Citizen Akoy Read online

  In 1978–79 the Islamic Revolution swept through Iran. Shock waves hit Sudan, where leaders in the north, covetous of new oil fields in the south, declared all of Sudan an Islamic state and instituted Sharia law in 1983. In what is known as the Second Civil War, Adaw’s father went off to fight for the southern rebels—the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). Adaw was a frightened girl when militia from the north attacked her village. “We saw the soldiers with the guns and the big things they drive, the tanks,” Adaw said. “There was a lot of death. You don’t know what to do. You just cry and cry.”

  She continued: “My grandmother said to my mom, ‘Atong, you need to leave with your children.’ And then her daughter, my auntie, who was pregnant with twins, got shot and killed when we tried to leave. My grandmother said, ‘Atong, just leave—run!’

  “We ran to the jungle. A lot of people were running and screaming. What do you do? The person next to you is shot and falls down. You need to save your life, and you are crying. You just run. You carry nothing; you leave everything.

  “We went through a jungle to avoid both armies. We were running, hiding, running, hiding. It was very hot. No food, no drink, nothing. At night we slept under big plants with spreading leaves—we were afraid of wild animals. We found puddles of dirty water; people fought to drink from them. We drank the dirty water and got sick.

  “We walked for seven days, a long way. Then we got to a place with a car.”

  Adaw rode with her family to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, about 570 miles northeast of her village, and found sanctuary in a UN refugee camp. “We were happy to get there—we were going to be saved,” Adaw said. “The UN was there to give us a place to live and some food and clothes. We didn’t care about shoes—we just needed to live. But my brother and sister were sick from the dirty water. They died in the camp. He was five and she was three. Adaw recalls, “We were in the camp for a year and a half or two years. We had some stuff in the camp but not a lot of other stuff. My mom sold some of our food to get shoes and dresses for my sister and me. One day we asked about our dad. She told us he was killed in the war. . . . We were in the camp until my mom’s uncle found us. He lived in Khartoum and had looked for us. He took us to his house.”

  Emanuel Bol, her great uncle, brought Adaw, her sister, and her mother into his home in Omdurman, a suburb of Khartoum. He also sheltered children who were unrelated but had been orphaned by the war. He fed and clothed them on his small income from a job with the city or military—Adaw wasn’t sure which; the job shielded him from the systemic persecution of non-Muslims.

  Adaw came of age in a culture in which Sharia law proscribed civil liberties for women. All women, including non-Muslims, were required to wear veils. They had virtually no legal right to land ownership and had to defer to their husbands or male guardians in the management of assets. All forms of credit were reserved for men. Polygamy was legal for men. Women retained the right to divorce, but the custody of children aged six or older reverted to men. Men beat their wives at home or in public without penalty or punishment. Female circumcision, also known as female genital mutilation, was commonly practiced on young girls.

  A military coup in 1989 brought to power Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, an authoritarian who squashed democratic efforts and dialed up persecution of non-Muslims. St. Joseph’s Catholic Church was the sanctuary preferred by Emanuel Bol.

  “Every Sunday he loved to go to church,” Adaw said. “On Saturdays he told us, ‘Tomorrow we go to God’s house; everybody have to get ready.’ We didn’t have a lot of clothes—maybe one dress and one skirt. The skirt you wear at home and the dress you keep for Sunday. At night we have to pray ‘Hail Mary’ in our language; he would tell us it’s time to pray, and then you have to go to sleep.” Adaw added, “Church was someplace to go. There wasn’t a lot to do. The girls didn’t go outside a lot; a lot of bad things were going on. Girls didn’t go to school because eventually they are going to marry and have children. That was why we focused on religion. I loved the church a lot.”

  Her uncle encouraged her to focus on family: “My uncle would tell us, ‘You guys are rich.’ We said, ‘How come we are rich when we are sleeping hungry and we don’t have enough food in our tummy?’ He would tell us that you are rich when you have people. He said, ‘I feel rich when I have you guys around to take care of. I had no one to take care of, but after you came, I feel rich.’”

  Adaw grew into womanhood in Omdurman. When she was nineteen, her uncle arranged her marriage to Madut Agau, who was from Gogrial, about fifty miles from her hometown of Wau. Ten years her senior, Madut made his living as a peddler in Khartoum. His first wife and his father had died in the war, and his only son was missing and presumed dead. Of Madut’s four brothers and three sisters only one brother had survived the war. Soft spoken and polite, Madut had been spared the tribal customs of facial scarification and dental extraction as a young man. “My uncle knew Madut,” said Adaw. “He came from the village to the city and was a salesman of clothes and shoes. He was separated from his brother; his mom was the only one left. My uncle saw that Madut had a lot of things to survive with. He saw that I had grown into an adult, so he said, ‘Why can’t we put them together? They can help take care of each other.’ . . . “That’s how we met. We got married right away. We lived in my uncle’s house.”

  Adaw and Madut married in 1993, the same year the Clinton administration placed Sudan on its list of states that sponsor terrorism and imposed upon it trade and economic sanctions. Islamic terrorist Osama Bin Laden had moved from Saudi Arabia to Khartoum in 1991, three years after he founded Al-Qaeda, and lived there until the Sudanese government expelled him in 1996 under pressure from the United States. In 1998 Bin Laden issued a fatwa to all Muslims: “The ruling to kill Americans and their allies—civilian and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” In 2001 Bin Laden was in Afghanistan when he orchestrated the 9/11 attacks against Americans.

  Akoy was born in November 1994 and was named for Madut’s grandfather. Even as the civil war escalated and survival became more tenuous for non-Muslims in the capital city, two-year-old Akoy was baptized as Daniel Akoy Madut Maguy Akoy Agau at St. Joseph’s. The United States closed its embassy in Khartoum in February 1996 and moved personnel to Nairobi, Kenya, due to security concerns. By the time their second son, Maguy, was born in 1997, Adaw and Madut kept to the shadows and lived in fear.

  The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor detailed the peril of Sudanese non-Muslims in a 1999 report:

  Government forces were responsible for extrajudicial killings and disappearances. Government security forces regularly tortured, beat, harassed, arbitrarily arrested and detained, and detained incommunicado opponents or suspected opponents of the Government with impunity. Security forces beat refugees, raped women, and reportedly harassed and detained persons on the basis of their religion. Prison conditions are harsh, prolonged detention is a problem, and the judiciary is largely subservient to the Government. The authorities do not ensure due process and the military forces summarily tried and punished citizens. The Government infringed on citizens’ privacy rights. . . .

  Authorities continued to restrict the activities of Christians, followers of traditional indigenous beliefs, and other non-Muslims, and there continued to be reports of harassment and arrest for religious beliefs and activities. Catholic priests report that they routinely are stopped and interrogated by police. Security forces also detained persons because of their religious beliefs and activities. . . .

  Muslims may proselytize freely in the north, but non-Muslims are forbidden to proselytize. Foreign missionaries and religiously oriented organizations continue to be harassed by authorities, and their requests for work permits and residence visas are delayed. . . .

  A Muslim man may marry a non-Muslim, but a Muslim woman cannot marry a non-Muslim, unless he converts to Islam. . . .
Non-Muslims may adopt only non-Muslim children; no such restrictions apply to Muslim parents.

  As Adaw recalled, “War got worse in the city. People just got killed—just like that. Young men and young women got killed—for no reason. We know there was a war in the villages, and we think we are okay in the city, but now that is not so.”

  At that point, Adaw’s uncle advised them to flee:, “My uncle said to us, ‘Okay, you guys need to leave because this city is going to be bad soon. I don’t want to hear that somebody just got killed. You just need to leave.’ It was devastating to hear, but he was right. We said, ‘Where do we go?’ And he said, ‘You need to go to Egypt.’ The people in the villages went south to Kenya and Ethiopia. But to go there from the city we would pass through the soldiers and much danger. It was safer to go north to Egypt.”

  Early in 1999 Adaw was pregnant with her third child. Madut was arrested, ostensibly for selling his wares on the street without a proper license, but in fact for being Christian in Khartoum. There would not be enough money to buy Madut’s freedom if Adaw and her children and mother had to be fed, so Emanuel arranged passports for them as “tourists” to Egypt, Adaw recalled, “because if you tell them you are evacuating, they won’t let you go.” They packed sparse belongings and set out for Cairo, first by train and then by boat.

  In Cairo, a metropolis of seventeen million, south Sudanese refugees numbered between thirty and forty thousand. Adaw and her two children moved in with an aunt who had a small apartment and children of her own. To feed themselves and their children Adaw and her aunt cleaned the homes of Egyptian families. “We left the children in the apartment by themselves—there was no school for them,” Adaw said. “You clean all day, and some people pay you twenty Egyptian dollars. But if that person decided not to give you money, there was nothing you could do. If you refuse to leave, you be dead. Egyptian police never take your side, only the Egyptian side. . . . At night when I go home, I bought onion and some oil and red lentils to make a soup. I bought a grain that was like millet. We didn’t eat meat—it cost too much.”

  Life in Egypt was “very difficult” because refugees had no rights or benefits under the law. Adaw saw that the country offered no education for her children and little hope for the future. She decided to leave as soon as possible. “I went to the UN office to fill out the paper to be a refugee,” Adaw said. “I tell them my husband is not here. They said, ‘You are a pregnant lady with two children—how can you leave without your husband? It’s very hard to do that.’ So I call on the phone to Khartoum and beg my uncle to get Madut out of jail. He said he need to write an appeal.”

  A third boy, Aguir, was born in September 1999. Emanuel secured the release of Madut, who came to Cairo in 2000 and resumed his work as a peddler of clothes and fabric. He and Adaw got their own one-room apartment and waited on their refugee application, which went through UNHCR. The agency forwarded suitable applications to potential host countries, which had final say about who would be granted residency, an opportunity less than 1 percent of refugees worldwide received. Not long after the first World Refugee Day the United States approved their application. Adaw was pregnant again when they were summoned to the UN office in the summer of 2001.

  “We know south Sudanese go to Australia and Canada and America, and we know that in all of those places they got a place to live and work,” Adaw said. “So we just hope to go anywhere. “When they tell us America, oh my God, the excitement! You try to hold it in—you don’t want to jump—but you are so excited! I call my uncle Emanuel in Khartoum and said, ‘We go to America.’ He got very excited. He said, ‘Now you can go forward with your life.’”

  Then their excitement gave way to alarm. They watched coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks on a neighbor’s television. When Adaw told Akoy that the attacks might cause their move to America to be postponed, he cried and told her, “I’m scared.” Adaw became petrified of airplanes, though she hid it from her children. “I didn’t eat for two days,” Adaw said. “I call my uncle in Khartoum and said, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to die with my husband and children.’ He prayed with me and said, ‘Put that negativity out of your mind—pretend you are in a boat God made to cross the sea.’”

  Security and safety concerns slowed the process to the point that U.S. refugee admissions dropped from 68,925 in 2001 to 26,788 in 2002. With their admission to the United States on hold, Adaw, Madut, and their two oldest boys, who spoke Dinka and Arabic, took an introductory class in English. The parents continued to work. When they left in the morning, six-year-old Akoy was in charge of his two brothers. “Keep the door locked until I get back; don’t go downstairs,” Adaw told him. When a parent returned home, Akoy rushed out to play soccer with neighborhood kids. Years later he carried a few memories of Cairo. One was the searing heat. Another was the racist taunting of the Egyptian kids. He also remembered being hit by a “blue car or motorcycle” while on an errand for his mother. He wasn’t hurt, he recalled, but he “cried a lot” until Adaw came and took him home.

  Adaw gave birth to her daughter, Achol, in December 2001. The infant girl and her brothers, Maguy and Aguir, were baptized at All Saints Episcopal Cathedral, a haven for south Sudanese refugees. Finally, in early June 2002, the family got a green light from authorities. Adaw, Madut, and their four children boarded a plane for America.

  “I got into the airplane and prayed,” Adaw said. “I tell my kids they can eat, but I don’t want to. I don’t remember how many airplanes we rode but we got to New York, and from there we got to Baltimore. When our plane landed, I cried and said, ‘Thank you Jesus; you got us here safe.’ Adaw concludes, “We came off the airplane, and a [south] Sudanese man who wore a necktie greeted us in our language. His name was Joseph Madut Kuot; he was there to translate for us. He picked us up with other people from his church. We were exhausted but very excited. We were finally in America and safe. It was a great day.”

  2

  First Thanksgiving

  The Agaus’ first home on American soil was in Westminster, Maryland, a town of 18,500, north and west of Baltimore. A local affiliate of the nonprofit Church World Service (CWS) arranged social security numbers, housing, food, clothing, job counseling, and medical care for their first ninety days in the United States. Refugees could access a federal cash and medical assistance program for eight months.

  CWS was founded in 1946 to help refugees of World War II. It proclaimed as its mission, “Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, comfort the aged, shelter the homeless.” In 1976, with federal funding, it began to open refugee resettlement offices in twenty-one states.

  The Agau family had the same needs and problems as nearly half a million refugees resettled by CWS since 1946. Refugees typically struggled with language, employment, discrimination, poverty, isolation, stereotyping, housing, concern for separated or lost family members, and parenting children in a new culture. Rules and bureaucracies were problematic.

  “We have issues where people don’t know the rules of apartments and don’t know how to make payments,” said Ryan Overfield of Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska, an affiliate of CWS. “In the developing world, particularly in refugee camps, there is a less formal economy. Western societies have faceless interactions with bureaucracies. Refugees are not used to that level of structure, to paying rent on time, putting garbage at a location. The list is endless. There are so many rules in Western society, and they’ve got to learn to play by the rules.” A team of ten church members helped the Agaus with mail, haircuts, groceries, medical needs, and finances. One church member clipped photos from supermarket ads to create a shopping list for Adaw.

  The Agaus lived in a motel for three months and then rented a house from a member of a local Baptist church aiding their resettlement. Akoy and Maguy were enrolled in the Carroll County school system for their first classroom experiences, while Aguir was enrolled in Head Start. Madut was hired by a local resettlement agency to bale and stack donated c
lothing, and on weekends he washed dishes at a restaurant. Adaw got a job filing and stacking in the warehouse of a book publisher. They alternated Sundays between Baptist and Catholic churches because the Baptist church offered Bible study, singing, and tutoring for the children, while the Catholic church made Adaw feel at home.

  The south Sudanese man who had greeted them at the airport, Joseph, became a trusted companion and translator. Adaw and Madut enrolled in an English as a Second Language class in which Adaw progressed more quickly than her husband. Neither grasped English as quickly as their children, in particular Akoy, who was driven to fit in. Akoy cried when his second-grade teacher handed out a test to his classmates but told him he wasn’t ready to take it. “I just didn’t like that feeling, being secluded from everyone,” Akoy recalled. He read children’s books at home to hasten his learning and soon took on the role of translator for his parents. “He learned so fast and became a big help to us,” Adaw said.

  On a Maryland playground Akoy discovered basketball. At first he was indifferent to it. But as he dribbled and shot and bantered with the local kids, he changed his mind. At home he told his parents he liked the American game with the ball and hoop.

  “That is not how you supposed to play,” Adaw told him. “You supposed to play soccer.”

  “Mom, this is what they play here,” Akoy said.

  “Soccer is better.”

  “I like basketball.”

  Akoy played when he could, and for his eighth birthday, which fell on Thanksgiving Day 2002, the Baptist church gave him a basketball. Adaw roasted her first Thanksgiving turkey, seasoned it with curry, and was featured in a Baltimore Sun article under the headline “A Refugee Couple Finds Much to Be Thankful For.” In a photo Akoy hovered behind Adaw as she basted the turkey. Madut told the reporter, through an interpreter, “This is a free country, and I feel freedom and I feel peace. Nobody will attack me and hurt me here.”