Conversations with a "lost boy" from Sudan

i remember when i first heard about gabriel.  "is it ok if my friend gabriel comes and stays with us? he's homeless right now". my rommate asked me and all i could think was ‘sure as long he stays in your room and not mine’. 

every day for 2 weeks there'd be a call from gabriel and he'd say that he's coming to ramallah to stay with us becuase he was just kicked out of his apartment in Jerusalem.  Obviously i was very curious about this person who just never showed up even though he was homeless.  the situation seemed urgent enough and i sort of just dismissed him as a really wishy washy person.  

"i figured you wouldn't mind him staying with us or that you wouldnt mind giving him a place to stay knowing that he was a child soldier, a slave, his entire family was murdered and is currently a refugee right now with no legal status".  this is how i started to know more and more about gabriel through M, who told me about her epxerience workign with the sudanese refugee community in israel where she would go every weekend to visit and volunteer.  She’d teach them English in small crammed rooms or help them with general things, like life advice.

as silly as this sounds, learning about him through maggie, he just became a character in my head, almost like a mythical creature, like some friend of my roommate that i would never acually get to meet .  A friend of my roommate who had a history that I couldn’t really fathom and  more unbelievable was the fact that  a person with a story like his is someone that my roommate knew so closely.

i learned that gabriel comes from an extremely important family and he is known in the southern sudanese community very well, and known because he comes from an extremely important political family  who were all killed.  I was told that it’s kind of like if Chelsea Clinton ever became an orphan.  Well thats who Gabriel is.  

my curiousity kept on building and building.  supposedly he could never keep a job, and he'd keep on getting kick out of his house.  i couldnt draw a mental picture of this person.  on one hand i had this image of a really sullen, serious, hard stricken person who carries with him a life long saga of trauma, on another hand I thought maybe he's like emmanuel jal an inspiration upon first encounter (in whatever form that may be),  or was he just some dude that was a  total flake? 

M and i needed to go to jerusalem.  gabriel gave us his place to stay.  ironic huh? maggie's constant mantra of "gabriel you need to get a job and keep it" had done some good and a month and a half later he was working 14 hour days, had a place to stay and was giving the two of US a place to stay.  

he welcomed us into his one room studio home.  a really really small place, but just enough space for one person.  i didnt mind at all, especially since it was so warm inside and i was concerned that maybe we’d have to freeze the night. it was just a bed in the room, and along the sides of the wall neatly lined up were his fridge, his stove and a sink and an oven.  inside his small bathroom he had his washer and dryer and his shower.  

what surprised me most about meeting him finally was his general demeanor of kindness and warmth.  It’s a kind of kindness that’s very rare. My interaction with him wasn’t long, only an hour or so after we got to his place.  Then he left to spend the night elsewhere and gave us his home and returned when we were awake at 6:30am the next morning.

Through  short conversations with him I learned about his disdain that so many people dismiss what is happening in southern Sudan, preoccupied with Darfur (which struck a chord, since UNC is all over Darfur awareness, how did southern sudan never come up?). I learned about his disdain about Egypt and learned about him getting arrested in Egypt 7 times.  Talking about these officers is when he said “I really think there are no good people in the world”.  He talked about Sudanese refugees just getting shot by the Egyptian officers after they’d been cleared to get into Israel as refugees.  He tells me that over 2,000 had been shot like this, among which were his friends.

There was an air of awe inspiring jaw dropping amazement after Emmanuel Jal had come to UNC last year and had done his show in Memorial Hall.  Everyone that was in that giant hall was captivated and speechless after hearing Emmanuel Jal speak and after hearing him sing.  His rawness and candid account of just his life was something that I don’t think any of us had ever seen.

When I mention this to Gabriel, he says “O Emmanuel! I just talked to him a few weeks ago, he’s doing well” Gabriel is doing his own thing, speaking in different churches, to different audiences, telling his story because he thinks that the story must be heard.  On his shelf I saw a stack of dvds with his face on it.  he made his own documentary about his experience and his story.

“but people just forget”.  “when you talk to them they gave you their full attention and they give you sympathy, and as soon as you walk away, they forget”

what's our responsibility about these awful awful things happening in the world? sometimes i wonder if we just take these pieces of news as entertainment. 

gabriel's story struck me because i realized how easy it is for everyone to separate themselves from problems that's not theirs.  child soldiering, slavery, war, displacement, living under an occupation..if your life has never been infiltrated by any of these things it's easy for the mind and the brain to separate it as something that happens to other people.  Why would you ever want to make it a part of yours in any  way shape or form if you didn’t have to? It’s nice for it to be left alone as  a thought provoking story, or a piece of news to watch, a lecture to attend or a show to enjoy. I’m not really sure what we do after that.  What can we do after that?

  

having a conversation, being in his home, or seeing him as a person, i realized how “ordinary” of a person he was with such an extra ordinary and unbelievable life.  It cracked me up when the only way he described Israeli girls at the clubs was by saying “oh my God, they are CRAZY! The cuter they are, the CRAZIER they are” and him explaining how dating them is so difficult because they cause the break up and then the get crazier after you break up.

He’s been in Israel for 3 years and his stay here is temporary.  he says he's understanding the Israeli mentality,  i can't figure out if he really loves where he is or if he doesnt, he seems to carry a lot of love for the place but then he talks about never looking the corner store shop ownerin the face when he is paying for his things.  "i want him to ask me one day why i dont look at him in the face and why i turn away when i pay for my things" he told me, “it's just the way that they look at you.  i stood in line but 15, 20 people went in front of me because the shop owner just ignored that I was standing there”.

He kept on saying that at 27 he was really old and that he needs to get married.  It may be a non chalant comment to make for a young person but it hits on a lot of issues.  For a refugee, there isn’t a sight of a place where he can feel ‘settled’ and there’s a bigger question of who he should and can marry.  He kept on saying “ I really want to get married but I’m not in Sudan”

Before coming here, I had worked with incoming refugee mothers in the Raleigh/Durham area.  I’m not in any way trying to clump refugees of different backgrounds and circumstances into one box, but the little interaction that I’ve had with them makes me reflect on so much about things that I can’t separate from mentally that feeds into my sense of stability and foundation as a person..like having parents, my family, knowing that there is security where I live and that I can pursue a higher education,  and I can inshAllah one day have a family of my own and practice my religion and raise my kids, and even though there is uncertaintly and moments of instability, these foundations are still grounded.  And how I think of these things as a bare minimum for a good life. But  then after experiences like this I realize to some people these are unrealistic luxuries.