The day we left Kakuma forever, I had to sneak away from my old life. I told my foster parents that I was going to visit a friend in the camp for the day, and I explained to Tabitha that she needed to leave after I did and meet me at my friend’s house. We each took just one extra outfit, hiding it under our clothes so our foster parents wouldn’t notice.
When Tabitha got to my friend’s, we left right away and hurried to the UN compound. A lot of Lost Boys were gathered to leave as well, and six of us Lost Girls. The UN people led us out to a plane that was very small and hot. We felt cramped in it, and very scared. I had never been on a plane before. As it began to lift off the ground, I looked down on all the Lost Boys gathered around the runway to say good-bye to us. Once we got higher, I couldn’t look out the window, I was just too frightened. The plane kept lurching down suddenly, as if it would fall out of the sky. I was so, so happy when we were back on the ground again. But an even longer, harder flight lay ahead of us.
We knew we had to cross a great huge body of water, an ocean, and some of the Lost Boys said the water could pull the plane down into it. But when the time came, we walked up the ladder and into that the big plane anyway. We were going to try to get to America, whatever it took. There was no going back now.
In fact, this flight was okay, and the food was good, even though we didn’t really know what went with what. We ate the bread and butter separately, ate the dry lettuce leaves, and drank the little container of salad dressing. And after a while, I dozed off to sleep, but every time there was turbulence, I would jerk awake, thinking the plane was falling out of the sky and into the ocean.
When we got to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, about 30 of us Lost Children got off the plane, relieved but not knowing exactly where to go next. Suddenly we came to these stairs that moved and we didn’t know what to do. We were scared to go down on them, and some of the boys said that these stairs were there to take people to a grinding machine, to grind us up. They were probably the same boys who said the ocean could pull a plane out of the air. After we stood there for a while, we finally decided we had to go down. Each of us stood in front of the moving stairs for a few minutes before we had the courage to step on. We thought we would miss our step and fall.
Tabitha and I and two other Lost Children, a girl and a boy, were headed for Seattle. On December 19, 2000, our plane landed there. We had made it! It had been a long, long trip away from the Africa we had known all of our lives and to a new set of foster parents in America. We were tired and anxious when we stepped into the airport waiting area, but there to meet us was a group of people holding a big cardboard sign that said: “Martha and Tabitha, Welcome Home.”
These people seemed excited to see us, and they gave us each a little wrapped box with a gift of earrings. We were astonished but so tired that we couldn’t quite take it all in. Except for one Lost Girl in this group, everyone else was white. Amazingly, two women I had known at Kakuma were there. One was the social worker I had told about the Lost Girls, and another was the woman who interviewed us about coming to America. The rest of the people were our new foster family—Karen and Kirk Brackebusch, and their children Kyle, Christopher, and Kara, and another foster daughter, the Lost Girl whose name was Teresa.
We got into the Brackebuschs’ van and drove out of the big city and away from the lights of Seattle that seemed to slash at the car windows. We were going to our new home—a smaller town in the countryside called Duvall. Our days-long journey finally ended at a house that seemed huge to us, with a big open kitchen and dining area with windows all around that let the outside in. To Tabitha and me the inside of the Brackebusch house felt like a large open field, not like a house at all. We were used to Dinka houses—all enclosed with just a little crack or door to let air in. We felt lost inside that house. We just stared and stared, trying to understand it all.
It was Christmastime, so there were lights and decorations everywhere and a big tree inside the house, glistening with ornaments. That seemed amazing, too. So many new things to adjust to. Would we be able to?
As the days went by, things got better and better. When Christmas Day came, my foster mom’s other family members gathered and there were another 50 people in the house. It was fun, and all the people were nice to us. They taught us games and gave us gifts. I felt very, very excited. We were finally with a loving, warm family. Somebody in this big group was always asking how we were doing and hugging us and taking care of us. When you feel that love for the first time, people caring about you, it’s a wonderful feeling. No one had treated us like this since we had lost our parents. Finally, I could relax. Things were going to be okay.
After the holidays, we started school. It was cold, and we had to get up early in the dark. High school was not like the Brackebuschs’ home at all. I was the only black person there. I felt like an odd person, and Americans seemed to close off from me. I confess I didn’t reach out to them either. I didn’t know the language or customs well enough, and anyway, I was too shy. I spent my time at school alone.
I’m used to white people now, but then they all looked the same. It was hard to learn the names of people and put them together with faces because all I saw was white. Also, it was hard to understand English because Americans seemed to speak through their noses, with a humming sound.
The classes were really hard for me, too. I took English literature and health and American history. But I had no connection to the history I was learning. It wasn’t anything I had ever heard about before. And trying to follow classes taught in English was just plain hard. Reading went slowly, slowly, so doing homework was overwhelming. Everything I had to do every minute of the day was new—the culture, the schoolwork, the customs.
Then a strange thing started happening. All the emotions I had covered up before began to surface. Maybe it was because I had let down my guard a little for the first time since I was six. Now I could go to bed without worrying that somebody was going to come shoot Tabitha or me. At first that felt like a great relief, like a big weight lifting from my shoulders. But then I began having nightmares—people shooting and running, all the things that had really happened—and I began feeling very down. I tried to get over it, thinking it would go away, but it didn’t. I think the dark, gray days of a Washington winter didn’t help my mood much. I found myself crying a lot. Finally, I told my foster mom how I was feeling. She was a good woman, and she asked other foster parents how their Lost Children were doing. It turned out that a lot of them were going through this. Happily, Tabitha wasn’t. She didn’t have the memories I did, so she wasn’t traumatized by them.
My foster mother began arranging weekends at her house where other Lost Girls in the area would come. There were about eleven of us, and we would listen to music together and braid each other’s hair and cook Sudanese food. Socializing had been such a big thing in Kakuma. We had always been with other girls. Getting together again and reliving some of our past helped us a lot.
Slowly, I began to feel better and get used to life in America. I was even back in touch with Yar, my foster mother in Kakuma. She had learned where we were and written a letter explaining that when she first heard we had escaped to America, she had been worried that we were being taken into slavery. But now she had heard of other Lost Children doing well in America and she was relieved, knowing we were okay.
I managed to graduate from high school, and I began taking classes to be a nurse. While I did this, I supported myself by being a nursing assistant in a nursing home. Some of the people there were pretty cruel to me because I was a black person and they weren’t used to that, but others were very kind.
Tabitha was still in high school, and she was finding the same thing. Some of the kids made fun of her because she was different. But she was feisty and tough, so she kept going and graduated from high school, too, a few years after I did. Then she started working and going to school at the community college.
Just before I turned twenty-one, I moved out of my foster parents’ house and in with two friends—one a Lost Girl and another an American. I finally had a place of my own! It was exciting, but from month to month we worried about how we would pay for the rent, the groceries, and anything else we needed.
During those first years in America, I had been in contact with other Lost Kids who had left Kakuma and come to the United States. One of them was John.
Even though we Dinka people had had to leave our homeland in Southern Sudan years before, we had managed to keep our connections going through a kind of Dinka “grapevine.” It helped that our names identified our clan and the area we were from. When I first got to America, I had gotten a call from some of John’s cousins who lived in Texas and who had heard through the Dinka grapevine that I was in America. John had told them about me, and following Dinka custom, they had called me to continue the connection, telling me that John was still planning to come to America and that he was a good man and that he really liked me.