That spring Akoy fell in love with somebody other than himself. He shared a math class with a freshman girl, Lauren Wegner, whom he friended on Facebook. Wegner played on a select softball team with Charlotte Sjulin, a sophomore at small, private Concordia High in west Omaha. Through Wegner, Akoy and Sjulin, known as “Lotte,” became Facebook friends. Then they became real-life friends. Then it got interesting.
“First time we met was at a movie,” Lotte recalled. “Me and my two girlfriends and he and his best guy friend. I wouldn’t call it a date. Just hanging out.” An elite athlete in her own right, Lotte knew of Akoy’s basketball celebrity. She decided to preempt his ego. “You can’t sit by me,” she told him. Miffed or pretending to be, Akoy sat three rows in front of the group. “So I knew it was going to be pretty light and relaxed,” Lotte recalled. “And then he came back and sat with us.”
To the naked eye they seemed an unlikely pair, she a luminous brunette beauty, the daughter of two physicians Midwestern-born and bred. She lived on 180th Street in an affluent west Omaha zip code almost as different from the Near North Side as from South Sudan. Race and class were vast chasms they stared across. Less obvious was their shared faith. The mission of Lotte’s high school, part of Lutheran Schools of Omaha, was “to prepare young people for lives of faith, service and leadership as Christian disciples.” Akoy believed in Jesus too, as a Catholic, and spoke openly of his faith. They jousted over the relative merits of the Catholic and Lutheran theologies. It was both good-natured and serious, and it carved out a basis for their mutual respect. Then too, as noted, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service was one of nine resettlement agencies for the U.S. government. Refugees were in the heart and soul of Lutherans.
Lotte was smitten. “The minute she met Akoy, she said, ‘You have to meet this guy—he’s super cool,’” recalled Ann Sjulin, Lotte’s mother.
Lotte’s father, Dave, was dubious. “I had seen him interviewed on TV, and he was kind of a character,” Dave recalled. “Lotte said, ‘I know Akoy; I talk to him all the time.’ I said, ‘How’s that?’ She said she was his friend on Facebook. And I said, ‘You and a thousand others are his friend on Facebook. Everybody wants to be friends with Akoy on Facebook.’ So I didn’t think it was real at all.”
Akoy’s introduction to the Sjulins was delayed almost permanently. In April 2011 he was with three friends from Central—on their way to an afternoon track meet—when their car ran a stop sign about two blocks from Akoy’s home. The front passenger side, where Akoy rode, took a direct hit. “We flew and hit somebody’s garage,” Akoy recalled. “My whole door was destroyed. I don’t remember how, but somehow I managed to climb out on the driver’s side.” Police found Akoy on a lawn, bleeding from a head laceration. He assured them he was not in pain and could walk on his own, but when he tried, he fell in a heap. An ambulance took him to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a concussion but no broken bones. One of Akoy’s friends suffered a broken wrist and another a broken collar bone.
This was not Akoy’s first crash. The previous November he, Adaw, and her brother Martin were hit on their way to Wal-Mart for Black Friday. Nobody was hospitalized, but Akoy had neck and back pain for several days. After the more recent crash Akoy was hospitalized for almost a week. South Sudanese friends visited and laid crosses around his bed. One hospital worker gave him a blanket that pictured dollar bills above a message: “Get Up and Make That Money.” Among the cards and flowers that came to him was a bouquet from Lotte and her older sister Lucy. On Easter Sunday, as the Sjulins drove back from a weekend with Ann’s parents in western Nebraska, Lotte called Akoy. They chatted and then Lotte handed her phone to her father.
“Hello, this is Dave.”
“Hello, Dr. Sjulin. I’m going to marry your daughter.”
Dave Sjulin managed to keep the car on the road as he relayed Akoy’s “hello” to his wife, Lotte, and her two sisters. All were incredulous. “We’re like, ‘Who is this?’” recalled Ann. “And ‘You’re crazy.’”
The phone conversation continued for the better part of two hours as the Sjulins crossed the state. The snippet that lodged in Dave’s memory was Akoy’s question, “What do you like to bake?” Dave allowed that he made a “mean banana bread.” Akoy asked Dave to bring him one in the hospital.
“So we got back from Easter and Lotte said, ‘I’m going to take Akoy and his family some banana bread,’” Ann recalled. “Lotte never had an interest in cooking, but she and Dave made some banana bread.” Lotte delivered banana bread to Akoy at the hospital.
Akoy asked to be released from the hospital a day early because he had an appointment to keep. His head was bandaged when Adaw and Madut picked him up and drove with him and his younger siblings (Maguy, Aguir, and Achol) to the immigration center near the airport. He and his siblings became American citizens that day in April 2011. Their test was waived under a provision for children under eighteen if a parent had passed the test. Absent a test, they could relax. On a video President Obama congratulated them and welcomed them to the responsibilities of citizenship. Alongside other immigrants and refugees, the Agau kids raised their hands and took the Naturalization Oath:
I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.
One by one their names were called, and they were handed their certificates of citizenship. One of Akoy’s friends from grassroots basketball, Mike Sautter, snapped a photo of the four siblings. Adaw watched with tearful eyes and hugged each of her children. Then they went home to a party with family and friends. Adaw’s sister cooked a couple of traditional South Sudanese meat-and-vegetable dishes. Fried chicken, a favorite of Akoy’s, was served. That afternoon Adaw savored the happiness on the face of her oldest son. A day ago he had been in a hospital bed. Now he was eating fried chicken as an American citizen. He noticed her gaze and was grateful. “Thank you mom for bringing us here,” he told her. “And thank you for helping us to do it easy.”
The next day Akoy asked Lotte to bring, as she recalled, “Fourteen dollars’ worth of McDonald’s. An Angus burger with large fries, large drink, two McDevils, two cinnamon twists.” But she got lost looking for his home because she had never been to that part of town. “She called me and said, ‘I don’t know where this is,’” recalled Ann. “And I didn’t know because at that time I hadn’t been down there either.”
Akoy’s citizenship coincided with a separate legal action in which Hammer became his co-guardian, with Adaw’s consent. Hammer’s rationale, with which Adaw agreed, was that Hammer was better equipped to deal with the onslaught of college recruiters and with Akoy’s basketball future. Adaw trusted Hammer and took his offer to be co-guardian as genuine and heartfelt. “Scott was like a big brother to Akoy,” she said. Behrens was skeptical. “I had players who really needed help. That wasn’t Akoy. He had two parents who were concerned. Maybe they didn’t know exactly what he was up to or what he needed—that was the cultural gap—but they gave him a home. Lots of people want to help the star players. But we had fifty kids in our program, and a lot of them needed help more than Akoy.”
Near the end of May, Akoy showed up at the Sjulin’s sumptuous west Omaha home for Lucy’s high school graduation party. Akoy still had a girlfriend at the time. “Lotte, you need to back off,” Ann said. Lotte replied: “We’re just talking—it’s no big deal.”
Akoy was in the role of Eliza Doolittle. He wore his favorite Hawaiian red shorts and had his hair picked out. He declined Ann’s offer of food and took a seat on the couch. “He sat on the couch the whole time and wouldn’t hardly look around,” Ann recalled. “He was totally freaked out because we didn’t know him.” “Yeah, I was scared,” Akoy recalled.
Akoy’s growth owed much to his fluency in English, the first beachhead for refugees and immigrants in America. They need it to figure out what to do, where to go, and how to be. Sometimes they need it to summon police.
In January 2011, as Akoy advanced upon his second championship, the primacy of language played out at the public housing project where Adaw’s sister lived. A Somali Bantu refugee who lived at the Southside Terrace Apartments was mugged and beaten. The victim’s call to police was ineffectual due to language difficulties. The assault had been preceded by a series of attacks on Somali Bantus in which the victims deemed police response inadequate. Now more than one hundred Somali Bantus gathered in frustrated but peaceful protest and asked the city for more police interpreters, more summer school programs for their children, and more ESL programs for parents.
The request for ESL instruction was particularly dire. An anecdote was told of a Somali mother who asked her son to go upstairs and bring down her purse. The son went upstairs and came back without the purse. “You disobeyed,” the mother scolded. “Mom, I don’t know what you’re asking me,” he said.
The argument escalated until a Somali elder was summoned to mediate. Among officials who listened was Susan Mayberger, head of the ESL program for migrants and refugees for Omaha Public Schools. “Students were learning English but weren’t maintaining their home language, so there was a breakdown in the family,” said Mayberger. “So the parents said, ‘Help us learn English.’”
School officials expanded an existing program at the Yates Community Center, a former elementary school not far from Central. Mayberger, whose daughter and two sons had been or would be Central students and were fans of Akoy, was in charge. The program offered ESL classes for parents for three hours on weekday mornings, with five levels of proficiency. The classes were “open door,” which meant adults could attend as long as they wanted or needed to. Along with expanded ESL the Yates added sewing classes, a computer lab, and early childhood classes to prepare children for school. A grant from the Sherwood Foundation funded a social worker on site.
The goal was to make parents proficient in English so that they could raise bilingual children. Early in her career Mayberger had worked for the New York City school system and had been dismayed to see second- and third-generation students in ESL classes. “What I realized is that you want to do things right as soon as families get here,” Mayberger said. “If we teach them well, they should be able to raise children bilingually, and hopefully families will stay bilingual. If we do things right with the first generation, we can head off long-term societal problems.”
Omaha Public Schools served about 1,350 refugee students in 2011. South Sudan and its border countries accounted for about 40 percent, while about 60 percent came from Myanmar, Bhutan, and other Southeast Asian countries. Nearly 6,800 students, or about 13 percent of the district’s enrollment, were native speakers of a language other than English. Most came from rural areas of Mexico and Latin America, were not classified as refugees, and spoke Spanish as their first language.
All of Omaha’s seven high schools, eleven middle schools, and sixty-two elementary schools had ESL programs with ESL-trained teachers and staff. Other supports included family-resources centers in twenty schools, dual-language classes at six schools for Spanish and English, teen literacy centers at two middle schools and district headquarters, and ESL classes for parents in targeted schools as well as at the Yates.
A teen literacy center for non-English speakers aged 13–21 operated out of the fourth floor of district headquarters. There students got intensive instruction with the goal of a third-grade proficiency in English and basic proficiency in other core subjects. This was the first school experience for some refugee and immigrant students. Because newcomers had so much to learn before they aged out of the program at twenty-one, they took no fall or spring breaks and attended a special Saturday school and two months of summer school, twice as long as mainstream students.
Apart from the school system ESL classes were offered at Metro Community College and Omaha Public Library. Adaw and Madut had attended ESL classes at the South Sudanese Community Association (which became the Refugee Empowerment Center) before they had applied for their drivers’ licenses. Adaw’s proficiency increased to where she could pass the naturalization test, while Madut’s did not.
Mayberger’s connection to her ESL program ran deep in her Nebraska blood. Her great-grandparents were Czech immigrants whose rural Nebraska experience mirrored that of the Shimerda family in Willa Cather’s century-old novel My Antonia. “They spoke Czech as a first language, and their children spoke Czech,” Mayberger said. “My mother’s first language was Czech, even though she was third or fourth generation because a lot of her community spoke Czech.”
Mayberger’s mother, whose maiden name was Voboril, grew up in the farming community of David City, Nebraska. Her mother’s family was able to farm throughout the twentieth century without English as its first language, just as Akoy’s father worked at meat-processing plants with limited English. But proficiency is needed today, Mayberger said, for most jobs and economic opportunity. That’s the carrot her ESL program holds out to refugee and migrant parents. “I just feel language is power,” Mayberger said. “If you can help a parent learn English, how could they not be better able to parent in the U.S.?”
As Somali Bantu refugees protested in Omaha, Arab Spring swept over the Middle East and North Africa. A populist movement against autocratic rule, it began in Tunisia and spread to civil uprisings in Egypt and Bahrain; street demonstrations in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Oman; and insurgencies in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Social media fueled the insurrections with messages and images of discontent—and organized protests—on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Arab Spring was born of idealism and hope for democratic reform, but instead it caused the largest upsurge of refugees since World War II. On World Refugee Day in June 2011 UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon cited the “unfolding crisis in North Africa and the Middle East” for bringing the worldwide population of forcibly displaced persons up to almost 44 million. He called on the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia to provide more help:
Poor countries host vastly more displaced people than wealthier ones. While anti-refugee sentiment is heard loudest in industrialized countries, developing nations host 80 per cent of the world’s refugees. This situation demands an equitable solution. No one wants to become a refugee. No one should have to endure this humiliating and arduous ordeal. Yet, millions do. Even one refugee forced to flee, one refugee forced to return to danger is one too many. On this year’s World Refugee Day, I ask people everywhere to spare a thought for the millions of children, women and men who have been forced from their homes, who are at risk of their lives, and who, in most cases, want nothing more than to return home or to start afresh. Let us never lose sight of our shared humanity.
Legislation proposed in the U.S. Senate and House, called the Refugee Protection Act, sought to protect refugees and asylum seekers from a rising tide of fear and xenophobia. Middle Eastern refugees in particular faced suspicion of terrorist intent. Senate sponsor Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said, “The bill ensures that innocent asylum seekers and refugees are not unfairly denied protection as a result of overly broad terrorism bars that can have the effect of sweeping in those who were actually victimized by terrorists. The bill ensures that those with actual ties to terrorist activities will continue to be denied entry to the United States.”
Sudan sidestepped Arab Spring because in January 2011 it allowed South Sudan to vote for independence. By then the strife that had started in the late 1950s had cost the lives of two million and displaced another four million in South Sudan. More than 3.8 million votes were cast by the South Sudanese and by expatriates in eight countries. Polling booths were opened in Nebraska and seven other states, and voting was conducted in an atmosphere “electric with excitement,” according to a refugee service provider in Omaha. Adaw and Madut voted to secede from the Khartoum government and explained their votes to their children. “We told them Sudan has a war, and war is what brought us here,” Adaw recalled. “We explain that north and south need to separate and that we pray for peace. Then we tell them they need to focus on America. They have a good life here; they go to good schools. We tell them to make their future in America.”
Results were announced in February; more than 98 percent had voted to secede. Of the 8,487 South Sudanese who cast their ballots in the United States, Omaha accounted for about 36 percent of the votes. Of 3,076 votes cast in Omaha, 3,054 were for secession. The formal inauguration of South Sudan was set for July. It was born rich, with half of the former Sudan’s oil wealth. But its challenges, as outlined by a congressional report, began with its need as a land-locked state to take its oil to market through pipelines and ports in Sudan. Economic development was hamstrung by minimal infrastructure—roads, airports, telephone and electric services—and by a shortage of skilled labor. Of its population of 10.5 million, 72 percent were under thirty, adult literacy was 27 percent, and more than 51 percent lived below the poverty line. An estimated 38 percent had to walk more than thirty minutes to collect drinking water. Climate change and decreased rainfall threatened agriculture, which employed about 80 percent of the population.
The hope was that an independent South Sudan would bring about peace, stability, economic development, an end to the refugee diaspora, and repatriation for those who had left. Adaw and Madut prayed that her mother and his brother in South Sudan would be safe at long last.
Meanwhile, Akoy bonded with Central’s first-year principal, Dr. Keith Bigsby, whose resume included a stint as a basketball coach. They stood side by side in the hallways, Central’s odd power couple. Akoy hung with Bigsby because, well, a guy never knew when a principal would come in handy. Bigsby hung with Akoy because he genuinely liked him and because it raised his “cool” factor with the student body.
Then, too, Bigsby understood Akoy’s value to Central’s brand, which he feared was at risk. The state had slapped it with a “persistently lowest achieving school” (PLAS) designation because its graduation rate had averaged 74.2 percent from the years 2007–2010, a shade below the 75 percent crossbar set by the state. The designation was more of a bureaucratic technicality than evidence of academic malaise, but Bigsby worried that it undercut the school’s image. He worried about a lot of things: that charter school proponents were out to get Central, that white middle-class kids from the western suburbs would stay away and thus “tip” the school’s delicate socioeconomic balance, and that barbarians—that is, street gangs—were at Central’s gate.
Bigsby also worried about student behavior, which he believed had spun out of control in recent years. In his first month on the job he gave a talk in the auditorium that was disrupted by an unruly student. Bigsby banished the student to his office, and the next morning Bigsby had the offender make an apology to the entire school over the intercom system. It wasn’t long before Bigsby drafted Akoy as an enforcer.
“We had a problem on the first floor after lunch when kids came down from the cafeteria,” Bigsby recalled. “Some kids didn’t understand expectations, and some were basketball players. Akoy would come and stand with me. And if somebody got out of hand and Akoy called him out, that was the end of it. In a sense, he became official. He took on a huge role.”
Bigsby practiced the “seven correlates” of successful schools and promoted the “Eagle Way,” which encompassed lofty attributes of scholarship and citizenship. To lighten the mood he kept up a running gag about pop star Justin Bieber in his morning intercom announcement. To the broader community he proclaimed Central “Champ High” and “the best downtown high school in the country.” Bigsby knew that good PR required a team effort: administrators, faculty, and alumni. Within a year Susie Buffett’s Sherwood Foundation would start the nonprofit Nebraska Loves Public Schools to resist the onslaught of charters. Even students could help with PR, Bigsby realized—particularly naturalized refugees who were personable and poised and delivered state basketball championships as dependably as spring brought young love.
Going forward, Akoy would be the unofficial face of Central, the de facto “ambassador.” When possible, he would greet officials, VIPs, and alumni. When eighth graders came for Open House, he would lead them through the old wooden hallways so that when it came time to pick a high school, they were star-struck: “Mom, guess who I met at Central today?”
Akoy began to wrap his mind around the notion that he was a role model. A letter came in the mail from a boy in the middle of the state. Central had played in Kearney, Nebraska (population thirty-two thousand) in February. He read the letter to a teacher, Michelle Synowiecki.
“Thanks for coming to our town,” Akoy read. “I loved watching you play. Good luck in the future.” A smile lit up his face.
“Somebody looks up to me,” he said.
“You know what to do,” Synowiecki replied.
“Write him back?”
“Yes.”