Disturbed in Their Nests by Alephonsion Deng

Author:Alephonsion Deng
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2018-08-22T19:13:53+00:00

WAR

Alepho

The video of Sudan that we had seen at the church brought back both good and bad memories. I began to think more about war and all its consequences. When our village had been peaceful, people had looked after everyone’s children and helped each other out. War changed that. Desperation made people hateful and angry. I even saw adults take food from children.

After the attacks on New York happened, our moods changed. In the apartment, we spoke of war in terms of politics and our opinions, but down in our guts we knew it was just blood, destruction, and death. We’d been exposed to violence in our homeland. We knew the danger it posed to a good way of life. The thing called war destroyed prosperity and took from people the potential to become what they wanted. It robbed people of life and destroyed everything they’d built. War meant the end of the world for somebody—a child, a mother, or a father. It meant loss and deprivation without logical reason.

It seemed like the fight was always between two leaders. If two dogs wanted to fight, why not put them in a cage and let them have it out with each other instead of including every other dog on earth? Yet, it never worked that way.

We had received the news from IRC that our cousin Benjamin was on his way in September, but we didn’t know what day. Then we found out that he’d been coming to the US on the day it was attacked. What were the odds of such a thing happening? We thought we’d outrun our past. Our past was mimicking itself right before our eyes, as though it had slipped forward, gone ahead of us, and waited for us in ambush.

I called a friend who was still in the Kakuma Refugee Camp. “My friend,” I said, “America is different than what they told us. It is different from our jungles in Africa, but it is also a jungle and requires new sets of survival skills in order to make it out here.”

He reminded me of how important it was to go to school.

Going to school in America had been my dream. Now, so many other things distracted me from that goal. Life here was not clear to me. Daniel and James were desperate to find jobs to work every day. They said the first three months are free. Our rent was paid for. I still thought the food stamp card was just an extra thing until we got our green cards that could buy anything. I was eager for my green card to buy things and send them back to the refugee camp.

IRC gave us classes to prepare for working. Judy seemed worried and talked a lot about jobs.

I had trouble learning and using my survival skills in America because my head hurt all of the time and I didn’t know why. I had food now, but that food gave my stomach a problem.

Attacks on New York, jobs, rent, and sickness distracted me, but I could not forget my goal to get my education.

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