a chain link fence. The homes in the neighborhood were modest, and it had a higher rate of crime than surrounding locations. I lived less than ten minutes away, but on the other side of Colfax Avenue, a dividing line in this part of the city, economically.

I knocked again, but it seemed nobody was home. I knocked a third time, more loudly, and suddenly the front door swung open. A small child stood before me, wearing a green silk party dress with sequins and a large bow. The dress was a little grubby.

“Hello there,” I said to the girl. “Is this the house where Solomon and Methusella live?”

“No!” the girl in the party dress said emphatically.

The boys had written down the address for me in my notebook. I double-checked the number of the house, and it was correct.

“Solomon doesn’t live here?” I ventured again.

“No!” said the child again. She spoke with confidence.

“Okay—I’m sorry, maybe I am at the wrong house. Do you have a brother named Solomon?”

“Solomon?” said the child, brightening. “Oh yes—Solomon is right here!”

She pronounced her brother’s name with a British accent, so that it sounded quite different than the way I had been saying his name. This was Sifa (a Swahili word that means “praise”), and she was Solomon’s younger sister. Soon a bevy of small children flocked around my knees. Two girls with bright yellow ribbons braided into their hair took me by the hand; one of them had on a sparkly purple tutu, while the other was entirely naked. One of the girls with yellow braids was Solomon and Methusella’s sister Zawadi (Swahili for “gift”) while the other was their niece—the child of their oldest brother. A small boy ran around us in circles, wearing blue shorts and clutching a green t-shirt in his hands. This was Ombeni (“prayer”), a younger brother. We passed by a bedroom. I glanced inside and saw two twin mattresses covered in plastic wrap, even though the mattresses were clearly being used, as comforters lay strewn about. The children forgot about me and swept into the living room where they began dancing exuberantly to African music videos playing at top volume on a large TV.

In the kitchen, I found Solomon’s mother, busy at the stove. Beya was a forty-five year old woman with a beautiful face that she held completely still while I spoke to her in English. Her feet were bare and she wore an outfit that spoke of life in the African countryside: a floor-length skirt of multi-colored cotton, a red t-shirt, and a green wool beanie perched on top of her head. Her hat said Marvel Avengers on it, and appeared to be an item borrowed from a child. Nothing matched, to my eyes.

“Jambo,” I said.

A quick flash of a lightning-bright smile lit up Beya’s features, at the sound of a familiar greeting. She answered warmly but I did not understand anything that she said. I gave Beya a pineapple and some coffee cake that I had brought for the family. Solomon came down a flight of stairs and helped me explain the gifts that I had brought. I thanked his mother for having me to their home and she said asante-sana (thank you) for coming. Solomon and his mother conferred and then Solomon informed me that his mother wished I would sit down. When I sat at the kitchen table, one of the girls with yellow ribbons climbed into my lap, where she amused herself by gathering my hair into a ponytail multiple times. Ombeni pulled the green t-shirt over his head but did not put his arms through the sleeves. Solomon explained that his oldest brother, Gideon, was married and had three children of his own; Gideon and his family did not live in this house, but Beya was watching her grand-children that day.

Solomon and I were still sorting through the question of which small children were his siblings and which were his nieces and nephews when Solomon’s father Tchiza walked into the kitchen. Tchiza was a dignified man of fifty-two, who wore a navy collared shirt and navy trousers. He studied my face intently as he said hello. I felt as though I was looking at a much older Solomon—they had remarkably similar faces, dominated by the same high cheekbones, although Tchiza’s black hair included strands of grey, and his face was lined, and his brown eyes were rimmed with pale blue.

Almost immediately, the doorbell rang, and we were joined by the interpreter I had hired. Julius was from Sudan, but he recognized Solomon’s father, because he had translated for the family at a recent visit to a medical clinic. The two men greeted one another warmly in Swahili. All of us sat down at the kitchen table, and Solomon’s mother brought over a tall plastic pitcher, which held some type of reddish-purple semi-liquid substance. Julius exclaimed in happy recognition, and then turned to explain that this was a Congolese version of porridge, made out of millet. Beya poured the purple porridge into coffee mugs and handed one to each of us; apparently Congolese people drank their cereal. The porridge was hot and delicious. I could taste that had been sweetened with sugar, and it reminded me of oatmeal, although the consistency was more grainy.

“Do you have this every day?” I asked Solomon.

“Not every day!” he exclaimed in surprise. I understood this to mean his mother had made something special, probably because they had a visitor.

When his mother handed a mug of porridge to his father, Tchiza said, “asante,” and gave his wife a look of loving regard. As she smiled back at him, I was struck by the couple’s obvious warmth. They had grandchildren dancing in the living room, and their union still contained palpable affection.

I told Tchiza that he should be proud of his sons. Solomon and Methusella were very good students. “They are learning very quickly,” I told him.

Tchiza asked Julius a question in Swahili.

The interpreter said to me that Tchiza wondered if I was their teacher.

The misunderstanding surprised me. I thought I had been perfectly clear: I had sent home a letter written in Swahili, and Tchiza had signed a parental consent form allowing me to interview his two sons. I believed I had described myself as a journalist quite plainly to Solomon and Methusella, when we had spoken one day at school over lunch. Julius had come to their school, when I met with the boys for a second time, to help with interpretation. And I thought the boys had told their parents to expect my visit. But it was conceivable that the boys might not have understood my role, or their father had gotten confused by a second-hand explanation, or perhaps he had not connected me with the letter I’d had translated into Swahili. I realized that I had to put aside the list of typed questions that I had brought with me—this morning, all I would try to do was to explain slowly and clearly who I was.

“I am a visitor to the classroom,” I said. “I am a journalist, and I’ve been working on a book about their teacher and their classroom.”

I explained that I was hoping to write about several families who had children in the classroom in more detail, which was why I was here. I told Tchiza that the classroom served as a mirror of the global crisis, and that by telling the stories of various students in the room, it would be possible to illustrate the crisis as a whole. I thought he could help me understand what was happening in the Congo, for example.

Tchiza had some questions for me.

“Are you writing this book because you are still in school? Is this something you are doing so that you can graduate?” Tchiza asked. “Or this is your hobby?”

For me, writing was more than a hobby, I replied. I had been a professional journalist for more than twenty-five years, and had formerly worked at weekly newspapers and at monthly magazines. I had written two other books. I gave Tchiza a copy of my first book, which I had brought with me, and explained that it was about undocumented students whose families had immigrated from Mexico. Tchiza was not familiar with the predicament of undocumented students, so my first pass at describing the book was largely incomprehensible. We talked about that subject for a while, as Tchiza was fascinated to learn more about people who were living in the United States without legal status. I also told Tchiza a little bit about my own background, and how that had informed my interest in these subjects. My parents had been born in another country, and so had I—we had moved to the United States when I had been one year old.

“So are you telling me you were not born here?” Tchiza asked in Swahili.

“I was not born here,” I confirmed.

“Where were you born?” Tchiza asked.

“My mother grew up on a farm in Ireland—“ I began.

“Ireland,” said Julius. “England. London.”

Actually, Ireland and England were not at all the same thing, but I restrained myself and did not point this out.

“Europe?” Tchiza asked.

“Yes, Europe,” I said. “My mother grew up in Ireland, my father grew up in Ireland. They came here in 1965, and I was one year old. I have been living in this country for fifty years.”

Julius translated all of this.

“So it’s like you were born in this country, pretty much, because when you came here you were so little you didn’t understand anything else,” Tchiza said in Swahili.

“Exactly,” I confirmed. “Yes.”

Beya sat down at the table with us. I asked her if it was hard to find the ingredients to make food. Was it hard for her to find familiar items, like the porridge we were eating?

Beya rolled her eyes dramatically and slumped against Tchiza to indicate just how hard it was. Julius didn’t have to translate at all—I understood her perfectly. The impassive manner Beya had worn when I first arrived seemed more like a mask, put on before a stranger. It fell away once she felt safe, and underneath she was a highly expressive woman. I liked her theatrical eye-rolling.

Tchiza said his sons had struggled tremendously during their first weeks in Room 142. “It was very difficult for them at the beginning,” he said through Julius. “Because when the teacher would say something, they could not understand. But at the same time, the other students could not explain to them, even if they knew, because they had no way to communicate. Pretty much, the one sitting next to them, they did not speak the same language. They could not talk to one another. So they could not say, this is what the teacher wants. It was really, really frustrating. When they came home, they were so frustrated, because they could not understand anything. But then as time passed, they began to understand more and more.”

We talked about what it felt like for Tchiza to live in the United States. He worked as a dishwasher, he told us, in a cafeteria at a corporate headquarters. I had washed dishes for several years when I was in college, and we commiserated about the nature of the work. I remembered leaving my dishwashing job feeling greasy, and Tchiza used his hands to indicate how he got dirty water all over his body. My dish-washing job had been part-time, however, and I had been headed toward a bachelor’s degree from a prestigious college, whereas Tchiza had no idea when he might find another kind of work. While living in the Congo, Tchiza had completed tenth grade, which was an unusual level of education to attain for a man living in a rural part of that country. He had worked as a farmer, but he had also consulted with other farmers in his region, seeking to help them produce more food. People had come to view him as a leader, and at one point he had even run for public office, although he did not win. Now he washed dishes for a living—clearly, the job was dull and wearying. He commuted by bus, and it took him almost two hours each way. Tchiza spoke four languages fluently—Swahili, French, Kinyarwanda, and a tribal language. During one future visit, I would find him seated in a chair, teaching himself English by reading a creased English-French pocket dictionary, which he had found at Goodwill for $1. He understood a lot of what I said, but his ability to speak English remained poor, which limited his work opportunities. He was grateful to have any job, however, and he never complained about washing dishes as being beneath him.

What Tchiza found most difficult about life in the United States was something more ineffable: the way people in this country seemed to pre-judge him. If they discovered his intelligence, they seemed surprised. “When you are black, people don’t look at you as if you can even do the thing you are doing,” he offered. “When you are black, pretty much you are nothing. That’s the assumption. But at the same time, I know more than maybe people think. People wonder, you are black—how do you know it?”

I told him I understood that it was like that in my country—here black people were constantly underestimated by white people. I told him that I had visited Africa once, many years ago, when my college roommate was teaching English in a rural school in western Kenya. I had glimpsed how different the matter of identity seemed to be there. I told him that I could feel the difference between the two places, in this regard.

“It’s a good thing you have been there,” Tchiza told me. “That’s what the human being is supposed to be like. Judge me by my character. Not because of my color, not because of how I look.”

In the living room, the small children had started watching cartoons, and the clamor of the children’s shows threaded through our conversation as we turned to the subject of war. I asked Tchiza if he could help me understand what the family had endured in this regard. From speaking with Solomon and Methusella at their school, I knew that the family had lived on the eastern side of the Democratic Republic of Congo, not far from the city of Goma. And from reading about the Congo, I knew that this was an area that had seen more violence than any other part of the D.R.C. In a brief interview in Room 142, during their lunch hour, the boys had told me that their family had escaped from the D.R.C. in 2008, and then they had spent seven years living inside of a refugee settlement in Uganda. The boys had done the first half of their schooling in the Congo, and the second half in Uganda. While Methusella had gone to school continuously, Solomon had stopped going to school in the Congo when his family had needed him to help guard the home against pillaging bands of armed groups; at the refugee settlement, Solomon had returned to school briefly, but petty theft was common there, and his parents were busy in the fields, cultivating food for the family, and they needed him to watch his younger siblings and guard the home against intruders. Originally, Solomon had been one year ahead of Methusella in school, but later he had fallen one year behind. Both boys had seemed to find this reversal funny, Methusella in a way that suggested it made him feel proud, and Solomon in a way that suggested he felt embarrassed.

The boys had told me the names of their closest friends at the refugee settlement, too—Methusella had been particularly close to a boy named Stivin—and in their voices I could hear how awfully they missed the friends they had left behind. They had not yet made any friends in America, the boys said. But they were happy to be in the United States, even if they were lonely, because in ten hundred ways, life in America was easier.

When I asked the boys why their family had left the Congo, Solomon said, “The problem was, soldiers fighting.”

Methusella added, “Maybe at night, maybe when you are sleeping, soldiers fight, and so you run away from the house and you have to hide yourself.”

“Where would you hide?” I asked.

“In the bush,” Methusella replied.

They could not remember an extended period of peace; all the years they had spent in the Congo had been marked by warfare. Solomon and Methusella seemed to have a sense of mission about educating people in the developed world about what was happening in the D.R.C. At the same time, I felt conscious of the fact that the two boys were young, and had only just arrived in the United States. They were very close to my own son in age, and we were speaking over lunch, while they were in the middle of their school day. I would not have wanted a journalist to grill my son about things that were bound to be upsetting while he was at school, so I did not press for details about what they might have witnessed, given that it seemed highly likely they had seen harsh things. Instead I had asked if it would be possible to meet their parents. Yes, the boys had said. But not during the week, because their father worked long hours. It would be better to visit on the weekend.

I explained to Tchiza that while the boys had told me a little bit about their time in the Congo, I was hoping to hear the full story of the family’s journey from him. Tchiza agreed that consulting him would be better than interviewing his sons further. He waved his hand at Solomon. “Even my children,” he said, “They don’t know. The elders, you know how it is—you know how to go from here to here, when you are walking. You know what the trip is going to be like, you know how difficult it will be. With the kids, they don’t know. They just follow you.”

The only problem was, Tchiza did not appear certain that I would understand what he and his family had lived through. Some things are simply untranslatable.

“People here, most of them don’t know what a war means, actually,” Tchiza observed. “They don’t know.”

I acknowledged this was true. The United States had fought many wars, but during my lifetime every major conflict had taken place on foreign soil. As a result, I considered myself to be fairly ignorant on the subject of armed conflict, like the vast majority of Americans.

“You’ve been living here for fifty years,” Tchiza observed. “Have you seen war?”

“Never,” I conceded.

“Here there are gangs, and gang shootings, and all of that, but that is nothing,” Tchiza said, dismissing such concerns by brushing away the air away with one hand.

Julius spoke up at this point to tell us about his own background. The interpreter was from southern Sudan (he left that area before it became the separate country of South Sudan). Once upon a time, he had been a child soldier. The Swahili term for child soldier was askari watoto, I learned, from listening to Julius speak to Tchiza. Julius told us both, speaking first in Swahili and then in English, that he had come to the United States at age sixteen, without any other family members. He would have been exactly the same age as Methusella, I thought to myself. Earlier, Methusella had come over to say hello, but then he had retired to another part of the house; Solomon remained at the kitchen table, and was listening to our conversation intently. Julius pulled open his warm-up jacket to show us that underneath he was wearing his King Soopers work uniform, because he needed to go from the family’s home directly to the grocery store where he was employed. He pointed out that he had on his nametag, which said, “Julius. One of the Lost Boys.”

“So you understand,” Tchiza said to Julius in Swahili. “You know what war is.”

The men looked at one another, and then they turned to look at me. There was a lull in the conversation. In their eyes I saw a question: What are we supposed to do about the terrible innocence of Americans? I could feel how ignorant we were, those of us who got to live inside the United States. My life had always been safe and secure, even as conflict raged across other parts of the globe. How could I tell the story of a family from the Democratic Republic of Congo? And even if Tchiza had wanted to explain it all to me, where would he begin?

Tchiza mused, “If I see a dent in a wall here, that triggers memories of home. Because back home, everywhere you go, the walls are filled with holes. And you know, when you look at them, what made each one of those holes.”

The walls of my country were not riddled with bullet holes. I told Tchiza that I could only understand what his family had lived through with his help—but perhaps the rest of the story should wait for another day, as Julius needed to get to his job at the grocery store. If we talked any longer, we were going to make him late. Besides, we had already taken up most of Tchiza’s morning, and he probably wanted to enjoy some time with his family. Tchiza agreed that it would be better to resume the conversation at another time.

“The problem with life in America is, you cannot see your kids,” Tchiza marveled. “They leave for school at six o’clock in the morning. And then it’s time for me to go to work. When I come back in the evening, the kids are in bed already, the small ones. And the older boys, they are busy doing their homework. It’s just so difficult. Sitting like this—it’s not possible, most days of the week. There is no time to sit around the table together. Only on the weekend is there time to be with your family.”

This, like so many things about America, was entirely new to him.

Before we left, Solomon had a question about the parent-teacher conferences that Mr. Williams had mentioned. His father would be at work. Could one of his brothers come in his place? I told him that I believed that would be fine. We could double-check with Mr. Williams by emailing his teacher.

“Oh!” said Solomon. “You can talk to him by email?”

“Yes, we can talk to him by email,” I said.

Using my phone, I sent an email to both Mr. Williams and Solomon’s older brother Gideon, who spoke English fluently, so that they could communicate about the parent-teacher conference. Then Julius asked Solomon if he knew much about ROTC. On the day when Julius had visited the boys’ classroom, to help me speak with them in Swahili, a student from Kenya had dropped by Room 142, wearing a blue Air Force uniform. Julius was a huge man, with a driving personality. When I first introduced him to Solomon and Methusella, the two boys had gone very still. As we sat at the kitchen table, Julius urged Solomon to speak with the Kenyan student about the advantages of the military recruitment program. “ROTC, it’s a very good program,” Julius advised. “Very good program. You should ask her about it.”

“Did you do ROTC?” I asked Julius.

“I did ROTC, but I was also running. So I got a scholarship for running. But it’s a very good program.”

“You end up in the military afterwards,” I pointed out.

“You only have to serve for four years,” countered Julius. “Then you can opt out. It’s a good, good program. It’s a good program, I’ve been here twenty years, I know. I’ve got friends who are generals now in the army because of that. They don’t even see bullets fired. They sit at a table like this, doing the planning.”

“So I agree with you, it’s a very good program in terms of the economic benefits,” I said. “But I’m wondering—Solomon and Methusella, after they’ve seen war, do they have any hesitation about becoming soldiers?”

Solomon burst out laughing when I said this—he was laughing in relief, that somebody had mentioned out loud that it might be possible to have such a hesitation.

“I don’t think that would be a problem,” Julius insisted.

“I think I can do that program when I am good with English,” Solomon said, diplomatically.

“It will not take you that long to learn,” Julius told him. “By the time you are ready for college, you will be fine. You don’t have to wait. Look, you can start now.”

Then Julius said he really did have to go. I left with him, feeling some consternation that after I had brought him to this house, he had tried to sell Solomon on ROTC. I wasn’t sure that I agreed with Julius that the program would be good for the boys, given this country’s propensity to get mired in interminable conflicts overseas. As we walked to the door, the small children shouted enthusiastically: “Bye-bye!” Then they started giggling, as if this was the funniest thing in the world.

I thanked the boys’ mother once more. Both parents walked out of the house with us, and accompanied us all the way to the gate in the chain-link fence.

“This is how we did things in Africa,” Tchiza explained.

It was customary to walk someone outside, as a sign of respect. We said asante several times. I waved goodbye, and Tchiza waved back with both of his hands. Over the coming months, this was among dozens of things I would learn from visiting this household—how to say goodbye properly. After I left, I found myself turning over in my mind the depth of intention Tchiza put into everything. He did nothing casually, not even waving. From the outset, I could see that my experiences in this home were going to be profound. But I had no idea at that moment how blinkered my own perspective was. It was not yet possible for me to comprehend the full scope of the transition this family was presently going, because the extent of what I did not know about life in a country like the Democratic Republic of Congo would turn out to be rather stunning. But I only learned that after I traveled there to meet some of the family’s relatives who had not been chosen for resettlement, and were themselves divided in two, some of them still living on the eastern side of the DRC, and others in a refugee camp located on the western side of Uganda, near to where those two countries share a border.