Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Enjoying each other's company during lunch at Prospect High School are (from left) Bethelihem Haile, Selame Alemayhu and Tigist Haile, all of whom are recent immigrants from Ethiopia.

Newly Arrived

Teen immigrants cope with being strangers in a strange land

Everyone living in Saratoga can trace family history back through the years and find an ancestor who immigrated to this nation from a distant land. To these foreign eyes, the United States would have seemed a strange and forbidding place, full of people speaking an unknown language and acting according to alien customs. But for those families that have been here for a few generations, the experience of immigration fades in time, and many come to think of themselves as Americans instead of Germans or Chinese or Africans. Immigration is the bond that nearly all Americans share, but forgetting this experience makes it easy to lose touch with one's history and to feel estranged from those who have newly arrived.

Some 150 immigrant students attend Prospect High School. Of these, approximately 30 are Africans. Three of them, and one De Anza College student, recently spoke to the Saratoga News about their lives back home and their experiences here.

Their reasons for immigrating to new and exotic Saratoga varied widely. Sylvanus Kabba, a 16-year-old Prospect sophomore from Sierra Leone who has been here about a year, said his dad won passage to the U.S. and a green card in a lottery. Omar Mohamed, a 17-year-old junior, said he also came about a year ago, fleeing ethnic fighting in Somalia. Selame Alemayhu, an 18-year-old senior, came here four years ago from Ethiopia. The reason was simple: "There was just a war going on," she said very matter-of-factly. "We didn't feel safe then. There were people carrying guns and stuff."

There may not have been anyone carrying guns in Saratoga, but these young people still faced daunting challenges when they arrived. The first and most obvious differences were that they did not know their way around and did not speak the language. Sylvanus describes his first school morning in Saratoga.

"There were too many buildings, too many people, too many cars on the streets. I woke up, and my dad said it's time to go to school. I have to catch a bus. I don't know what bus I'm going to catch. So I walk down to the bus stop and I see some guys, some black guys. So I think they speak my language. I started to speak English, but I can't. I can't understand what they say."

And school was no less confusing at first. "I can't find my classes because I don't know the buildings or the school," Sylvanus said.

Finding his way around school was especially difficult because in Africa, students do not travel between classes after each period. Instead they remain in one class, and teachers make the rounds. This also made it harder for Sylvanus to settle in with other students at Prospect, because he was accustomed to having a core group he could get to know well, rather than moving on each hour to another set of strangers.

The problem of finding friends was complicated by many things. Even when the African students overcame the language barrier, they often had problems moving conversations beyond the fact that they were African. Curiosity spurred many local students to ask Selame questions, but all they knew about Ethiopia was the 1994 famine.

"It doesn't bother me," she said. "When they keep asking that question, they don't know how life it is over there." She said television gave many Americans a distorted view of Africa. "When they show it on TV," she said, "they show what it was like before even my mom and dad were born. [Americans] think it's still the same like that right now, too."

But for Eyerusalem Kefyalew, a 19-year-old freshman at De Anza College, also from Ethiopia, the ignorance became alienating. "That was the first question," she said. " 'How is the famine now?' I was asked that a lot. I tell them there is no famine. After many questions it felt limited, and I felt left out of the society."

And often, finding friends was difficult because the word meant different things to an African and an American. "I see a lot going wrong with friends here," Eyerusalem said, explaining that her American friends too easily allow things such as boys to come between them. "There, friends are like your sisters. I miss my friends because we would sacrifice and are always there for each other."

Omar said he often felt uninterested in conversations that revolved around classroom gossip because he learned in Somalia not to talk that way. "I get along," he said, "but it's hard, like you're different. You feel how different you are."

Even signature American teenage activities such as dating and parties did not happen in Africa, Selame said. There, teenagers spent much more time with their families and much less only with each other. "People did not get drunk for fun or anything. For sure I know that," she said. And if Ethiopian parents caught their daughter out with a boy without a chaperone, "they would beat you up."

"They miss their friends," said Al Williams, an English language development teacher at Prospect. "It's a rough age for them to come here. We work hard to get them friends, to pair them with another kid who speaks their language."

This often works out well because the experiences of immigrant students are just too different from those of locals for them to understand one another. One can't easily imagine what it feels like to live in Africa, to flee a war or to live every day in familiar Saratoga and experience it as a foreign country.

"If you come here growing up as African, mostly you hang out with Africans," Omar said. "You know your own people, you stick with your own people. That's how it is down here."

Eyerusalem said that her best friend here is an Armenian, even though Armenia and Africa may have little in common. She said they understand what the other feels because they can sympathize with other immigrants. "They know what you put on to get through [the day]."

Getting through each day can involve a struggle just to maintain one's identity. It can be especially difficult for young people who come here in their teen years because they already face so much change in their developing minds and bodies. While most American teens have their hands full discovering their distinct identities in a familiar setting, the African youth have the added challenge of dealing with another culture at the same time. Just at the age when young people most need to feel included, these African youth found that they were vastly different than anyone else around them. And the thing that made them most different was their identity as Africans.

A challenge like this leaves the usual pressure to conform far behind, and these students seem to balance their need for society and keeping a sense of self in different ways.

Selame acknowledges the challenge of adapting here but minimizes the differences. "It's the same. The same thing. We wear the same clothes and all that. It's just life is harder to live there. That's the thing."

Eyerusalem thinks that one must work to make friends here and overcome the ignorance that can separate people. "To come here you have to change yourself a lot. You have to be active. You have to try to make a friend for yourself. Everybody thinks that Africa is so backward a country. You have to show them you can keep up with them."

Omar talked about Americans who don't notice the person he is, but only that he is different because he is African. "I see it, but I deal with it because I know I have a country, I have a culture. It's where I'm from--Africa. That makes me strong. If a person doesn't like it, what have I got to lose?"

However, losing identity is only half the challenge. These young people also have to deal with gaining racial identity. In Africa few of them were ever conscious of their skin color; in fact Selame didn't even understand questions about "color" until given more context. None of the students felt that race naturally separates people, but neither did they feel that race naturally connects people.

Omar told a story about the odd experience of African Americans that he had never met coming up and talking to him.

"When I'm on a bus or in the mall, I get some African Americans who come up and say 'How you doing, brother?' I kinda feel proud, because when a person comes up and say, 'How you doing, brother?' you feel like they're showing respect."

None of the students said they remember African people paying much attention to race at all. "Here it's like you're black, you're white, all this kind of thing," Selame said. "I mean I never knew about this kind of stuff when I was back home."

Eyerusalem commented that "feeling different for being black is new here."

The changes involved in coming here are even more significant because many of these students do not even live with their immediate families anymore.

"My family, they're not here," Omar said. "I came here by myself. I'm here with some guy, he's my uncle. Kind of a far uncle. Kind of a friend to my dad."

Selame said that her parents are in Germany and that she is living with cousins.

Thus family situations and expectations are different here. For example, all the students said they are expected to cook for themselves now and clean the house. This sort of self-reliance may sound normal to Americans, but none of these students were required to do chores in Africa. With even their home situations so changed, these students have literally no anchor to what they have known except for their own sense of self.

In the end, America has been not a melting pot for these students, but a crucible. They have not easily melted into a homogeneous society, but they have been tested and tempered by their lives here. It may be that self-reliance has become such a strong American value because immigrants need it to survive. In Eyerusalem's words, "You have to be able to accept and like yourself and face up to every problem you got. If you're that kind of person, you're fine."

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