26 Miranda Vermeer

God Listened to My Prayers

Monica Akuien lived in Bor Town, South Sudan with her father—a teacher—and her mother—a stay-at-home mom—as well as her siblings. It was “peaceful living” for her family—“smooth and easy”. They shared a house they had made themselves and enjoyed a very close-knit community. It is this sense of community that she remembers most from her time there. In the compound she was surrounded by relatives who all helped each other with cooking and cleaning and taking care of children. They shopped every day for fresh meat, vegetables, and fruit, and met with different people at various shops and cafes around town to chat. Even conflicts were handled internally in the community, whether that looked like a neighbor reaching out to another neighbor to talk over a dispute or elders in the community coming to a home to help settle disagreements. After graduating from the high school she commuted to in Juba in 1979, Monica volunteered at schools before being sent to the teacher’s training college for two years. She came back in April to begin teaching but did not really get to enjoy “the fruits” of her training because in May, only a month later, war broke in Sudan.

War broke on May 16th, 1983, and this was the second civil war in Sudan. The first war started in 1956 after the country gained independence from the British; Monica had not been born yet when the war started, but she remembers that the people of southern Sudan did not feel like their voices were being heard by the northerners that had been left the majority of control by the British. Feeling powerless, the southerners took up arms against the northerners. This war continued until 1972, when an agreement was reached. It was this agreement that prompted the second civil war in 1983 because the people of southern Sudan did not feel like the promises of the agreement—like better address the concerns of allSudanese people, not just northerners—were being fulfilled.

A couple of months after the second war broke out, Monica’s husband joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army—SPLA—which was the faction fighting the government. His work with the army meant he ended up separate from the family. After he left, along with many of the other men, the Sudanese government and security forces came and questioned people in Monica’s town, trying to find out whose husbands and brothers had joined the army. People would be held responsible for the actions of their family members who had joined the SPLA, so Monica—a mother of two with another boy on the way, and a teacher of science and math to middle school girls—feared for her family’s safety. This prompted her to leave Bor Town and to join her in-laws in a village miles away. Life in this village was less than ideal, though. Monica was not accustomed to the village life of milking cows, collecting firewood, and the other tasks that made even preparing meals take hours. Added onto these hardships was the “psychological torture” that military aircraft bombings and raids brought. Monica and her children persevered through these conditions for four to five years before leaving for Ethiopia in 1989.

In the journey to Ethiopia, she was accompanied primarily by women and children—most of the men had gone to Ethiopia already to train and had returned to Sudan to fight. Monica and the others walked to another village in Sudan where trucks were available to take them to the Ethiopian border, where they then had to continue to walk to find refuge. Monica and her family moved between several different refugee camps in Ethiopia as they tried to seek the best rations and resource. When she heard about a school being constructed to address the needs of a growing number of Lost Boys at one refugee camp in particular, she brought her family straight there to give them the best opportunity possible—Monica herself taught students in this camp. Ethiopia could not be a place of refuge for them for long, however, as war broke there too in 1991.

When war broke in Ethiopia, the UNHCR asked the Sudanese refugees to leave for their own safety but could not provide transport to such a large number of displaced people. In order to flee, Monica was forced, along with many other people, to walk back to Sudan. They spent a tough couple of months in Sudan, where they relied on infrequent shipments of resources—like maize and beans—that came via air drop. Just as they were beginning to adapt to this harsh way of living, they were told that Sudanese soldiers were advancing and were again asked by administration to leave on foot. “That was the toughest walk ever.” They walked with small children that could not match their pace, lacked shoes and an adequate supply of food and water, and they needed to take time to rest between long stretches of walking. Her oldest child was eighteen and her youngest only two. Her two-year-old was on her back, all of her belongings—like the food and water to sustain her family—were on her head and in her arms, and her four-year-old held to her clothes to keep from losing her as they walked. “There were times I thought I would not make it because everything was weighing me down. The heavy load on my head, this 2-year old, heavy boy and this 4-year old clinging to me. Sometimes you have to have faith and have hope and think that things are going to get better.” They could go a day without eating, but it was the fear of illness that scared her the most. The party would continue without them, regardless of diarrhea, malaria, or snake bites. She prayed for health. “God listened to my prayers. But we lost a lot of other people along the way.” It took nearly eight weeks for them to reach Kenya.

When Monica and her family all finally reached Kenya, there were UNHCR trucks waiting along with the Red Cross to help with food, water, and treatment. The trucks then transported people to Kakuma. It was a barren place; it was windy, dusty, and hot like a desert, and there was nothing besides shrubs and trees that stood on the land. This was very different from the Ethiopian camps, which had some established homes and markets and weather similar to Sudan. In Kakuma, the Sudanese refugees realized they would need to build a proper establishment for themselves. They spent several nights sleeping under the trees and shrubs out in the open, waking up covered in dust “like a person who had just gotten out of the grave,” until the UNHCR provided them with wood, plastics, and nails to build their own homes. It was this kind of support, along with supplied rations of food and water, from the UNHCR that angered locals in the area. According to Monica, the locals did not seem to understand why they were not receiving the same kind of support from the UNHCR, even though they had their own government—both local government and the larger Kenyan government—for such support. This led to hostility between the locals and the refugees that sometimes peaked in acts of violence against the refugee population—including harming women who were collecting firewood, sexually assaulting refugees, armed robberies within the camps, and even murders. Monica had been growing more and more worried about the education of her children. She worked for the UNHCR as a teacher at the camp, but the money she made from that could not pay for furthering the education of all of her kids—at this point she had five sons and one daughter. As the hostilities with the locals worsened, Monica realized that she needed not only to worry about the education of her children, but their physical wellbeing, too. Armed with these concerns, and her status as a single mom since her husband had been absent for many years, she decided to apply for resettlement at the urging of her friend Mary.

She was not only supporting her own children, but two of her younger brothers as well, so she included them on her application and hoped for people to be understanding of the situation. Monica waited and waited to be contacted. She was called while she was on a brief trip to Sudan for supplies and missed it but was luckily called back and given the opportunity to defend her case. The entire process took about two years—longer than she argues most people, especially Americans born in the States, think.

Her extended family were skeptical of Monica taking all of the children with her to a foreign country where they would not have family to support them. Dinka people are close-knit and take care of each other. They tried to persuade her to stay, saying they could help her support the kids. But she stood her ground, arguing that she wanted to give her kids better opportunities.

She remembers two interviews, approval, the medical checkups, and orientation—where she found out about going to Des Moines, Iowa not long before being ‘given’ the plane tickets. Monica would object to the term ‘given’, since she signed a form agreeing to pay back the cost of all of the tickets—for her own, those of her children under eighteen, and even though her oldest son and two brothers were over eighteen, she would be helping them to pay back their tickets too so that they could focus on school. It was not a free ride; saying they were loanedthe tickets is more accurate—Monica has since paid back the nearly eight-thousand-dollar cost of the tickets. They arrived in September and Monica had a job cleaning at Mercy Hospital by November. “Though I was a teacher, I didn’t say I couldn’t clean…I wanted to do something so I could support my children.”

In her transition to the United States, she has found the school system incredibly helpful. ELL programs helped her kids assimilate into the US school system. Monica also remembers Lutheran Social Services and DHS helping her family a great deal; they were provided with housing and food, and she especially remembers the first trip to the grocery store where “there was the most food I had ever seen”. Her children would not drink chocolate milk brought to them as a treat by sponsors, thinking it looked like dirty water and electing to stick with regular milk. And they were terrified by the first Fourth of July celebration that they went to because they thought the fireworks were the sound of gunfire—which made their sponsor cry. They had help, but the transition was rocky. While Monica does think that the school system could do more to account for the trauma that child refugees are processing and their cultural orientation, she thinks it is primarily the parents that face the biggest barriers.

Monica has moved on from her cleaning work at Mercy and is now working to bridge the cultural education gap that Sudanese parents face. She is currently employed as a bilingual family liaison for the Des Moines Public Schools, and in this job, she works to teach parents how they can best advocate for their children in the American school system. “Here, education is a partnership between the parents and school,” and refugee parents want the best for their kids but are not initially familiar enough with the system to be effective, and the obstacles they face are not always understood by teachers. She works diligently to help her fellow parents in the Sudanese community as well as the teachers in the school system to do best by the Sudanese students.

While Monica is proud of the work that she does to help other families, it is her own family of which she is most proud. It took a lot of patience, perseverance, and dedication for her to get her family to the United States. Now that they are here, all of her kids have gotten their high school diplomas, a couple have already earned themselves free college educations, and one in particular is a successful pharmacist right here in Iowa City. Her family, and the many other families that make up the resettled refugee population in the United States, are assets to our country.

“I want people to know that nobody leaves their home for no reason…People don’t just leave. It’s not like how it’s being talked about politically–refugees aren’t here to deplete the country’s resources. Since I’ve come here, I’ve never worked just one job. I work two jobs to support my children and in doing so I support the country because I’m paying taxes. Refugees are more than they are portrayed in the media…Refugees are people like you, and they deserve respect and the other benefits of American citizenship.”

Personal Reflection

I was not in close contact with any refugees when we were given this assignment at the beginning of the semester. I knew a few peers from my high school, but we had been out of touch for years and I did not feel comfortable reaching out to them. Instead, I reached out to my mom. My mom, Dr. Heather Farris-Vermeer, is a vice-principal in the Des Moines Public Schools District, and I thought she might know of a student or teacher that I could contact. Luckily for me, she immediately replied to my text with one urging me to reach out to Monica Akuien. She told me that her and Monica worked together from time to time and that she had sat in on a discussion where Monica had described her refugee experiences and was advocating for better outreach to refugee populations. I was able to meet with Monica twice over the semester—once in person and then another time via phone call—and both times I was struck by her kindness, openness, and strength. Among many other things, I learned that Monica travelled for eight weeks on foot from Sudan to Kenya with six children, she had one of her sons taught at home here in the U.S., and she works as a Bilingual Family Liaison, serving Arabic and Dinka speaking families.

Monica walked through Sudan on foot, carrying much of her family’s supplies of water and food on her head while one child rested on her back, another clung to her clothes, and four others—plus her two brothers—walked with her as her responsibility. When she spoke to me about this journey, an unthinkable one to myself and people born in the United States, she did so in a very matter-of-fact manner. She talked about how afraid she was in the situation, how she feared for the health of herself and her family along the journey and discussed how they were without shoes for the walk and sometimes went a whole day without anything to eat. This fact—that she spent eight weeks walking to Kenya with the physical and metaphorical weight of several children on her the entire way—was critical for my understanding of Monica’s strength. While she gave a lot of the credit of their survival to God, it was refreshing to hear her acknowledge her own fortitude in enduring the situation. I am a moderately anxious person. Oftentimes, I feel a tremendous amount of weight on me between the clubs I am involved in, my studies, and my volunteer work. However, listening to Monica’s story put these struggles into perspective in an incredibly impactful way. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in my own problems that I forget that other people are going through significantly more difficult circumstances. This is applicable day to day to remind myself that my own struggles are manageable, but also to be more understanding of those around me. Since my interview with Monica, I have been working on taking a second to evaluate situations in which someone is making me upset: I think about their behavior and consider that their actions toward me could really be a manifestation of other events they have going on that I am unaware of. I have been using Monica’s strength to try seeing the better in more people I encounter. Monica’s story of resettlement has also been impactful on me.

Learning about the rocky transition Monica had with her eldest son upon coming to the United States was significant because it exemplified her patience and love for her kids, as well as the importance of positive support. Monica’s kids all went to the same high school as I did back in Des Moines—Roosevelt High School. Her eldest child, an eighteen-year-old at the time, was expelled from school for swinging a bat—not hitting anyone—during a disagreement with other students. She spoke so highly of her son, still, talking about how he was a great person who had been incredibly helpful to her during their journey as refugees, but pointing out that he was still a child from a war zone who did not have the kind of cultural understanding he needed to understand the consequences of this action. Monica was very understanding with her son, telling him that the act and consequences did not make him a bad person; she emphasized that everyone makes mistakes. She admitted to initially wanting to leave town out of embarrassment and despair over the incident, but she stuck through with her son. Hearing this reminded me of my own mom. Like Monica and her son, I know my mom would stick by my sister and I with unconditional positive regard. Having parents like Monica and Heather is not something everyone is afforded. The story made me think a lot about the importance of unconditional positive regard, and viewing actions as right or wrong, but not sticking these labels on people. While not everyone can have parents that look out for them in this way, Monica’s story made it all the more evident that our institutions need to pick up the slack that individuals can drop. Hearing about how the school system—the very same one that I was educated in—was so indifferent to Monica’s advocacy attempts for her son was really disheartening for me. It made me realize the importance of programs like the Human Rights Certificate and even this class; being able to look at issues from different perspectives is the best way to pursue fair and compassionate treatment. Monica herself, of course, pursues structural change in her own work.

When Monica and I first began exchanging emails, she told me she was a Bilingual Family Liaison for DMPS. I was under the wrong impression, embarrassingly, that this was simply another name for a translator. Luckily, this was cleared up for me in our interview. While listening to Monica, I realized that her work does consist of translating, but it is so much more than that. She really imparted on me the importance of the school system adapting for the refugee students and their parents, rather than expecting the refugees to do all of the work themselves. Her words that the parents want the best for their kids and just need help in navigating how to advocate for their children in this new environment have really stuck with me. Our system is confusing enough as it is, so people like Monica who are working to bridge barriers in understanding are so important. Hearing that she is working very so diligently is inspiring, and gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own privilege as a student whose parents knew about parent-teacher conferences, what report card marks mean, and could take their own experiences with the same system to advise me.  Being able to hear Monica’s story, and be inspired by it, was a privilege, too.