In this week of Martin Luther King celebration, my thoughts turn
to the black man who has most influenced me during this past year,
a Dinka tribesman from Sudan, Africa.
In this week of Martin Luther King celebration, my thoughts turn to the black man who has most influenced me during this past year, a Dinka tribesman from Sudan, Africa. He is a refugee from Africa’s longest civil war. He came to share my home in Gilroy for a year of friendship, laughter, hardship, learning and the exchange of each others’ cultures. When he insisted on paying for groceries, I tried to explain the way housemates share the cost of living equally and keep track of who buys what. It didn’t make sense to him. “If you’re going to start dividing everything,” he said, “Where does it end? Do you divide the eggs you cook in the morning and figure out who bought which eggs? Do you divide the water you cook with?” I could not get him let me help pay; he said to me, “You have the cow’s three legs and a head. I only have one leg.” Which I took to mean that since I had offered him a home, I should let him contribute by paying for things when he could. This was the first of many lessons in generosity from someone who had often gone hungry, and sometimes only survived thanks to Red Cross aerial food drops.
Angelo Athian Bul (Angel Secret Drum) came here, like many immigrants, expecting money to be growing on trees. He thought that English would be fed into his brain by simply plugging his mind into a computer.
On the plane to America, the Sudanese traveled from Stone Age to Silicon Valley’s computer age in less than a day. Even though some of them needed to, they were afraid to get up and go to the bathroom on the plane because – after all – how can anyone walk above the clouds? But Angelo said, “I’m going to go check it out,” and got up from his seat, the only one brave enough to try being a cloud walker.
However, as reality sets in for immigrants who think they are coming to a magic land where everything will come easily, the downside of the struggle to make a new life hits hard. The challenges of culture shock, loneliness, the loss of contact with other Sudanese, his longing for the supportive surroundings of his own culture, his feelings of isolation and anguish over losing his family to the war, etc., bring the disenchantment and depression with which Angelo struggles. When tears come, he struggles to stop himself, saying, “No, stop it; crying is a disease. Crying gets you nowhere – I learned that long ago – crying gets you nothing! I cried for a long time when I lost my parents – it did nothing for my life. I don’t want to cry!”
A Swahili phrase he taught me goes like this: “Haraka, haraka heina baraka,” which literally means, “Hurry, hurry, brings no blessing.” It will take time for him to find his way in a life that has been so changed by war. But now that I’ve come to know him, I can’t watch the news the way I used to: a third world statistic has a real personality and a face for me now. He may not have found the magic here that he was expecting. But in the way that I don’t just see “black” anymore, in the way I don’t see all people from Africa as the same anymore, and in the way I don’t see “refugee” anymore, Angelo has created a magic here for me. Now refugee has become “person.” Now refugee has become friend, and for that I have Angelo to thank.
