The Pastor's Blessing

Blaz, born in 1970 to Pentecostal Christians in Slovakia, trained as a dental technician in his teens, but could not get a job. His parents had warned him about spending money on the dental technician program; Pentecostals will never get those kinds of jobs, they said. All those kinds of jobs are only for Catholics. They wanted him to go into business with his father, selling auto parts, but Blaz was stubborn. He had worked in his father’s tiny shop since he was 12; he saw nothing interesting in it. Pentecostals had their own businesses, and employed their own families, because jobs other than laborers and domestic servants were closed to them. The government did pass laws against discrimination, but they weren’t enforced. Pentecostals were only about 3% of the population, and had no champions.

He wanted to build molds for false teeth, and make teeth that fit beautifully. There was a big market for false teeth, and Blaz had an entrepreneurial streak, but setting up a shop was expensive. He needed to get some experience and save some money before he could do it. He applied everywhere in Bratislava, the capital, without success. He then astounded his family by filing a discrimination claim, without a lawyer, against the largest dental workshop in the country. It was 1989, and Slovakia had just had an amiable divorce not only from the Czech Republic, but also from the Soviet Union ; people felt great optimism about the country’s future. Blaz thought it was high time to dismantle the entrenched culture of discrimination against Pentecostal Christians.

Right after he filed the suit, his father’s shop burned in an arson attack, and he was beaten, quite badly, as he tried to salvage parts the next day from the smoking ruins. The attackers, three beefy young men, made it clear that he needed to leave the country before he and the rest of his family were murdered. Blaz went to the police, and collapsed in the police station as he tried to tell the sergeant what had happened. He woke up three days later in the hospital, and spent the next two weeks recovering. His father insisted that he flee to the Czech Republic, get a visa to the US, and then fly to Seattle to live with his father’s second cousin, who had fled Slovakia years before. Blaz was too sick and too discouraged to fight any more, and he did as his father wanted.

He arrived in Seattle in 1990, applied for and won asylum status from the US government, and went to work as a construction laborer. He lived with his cousin and his family in a room in their basement in Bellevue, and attended a Slovakian Pentecostal church. Attendance was required at the Sunday services from 9am -noon and from 6-8 pm; the Wednesday service from 7-9 pm ; and the Saturday service from 5-8 pm. There were optional classes on the Bible on Tuesday nights, and classes for “applying our faith to the challenge of modern life” on Thursday nights; Blaz attended both. On Saturday mornings, he went to English classes at the church, and on Monday and Friday evenings, he volunteered to clean the church and do repairs and handyman jobs. Back home, he had only attended required services, and did that at his parents’ insistence. In America, he found that the church was his family. The church rules gave him a structure and purpose that he did not think he could find without them. He found it sensible that there was an absolute prohibition against drinking alcohol, dancing, listening to secular music, and divorce, and that the pastor must approve all marriages and job and school choices.

The rest of the recent Slovakian arrivals spent almost as much time as he did at the church. But there was not one girl of marriageable age at all, for two long years. In 1992, shy 16-year-old Danila, another Pentecostal asylee from Slovakia, arrived in Seattle alone to live with her mother’s cousin, and the church community quickly matched her with Blaz. The pastor gave his blessing to the marriage, and they married the same year she arrived; the community loaned them money to buy a house near the church. Blaz worked construction, and Danila stayed home to have children. They had a child within a year of their marriage, and then another, and another; within the first five years, they had five children. By their 10^th anniversary, they had three more, and by their 16^th anniversary, they had 12 children.

Eastern European Pentecostal Christian families are very large, and children are considered a great blessing. The children were baptized and went to church with their parents, as often as their parents did. The babies were in the church nursery and little ones in the church preschool. School-age children spent nearly all their time when they weren’t at school at the church, which had a playground and a well-stocked kitchen. Danila thought about learning English and even getting a job, when her older girls were old enough to take care of the little ones, but she was so tired all the time.

When her youngest child was three months old, Danila complained of pain in her stomach, and went to see a doctor. The doctor said that she was just worn out from having so many children so quickly, and advised rest. She was only 33, and needed to start to pay attention to her own health, he said. Take walks, leave the children for an afternoon and meet with friends for the church sewing bees. Danila did as he said, but the pain didn’t go away. It got so bad that she screamed in her sleep, and Blaz took her to another doctor, who found that Danila had an advanced case of pancreatic cancer. He gave her six months to live. They did not have medical insurance.

The entire church community sprang into action. The women of the church cooked and delivered a meal a day for six months, in turn, for the entire family. They took turns staying with the children during the day so the older ones could go to school, and washed the laundry and cleaned the house. The church paid the mortgage and utilities for six months so that Blaz could stay home and take care of Danila. The church bought morphine for Danila with a doctor’s prescription, but she spent the last month of her life in great pain. When Danila died, the church paid for her funeral and her burial plot.

After Danila’s death, her sister Arva and her husband Andrej came from Slovakia to help care for the children, and Blaz tried to find work again. But it was 2009 and no one was building anything much. The church continued to pay the mortgage, but told Blaz they couldn’t do so much longer. Blaz met with Pastor Tomasz, and told him that he was desperate to see his family in Slovakia again, before his parents died, and to have some time away to recover from his grief. The pastor gave him money for the air ticket out of his own pocket, and Blaz flew home for the first time in 19 years.

He was gone four months. When he came back to church, he told everyone that he was engaged to a 24-year-old woman from the Slovakian countryside, and that he planned to bring her on a fiancée visa to Seattle, as soon as he had the pastor’s blessing. The church erupted in gossip and condemnation. The church council stopped mortgage payments immediately. Some said that it was disgusting that he wanted to trick a woman more than 15 years his junior into being a stepmother to 12 children, in exchange for US legal status. Others said that he obviously cared nothing about the children he already had, and wanted only to exercise his prurient sexual desires. The church council debated a resolution to make Blaz repay the money they had given him.

Blaz made an appointment for a Sunday afternoon, when almost no one would be at church, to meet with Pastor Tomasz and ask for his blessing on the new marriage. He rehearsed his speech; he would tell the pastor that he was looking out for the children by finding a good woman to take care of them. He would say that his sister-in-law Arva wanted to return to Slovakia soon to resume her life there, and that it was not fair to his older girls to ask them to care for the younger children. The girls would have to forfeit their chances of finishing school if they were tied to the house. He would say that he needed a wife at home so that he could go back to work. He would pledge to take no more money from the church, and that he would pay the pastor back for the cost of the air ticket he gave him to Slovakia.

Blaz put on his best suit, and drove to the church. He knocked on the pastor’s office door at the appointed time, but the pastor shouted, “Wait!” from behind the door. Blaz stood outside the door for long minutes before the pastor opened it. This was reported to the church community that night by a church member who observed from behind a door in the lobby where he had hidden himself, to spy on the proceedings. The man could hear nothing for about five minutes. Then, he told church members, the pastor began the most awful shouting, angry shouting, and shouted for ten minutes straight. Try as he might, the man could not hear what the pastor was shouting. He saw Blaz open the door, sweat pouring from his face, and stumble out of the office, out of the church. He drove away.

What the pastor said is not known, to anyone except to him and to Blaz. What everyone does know is that Blaz and his children disappeared from their house in the next few weeks, and never returned to church. Some said that he was in a different city in the US, and others that they heard that he was back in Slovakia. Whether he married the young woman from the countryside isn’t known either, but in December 2010, six months after the family disappeared, the church council got an email from Blaz, with picture of the entire family dressed in Sunday clothes, all 12 children and Blaz , and a young very pretty woman smiling in their midst. Thank you for your support, Blaz wrote.

Desert Crossing

David had lived his entire life in Mexico City, and never once thought of leaving it. His father was a street vendor of fruits and vegetables, and so was David. While his father was still alive in the 1950’s and 60’s, they went together every morning at 3 a.m., except Sundays, to the huge central wholesale produce market to buy enough produce to fill their red Ford pickup. By 6 a.m., fully loaded, they drove to the middle class neighborhood they’d sold in for a generation, and motored slowly through the streets, shouting “Fruta! Vegetales!” At their cries, the maids came out of the houses, and bought what they needed for the day. By 9 a.m., the truck was empty, and they headed home to sleep until lunch. David’s uncle had a furniture factory. David and his father carefully washed their pickup every day after lunch, and then delivered wooden tables and chairs, dressers and bedsteads all over the city.

When his father died in 1970, David took over the business alone until his own son was old enough, at 15, to help. They took the business in a new direction when they began selling vegetables on contract to restaurants. They made more money than David and his father had, and took on two of David’s nephews as helpers when they expanded to three delivery trucks. By the time David was 50, in the mid-1990’s, he was able to devote himself to the marketing and sales building while his son supervised the delivery staff. David had his office at home, and was able to sleep until 6 a.m. for the first time since he was 12 and began working with his father.

One of his contracts was with a wealthy man who owned three restaurants; it was their biggest contract, and provided almost ten percent of the company’s income. This man, Salvador Mendez, suggested to David that he would like fruit and vegetables delivered daily to his mansion in an exclusive neighborhood, as a thank-you for his business. David obliged, especially since his trucks had that neighborhood on a daily route. The cook would choose what she needed, and there would be no charge. It wasn’t an inconvenience, and it didn’t cost much. Mr. Mendez died in the late 1990’s, and the restaurants went to his son, Marco, who terminated the contract with David in order to buy from his brother-in-law’s vegetable delivery company. But there was a mix up, and David’s staff kept delivering vegetables for free for a few months to the mansion, where now Marco Mendez lived. When David organized his books and ordered a stop to the deliveries, he decided to send a bill to Marco for the months of free fruit and vegetables. It totaled about $400.00 US dollars.

A month went by with no response, so David called Marco, who swore at him and hung up. Against his wife’s advice, David went to a lawyer who sent a letter to Marco to demand the $400. And that is when David’s troubles, the first of his relatively serene life, began. In front of David’s house, which was set inside a walled garden and patio, four thugs in dark suits and dark glasses appeared one late morning a week after he’d sent the letter. David was in the house when the blockade began, but his wife and three of his four children were not. David’s daughter, Maritza, and her two toddlers were in also inside, but Maritza’s husband had gone out. The thugs stood in front of the only door to the street, which opened in a long wall against the sidewalk. David saw them from an upper floor of the house.

The phones didn’t work; the lines had been cut. Cell phones weren’t much in use in 1998, and there were none in the house. The thugs threw a note tied to a rock over the wall. It read, “Come get your $400, asshole. It’s waiting for you.” It was signed “Zeta.”

Zeta. It meant Marco was aligned with the powerful Zeta crime organization, one of the largest in Mexico. It meant no escape, no begging forgiveness, no way to have life go on as before. It meant his death. No one in the neighborhood would call the police; it was dangerous in addition to being useless. David knew all this from the moment he saw the four men, standing in front of his house like they were settling in for a long wait. When his wife and children walked towards the house, they would know, too, and would turn away. They too would not call the police. It would make things so much worse when the police informed their Zeta contact.

David had to either give himself up and accept his torture and death, or somehow leave the house unnoticed if he was to save the rest of the family. He and Maritza waited until dark. She went out the door with her children in her arms and told the thugs she was going to her in-laws house. She left the door open. At the same time, when Maritza was talking to the thugs at the front door, David used the bed sheets he and Maritza had tied together to lower himself to the street from a back window. He dropped to about three feet from the pavement, let go, and jumped. He heard a snap; he was a heavy man, unused to exercise, and he broke his left ankle on impact. But he couldn’t lie in the street. He dragged himself across the street to a neighbor’s house, who, miraculously, let him in.

From his neighbor’s house, he saw the thugs going from room to room in his house, and heard the crashing as they hurled vases, dishes, and furniture to the floor. After an hour or so, they left, with, David assumed, anything of value they found. They didn’t come back, and in the weeks that followed, as David’s ankle healed in his neighbor’s house, his family returned to clean up and restore the house, and to keep the business going. The Zetas seemed to have lost interest in pursuing David, but everyone knew that it was only because he disappeared. He would be a target again if they found him in Mexico.

This ankle healed, but incompletely. The doctor who came to his neighbor’s house to attend him wanted him to go to the hospital for surgery, but David couldn’t risk it. He would walk with a limp to the end of his days, but he would walk. His son made arrangements for him to be taken by private plane to the border with Arizona, and then by a “coyote” (a smuggler) to Tucson. From there he was to fly to Seattle, where his cousin Angel had lived for more than thirty years. He would live with his cousin, find work, and then return to Mexico when the Zetas’ crime network was dismantled by Presidente Calderon, who had pledged to break the powerful organization. He wouldn’t be gone long.

That was the plan. Here is the reality: he did fly to Ciudad Juarez, bordering Arizona, and he did find the coyote his son hired. But instead of taking just him, the coyote had a group of 18 men and four women to walk into the Arizona desert. David told the coyote that his son had paid for him to be smuggled alone. The coyote laughed. “No one goes alone,” he said. “I can’t make money like that.”

The group left at night, at about 9 p.m., and walked by moonlight until they took a break at 1 a.m. They started again at 2 a.m. and walked until about 5 a.m. when, he heard shouts of “Paren, paren (Stop! Stop!)” coming from all around him. “Escondense! (Hide!)” He heard a man shout. “La migra! (Immigration!)” With his limp and the pain from the walking, David was behind the group, who were in their teens and twenties and a few in their thirties. The coyote already had had to slow the group several times, so David could keep up, and he had urged David to go faster. One of the boys in his teens found a thick stick that he cut to fit David’s height, to use as a cane. But when la Migra surrounded the group, David was at least twenty-five yards to the rear. From behind a small boulder, he watched the border patrol close in, approximately fifteen officers holding the group at gun point. They handcuffed the entire group, including the coyote, and marched them over a rise where a van must have been waiting for them. David heard the van start up, and drive away. Then it was silent, and David was alone in the desert without a map or guide, little food in a small backpack, and no water. The kind teen who cut the cane for him had offered to carry David’s water.

The daylight came on soft at about 6 a.m., but by 8 it was already too hot to move. He knew he needed to find even the tiny shade of a cactus or a rock, and stay there, moving with the sun, until it was low in the sky. But he was parched with thirst. From his years of selling vegetables, fruit, and herbs, he knew of some desert water- filled plants, and he looked for them. He found mosoquelete in relative plenty, with thick stalks that he could break and suck, but handfuls of stalks were barely enough to wet his mouth.

To be continued...

Memory Streets

Baba was not a magician. She was not a time traveler. But she could turn a cold Chicago suburb into the sunny Macedonia she remembered from her childhood. She created an elaborate visual mechanism to link each step along the sidewalks of Berwyn to a specific memory. From the house to Anja’s school... She was a child at her parents’ and grandparents’ farm, sitting in the sun crocheting. It was a white shawl for her sister’s wedding. She was six and the sister who would marry was 15. It was summer, and she was sleepy in the sun. She was sitting on a big flat rock, listening to her brothers, sisters, and cousins laughing and calling to one another as they weeded the wheat field. Flies buzzed; there was a smell of fresh manure. The shawl had a pretty sliver thread running through it…

Baba immigrated to Chicago from Macedonia in the mid-1930s, a new widow with her five-year-old daughter. She was 45, and dressed in a widow’s long silky black dress that she never removed, even in Chicago’s stifling Augusts. She added a black woolen shawl from October to May.

Her oldest daughter Sonja married a Chicagoan of Macedonian descent, moved to Chicago, and obtained a visa for Baba. Baba’s husband had left her for a new life in Canada, and Baba’s brother-in-law told her that it was getting to be a burden to keep her and little Anja fed and clothed. Baba packed up a few clothes and her jewelry, some photos very dear to her, and sailed for New York.

Sonja and her husband owned a yellow brick 3-flat in Berwyn, a close-in suburb home to recent eastern European immigrants. They and Baba and Anja lived in one large apartment with three bedrooms. Baba and Anja had their own room, unimaginable to her, because back in Macedonia, fifteen relatives slept in a one-room farmstead – and not a big room at that.

Despite the big apartment, the kindness of Sonja and her husband, and the happiness of Anja in her new school, Baba was listless. She knew she didn’t want to go back to Macedonia, because what she missed was gone. And there was nothing for her in Chicago. She cooked for the family, washed clothes, cleaned, and tried to teach Anja how to bake bread, make yogurt, and roll fine filo dough, but the child wasn’t interested. Anja stayed in the park after school with her friends, playing until supper, and then ran out again after the meal to continue with her play.

Baba began walking, winter and summer, for miles along the city streets. She walked hours during the afternoons after her housework was done, and Anja had eaten lunch and run back to school. Each block was a memory, and she walked her history. Berwyn’s streets were her memory palace. She doesn’t remember exactly how it began…maybe something – the way the bread sat on a thick white plate in the baker’s window, or a woman holding a baby on a stoop, singing in a thin faltering voice – reminded her of home. As she walked the blocks, she lived again. Some parts of her life took a mile or so, others less. She could see everything again, taste it, smell it, and hear it.

It wasn’t easy at the beginning. She struggled to tie a particular block to a memory, so she could walk it. But it got easier with practice. She could go forward or backward in her life, eventually, or take only a particular memory.

From the school to St. Saba’s Orthodox Church... She was 12, a girl small for her age but so pretty and quiet and quick-witted, that three families asked for her hand in marriage for their sons. Her father was stunned at the swift upturn in his fortunes; each of the three families was willing to pay a substantial down payment to secure her. He was a nervous, doubtful man and was afraid of offending any of the three much richer families. But he was a kind man, too, and he gave the power of choice to Baba, although his new wife told him he was a fool to do so. He brought the families one by one to the farmhouse, with their sons, while Baba sat crocheting, screened by a curtain. The moment she saw Anders, only 16, she knew he was the one.

Anders was standing next to his father, looking calmly and levelly at her father, as if he knew how serious this was, this moment, but not fearing it. He had blond hair that fell straight across his forehead. He listened while the men talked, gravely, but didn’t comment, or smile, or twitch. Her father cleared his throat, and asked about Anders’s prospects for inheritance. He couldn’t bring himself to name a price for the dowry. Anders’s father said Anders would have a half-share in the 100-acre farm; he had only one brother with whom to share it. “Handsome, handsome!” her father cried, but couldn’t seem to think of any more questions. Anders’s father had to state a sum. Her father said, “Generous, generous!” It was her stepmother who had to state that her father would consider all the offers and let him know the decision.

Anders’s father’s offer was not the highest one, but Baba was clear in her choice, and Baba was pledged to Anders. Three months later, at the betrothal ceremony, as she sat beside Anders, the entire side of her body next to his buzzed. It would be three more years living apart until they would marry.

She had other memories for the rest of her long walks...about Sonja as a child learning to walk, about Anders and she working together to get in the harvest until it was too dark to see anymore, about winter Sunday afternoons with the three of them playing in the warm barn, jumping and tumbling among the hay bales. But she did not walk memory streets for any time after 1914, when Anders was drafted into the Army, then killed at the front in 1916. She refused to dignify with her memory the cruel years of hunger and cold and fear that followed, the hard corner in her father-in-law's house she and Sonja lived in for ten years, and then the marriage to Anja's father, the cold man. She was glad when he left them, glad when she heard that he had a new life in Canada and wasn't coming back, and glad when Sonja sent for her and Anja.

But was this life, in Chicago? Was it just waiting? And if so, for what? So she walked, and walked, and while she was walking, she lived again.

As American as They Come

His name was John Lincoln. He chose it because it was very American, he said. He was a Romanian immigrant, originally Stefan Andreescu. He came to the US as a student to study English at a community college in Seattle in the early 1990’s, and before his visa expired, he married a US citizen, a woman more than 20 years his senior. She was one of the volunteer tutors at the college, recently divorced. John moved into her big house in a neighborhood of broad lawns and quiet streets and took a job delivering pizzas until, he said, his English improved and he could get an associate’s degree in computer networking. But he didn’t get the chance.

Four months after the wedding, before he could have his permanent resident interview, his new wife threw him out of the house and out of the marriage. She got a divorce and wrote to Immigration to withdraw her immigrant petition for him. With the petition withdrawn, the Immigration Service placed him in deportation proceedings. That is how I came to know John. I was working as an attorney at a downtown immigration firm in the late 1990’s, and John’s case was assigned to me. I had my first meeting with him to assess the kind of relief available to him, if any. The US immigration system is based primarily on family or work, and asylum. When one is in deportation proceedings in immigration court, one must usually prove that one merits legal status, and that a family or work visa is available. John did not have any US citizen or legal resident family, or an employer able or willing to petition for him. What he did have was the absolutely unshakable desire to stay in the US. There is no way I’m going back he said, not even if I’m deported.

So I began to examine him for a possible asylum claim, based on a fear of persecution by the government of Romania if he returned. The fear, to qualify for asylum, could also be of a group the government could not or would not control. John would have to have suffered this persecution because of his race, nationality, social group, religion, or political opinion. I had been practicing asylum law for more than 15 years by the time I interviewed John, but no matter how I framed the questions, he steadfastly refused to give me any information about his life there.

“I had parents like everyone does, I went to school, I left, that’s all,” he said. We were stuck. I would have to refuse representation. He would be better off going to court alone than paying a lawyer who could learn nothing to help him. We sat in silence for a while; John stared at his feet and I looked at his bowed head. He was still in his twenties but he looked much older. His hair was thin and dull and he already had a bald spot. His skin was pasty, and his narrow shoulders and hunching made him look like a great blue heron tucking its head under its wing.

I asked John what it was about the US that made him want to stay here. His head snapped up, and he nearly shouted, “Freedom, freedom!” He told me that in the US he could go wherever he wanted, live where he wanted, get work where he wanted, have the house he wanted, study if he wanted to, or not. Back in Romania, could he do the same? I asked. “Never, never, never,” he shouted.

And then, rushing as if he were running away from his own past, he began to tell me his story. His mother died when he was five, and his helpless father gave him and his younger sister to a great aunt to rear. His great aunt died when he was six, his father couldn’t be found, and he and his sister were sent to separate orphanages. When John was twelve, after repeated attempts to run away, he was committed to an insane asylum. I would only get the story from John in the weeks that followed; it was so painful for him to tell it that he cried, sweated, writhed in his chair, and pounded my desk as he spoke. He could only talk for a half hour or less at a time, before both of us were exhausted. I wrote his story taking close notes. We would need every detail for the asylum hearing.

John had been committed at the age of twelve to one of the Soviet Empire’s most notorious experimental insane asylums. He had suffered years of solitary confinement, shock therapy, strait jacketing, chaining, and drug “therapy,” all for his mental illness of running away. He was completely unable to communicate with anyone outside the asylum. At seventeen in 1989, he succeeded in running away for good, with the help of a sympathetic kitchen worker in the asylum, who hid him in her Pentecostal pastor’s house for a few months. The entire country was convulsing in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989. The Romanian dictator was executed by his own people, and the notorious asylums, the torturous prisons, the entire secret police structure which reached into the lives of nearly everyone in the country, were deserted by their staff when the government no longer paid them.

In the chaos, the pastor and his congregation managed to get John a passport and visa to Spain, and paid for his flight. John had no idea until years later who had done this for him, nor how hard it must have been for the church to pull off, and for him, a friendless stranger. At the time, he didn’t even know he was on a plane or what a plane was until he saw the ground fall away under him. He didn’t know he was arriving in Spain until he got there, and then spent weeks thinking he was in a part of Romania that had a different accent to the language (Romanian is a romance language with marked similarity to Spanish), and was much warmer.

He was assigned to a refugee camp on the outskirts of Valencia, and began to go to school. He was an apt pupil, and learned Spanish in a few weeks. He then taught himself, with the help of a passionate set of camp schoolteachers, an astonishing array of subjects: arithmetic and then algebra and trigonometry; English; geography; European and American history; and the new information technology skills. He was fascinated by what he learned of the US, particularly of its personal freedom, and determined that he’d get a student visa to go there. After two years, he succeeded in getting the visa to the Seattle community college.

I drafted John’s affidavit for his asylum claim, based on the persecution he had suffered in Romania by the Romanian government. We had expert testimony in his case from a US political science professor who specialized in Romania during the Dictator Ceausescu’s reign. We included testimony from a Seattle psychotherapist who corroborated John’s story of mental abuse, based on his current symptoms of fear and post-traumatic stress. We won the case, in large part because John’s story of the abuse he had suffered was detailed and consistent.

Bringing up all the torture was to relive it again, for John. After his win, and his grant of permanent residence in the US, he went into a deep depression and lost his pizza delivery job. I lost touch with him for years, until he contacted me in 2010. He called and said, “Hello, this is John Lincoln. Do you remember me?” Of course I did; no one else with a Romanian accent had a name like that. He told me that he had indeed gone to school and gotten a network administrator diploma, and then a job. He was married, and had two children and a house in Bothell. He had become a US citizen, and petitioned for his sister’s residence in the US as soon as he could, his sister from whom he had been separated at age six. He wanted help with the legal procedure to bring her and her husband and children to the US.

When I saw John again, he looked younger than he had 10 years before, and his wife and children seemed happy, and happy to be with him. I asked him if America had been for him what he wanted, all those years ago in the refugee camp in Spain when he dreamed of freedom. He was unhesitating. “Yes. But it’s more complicated than I could have known. It took me a long time and a lot of suffering to build a life here, despite or maybe because of all the freedom.”

Patience as a Vice

Margaret O'Donnell 2011©

Eugenio and Marta married in their small Salvadorian town when she was 15 and he was 17. They had five children in the first six years of marriage while they lived with Eugenio’s widowed mother. Eugenio supported them all with his shoemaking; he went, as his father had, from house to house to repair shoes and leather bags. He could make dirty broken shoes look almost new again. But by then, in the early 1990’s, it was nearly cheaper to just buy new shoes; they were cheap and fell apart quickly, but couldn’t be fixed easily. Soon, the shoe repair trade crumbled. Eugenio decided to come to the US, alone, find work, send money home and save enough to buy a house and send for the entire family.

He did this; all of it. He made it over the border and got two full time dishwashing jobs in Seattle, where he rented a room from a Salvadorian Family from his home town. He sent enough money home by his third month in the US to support his family. He saved and bought a house. He sent for his family. Trouble is: they didn’t want to come. It took him too long. Nearly 17 years, all told. Eugenio is a perfectionist. He saved $50,000 for the down payment on a 4-bedroom house in Tukwila. Then he saved for the money to bring his family. He didn’t believe in making promises he might not be able to keep, so he didn’t talk about when he would bring them. He wanted to surprise them all. After he bought the house, he felt he had a big lovely gift to give them, when everything was ready.

When that time came, he made the call: come now. But, the family had grown and settled. His wife had found another man, a young man, and already had two children with him. His youngest child was 18 and had moved to the capital to find work. The rest had children, partners, and spouses.

Eugenio…well, he goes on, saving money. He still works two jobs; says he’s bored if he doesn’t. He sends money to his mother and his children, but cut off his wife after he learned he was supporting her boyfriend and her new children. He says he’s not bitter, but he wishes it had been different. He’ll be a citizen in the US soon. Maybe, he says, he’ll see if his mother will come to live with him in Tukwila. He’s ready for some company.

Walking North

Margaret O'Donnell 2011©

Note: This story continues from the story entitled Lost, the May 2, 2011 posting below.

Pierre expected that his wife would come out onto the road when the sound of the truck faded, but she didn’t. He called to her, softly at first but then more loudly when she didn’t reply. He crawled through the bushes on both sides of the road, and then became frantic, screaming her name and that of the boys. He berated her, shouting, “This isn’t funny, Marie! Where are you? Please, please answer!” but he heard nothing. After a time, he stopped shouting, and sat in the bush, letting the mosquitos bite him. He felt blank. The sun was at its height by the time he realized how hot and thirsty he was. He was carrying half of their water supply, about a half gallon. He took a small sip. It could be a long time before he found water again.

He began his search along the sides of the road again; this time, he was methodical. He went back about a half mile, and then forward a half mile from the place he saw her last. He searched until almost nightfall, then walked to a tiny collection of huts he’d seen in a clearing a mile or so up the road. At this point in his story, Pierre’s memory goes dim. Was it because of the fear and loss? Or because what happened to him in the next five years was too awful to tell? All he will tell is that he moved deeper and deeper into Congo, asking for his wife, searching for anyone who looked like her, who looked like his sons. He never found them.

He remembers that he lived with a band of pygmies for a long time, hunting with them, and fleeing war with them. They fled consistently to the north, away from the violent, crazed path of war in central Africa. They were experts at fleeing the terror of modernity, of surviving where no one else could. He remembers thinking in the first years that surely the wars could not last long, and that of all people, he should be able to find a way back to normal life. He was educated, spoke English and French, and knew how to operate a car. But after a time, he forgot about those things.

In about 1998 the band was in Sudan, close to Egypt’s southern border. Pierre remembers that when he saw a truck loaded with migrant workers stopped for a rest break, he walked without thinking up to the truck and swung himself onto the flat bed with the other migrants. He watched his companions of the last five years fade from sight as the truck pulled away. He worked on a dam project in Egypt as a laborer, and earned a bit of money. He made his way to Cairo, and found Burundians in exile who helped him get a false Egyptian passport. Some remembered his family, and gave him enough money to fly to Mexico.

There, in Mexico City, he found a bus to the border with the US. When he got to Cuidad Juarez, sister city with El Paso, Texas, he walked to the border crossing and asked for asylum in the US. He was immediately arrested and placed in immigration detention Texas. He was detained for six months before he won his asylum hearing with an immigration judge in detention, in January 2000. He was one of the few detainees that got lucky: he had a pro bono attorney assigned to him through an immigrant legal project. After he won, the guards put him out of the detention center, where he sat on a speed bump in the parking lot for hours until one of the guards, on his way home, gave him a ride to a homeless shelter.

Pierre got a job in Houston as a day laborer, and earned enough money to take a bus to Seattle, where some Burundians he knew from the university lived. He lived with a couple and their young children for a year, then got a place of his own. He worked as a nurse’s aide, and then a translator in a hospital. In 2010, he heard through the Burundian social network that his wife might be in Tanzania, and that his children might either be in Congo or in Tanzania. He is saving his money to go look for them, and he is hopeful.

Lost

Margaret O'Donnell 2011©

The Hutu and Tutsi people live side by side in Burundi, Africa’s smallest nation. They intermarried for generations. Outsiders could not tell them apart, although some Burundians said they could be distinguished – something about the shape of the head, the length of the legs. But living together in peace was not an option for Hutus and Tutsis in Burundi in 1993, even though their customs, food, language, culture, and appearance were identical . Many thousands were murdered for their ethnicity, and many others fled in 1993 as refugees to Congo and Tanzania and beyond.

Pierre was a university graduate who worked in a car dealership in Bujumbura, Burundi’s capital, as an accountant in the head office. His father was Hutu and his mother Tutsi; both of them had been educated in France, and had returned to Burundi in the 1960s as part of the new urban middle class. In the 1993 presidential election, Pierre campaigned for the Hutu candidate, who would be the country’s first Hutu president. He gave campaign speeches from the back of a truck in neighborhoods throughout the city; after the speech, campaigners handed out bags of sugar and flour to the audience. It was the only way to attract and keep listeners. Pierre’s candidate won the election; many of the losing candidate’s supporters believed that his opponent won only through fraud. One of the prominent campaigners for the winning president was assassinated, then a few more, and then the new president was assassinated. Murderous mayhem took over the capital.

Pierre’s mother and sister were murdered in their house, and Pierre believed it was because of his campaigning. He went into hiding in a friend’s storeroom with his wife and young sons, and stayed there for weeks while battle raged in the streets. Was it Tutsis against Hutus, or vice versa? It was unclear, once the killing became indiscriminate. After weeks of hiding, Pierre and his wife decided to flee the capital in the night. They strapped food in blankets to their backs, stuffed cash in their clothes, and took their sons, ages 3 and 4, by the hands. They fled, street by street, hiding at every sound of gunfire or a truck, and made it to Lake Tanganyika before daybreak. Their plan was to walk at night north around the lake to Congo, where Marie, Pierre’s wife, had family. It was only about 50 kilometers, but controlled by Tutsi extremists, who were on the watch for escaping Hutus.

They kept to the side of the road that bordered the lake as the sun rose so they could hide in the thick bush if needed; Pierre went first around bends in the road so he could signal his wife when to hide. He heard a truck coming and turned to motion to her; he saw her and the boys disappear into the bush, and then hid himself. The truck stopped a few feet from him, and the soldiers crammed into the open truck bed got out to relieve themselves, resting their automatic rifles against the side of the truck. Pierre waited until they drove off, and when he couldn’t hear them anymore, he began to look for his wife and children.

To be continued next week…