When I first arrived in Portland, Maine, I walked off the plane with my twelve-year-old brother, my eight-year-old daughter, and my two little boys, age four and two. The woman from social services who met us took us directly to this room with a conveyor belt.
I had never seen anything like it before.
We stood there in silence, watching the bags, and she asked me, “Do you see your bags?”
I told her I didn’t have bags, only the plastic bag I was carrying.
That’s all we had.
She said, “Right. Okay. Well, then—let’s go home.”
And that word “home”—I hadn’t had a home since my village. I was born in a small village called Bor in South Sudan. We knew Africa had its troubles, but we had food, and we had each other, until one day, the spring after I graduated from high school. I was in the market getting meat for my family. Baskets were raised, and people were shouting. The meat wouldn’t go far, and we all wanted some.
Over the noise and chaos, the unmistakable sound of gunfire filled the air. Some people dropped to the ground, and some people ran.
I chose to run.
My stepmother and I grabbed what we could and ran into the jungle and on to another village.
It would be eleven years before I stopped running from that war. I never knew peace in Africa again.
Later I met my husband. All my children were born in refugee camps.
Then things changed from bad to worse. My husband was killed in the war, and I lost my second daughter. She died of starvation and disease as we were wandering from place to place.
So when this woman said, “Let’s go home,” there was nothing else I wanted.
She brought us to an apartment. We had never been in an apartment before. We had lived with thousands of other refugees, wandering from under the tree to under the tree, so this apartment was different.
She showed us around the apartment. She showed us the bathroom and the shower. I remember she opened the refrigerator, and it was full of food, but there was nothing familiar to us. We saw a big bottle of orange soda, and we thought it was juice, so we tasted it. (It tasted very bad. So we left it.)
Before she left, she said, “This is a fire alarm. When you hear it, just go. Go outside and wait there until it’s all clear.”
Then she left. And all five of us were standing in this strange place, very scary.
I told the kids, “Let’s sit down. We are home now.”
I kept remembering the word “home.”
There were two couches in the living room. My children had never seen a couch before, or a carpet.
So I went to the kitchen to warm up some milk. But before we drank our warm milk, we heard a noise.
I told the kids, “Let’s run! That’s the fire alarm the woman was talking about.”
Back at the refugee camps, we had a plan, because one time the village was attacked and I had to run with the children, and it was very difficult for me to collect all of them. So we made a plan that when something happened, my brother would grab the baby, I would grab my four-year-old, and my daughter would hold my skirt, and we’d run.
So here we were in Portland, Maine, in this apartment, hearing this noise, so we went into our plan, and my brother grabbed the baby, I grabbed my four-year-old, my daughter held my dress, and we ran out of the apartment and across the street.
We stood there.
And I asked them, “Do you see the fire? Do you smell the smoke?”
They said no.
We stood there for a while, and then we said, “We should probably go back inside the building.”
So we walked inside, slowly. But we didn’t know which one was our apartment! We looked, but all the doors looked alike. We tried a few of them, but they were locked.
Finally I saw one door a little bit open, so we thought, This might be our apartment.
I went in first, slowly. And it was our apartment.
There was a woman standing by the door. She told us she accidentally rang our doorbell. So we learned it wasn’t a fire alarm at all—it was a doorbell!
The woman from social services would come to visit us from time to time. And when she came, she would always find me sleeping.
One day she asked me, “Why do you sleep so much?”
I told her, “For the last eight years, I walked from Sudan to Ethiopia.
“And I walked again from Ethiopia to Sudan.
“And again from Sudan to Kenya.
“And from Kenya to the border of Somalia.
“I walked from under the tree to under the tree, from hunger to hunger.
“From gunfire to gunfire.
“From death to death.
“I walked the entire eastern continent of Africa with these children.
“I am sleeping because I haven’t slept for eight years.”
Portland was different from my village. My village was a small village, maybe around five thousand people. It lies on the eastern bank of the White Nile. My father had four wives, as is custom in my village. I lived among many brothers and sisters. I went to school and learned English, my third language. I was happy.
But in Maine we felt so alone. A woman helped me find some friends, people from my tribe who had made it to Minnesota. So with the help of social services, we were able to move to Minnesota.
In Minnesota my children had their first opportunity to go to school. I managed to get them enrolled. I bought them school clothes and the supplies they needed.
The woman who helped me told me that the kids would need to wake up early in the morning and go to the school-bus stop. She told me that we would need an alarm clock. So I went to Kmart and I asked the ladies there if they had an alarm clock that sounded like a rooster. They helped me find one!
We set the alarm clock in the morning. The kids woke up. I walked my now twelve-year-old brother and my eight-year-old daughter to the bus stop, which was just behind our apartment.
I watched them climb onto the bus with tears in my eyes. The bus took off. The other parents left. I was still standing there with tears in my eyes, wondering if they would come back.
Hoping they would come back to me.
I went back to the apartment to my little boys. They were still sleeping. My tears were still falling. I thought about everything my children had gone through. Everything they had seen.
When my baby Jok was born, the village was attacked. Nine hours after his birth, I was forced to leave with him. And now we had made it, with God’s help we had made it.
My children would never walk two hundred miles again. They would never starve again. And they would always be happy, even when I’m not around.
I thought about all of this the day my daughter graduated from law school—I was so proud of all my children.
Today I think about that first day in the Portland, Maine, airport when the woman said, “Let’s go home.”
And home means hope to me.
Home means I would never have to run again.
ABENY MATHAYO KUCHA is a single mother who survived the civil war and genocide in her homeland of South Sudan and immigrated to the United States. Here she became a certified nursing assistant and worked at the Mayo Clinic for almost ten years as a surgical processing tech. She is the mother of two daughters. Atong, her oldest, recently graduated from law school in May 2012. Abeny is proud to say what a joy it was to see her accomplish her dream of becoming a lawyer, because few refugees’ children graduate high school, let alone attend college. Abeny also has three sons and one grandson. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, and is the author of Tears of a Mother: A Sudanese Survivor’s Story, her first book about her life while living in Sudan. For more information on Abeny’s book and other projects, visit her website at tearsofamother.com.
This story was told on June 4, 2016, at the State Theatre in Portland, Maine. The theme of the evening was You Are Here. Director: Meg Bowles.
