We met at Kakuma, in a home economics class. She was three years younger than me, and was very smart, which is how she and I found ourselves placed together. It was required in the camp, for young men and women both, and this caused much consternation among the Sudanese elders. Men taking cooking classes? It was absurd to them. But most of us didn't mind. I enjoyed the class a great deal, even though I showed no aptitude for cooking or any of the other tasks involved. Tabitha, though, showed no interest in home economics, or even in passing the class. Her attendance was infrequent, and when she was present, she scoffed loudly every time the teacher, a Sudanese woman we called Ms. Spatula, attempted to convince us how useful the lessons of home economics would be in our lives. Ms. Spatula did not appreciate Tabitha's scoffing, or Tabitha's disdainful sighs, or those days when Tabitha read from her paperback novels while Ms. Spatula demonstrated the ways to cook an egg. Ms. Spatula did not at all appreciate Tabitha Duany Aker.
But the boys and young men did appreciate her. It was impossible not to.
There were more girls in classes in Kakuma, more than in Pinyudo, but still they were the minority, one in ten at best. And they would not last. Every year they were removed from school in order to work at home and prepare themselves to be married off. At fourteen, any girl without a deformity would be spoken for-sent back to southern Sudan to become the wife of an SPLA officer who could afford the dowry demanded. And they would in many cases go happily, for it was not a good life for a girl at Kakuma. Girls were worked to the bone, were raped if they left the camp looking for firewood. They had no power at Kakuma, they had no future.
But no one told this to Tabitha. Or they had and she was undaunted.
She lived with three brothers and her mother, an educated woman who was determined to give Tabitha the best life possible under the circumstances. Tabitha's father had been killed very early in the war, and her mother refused to be taken in by her husband's family. In many cases in Sudan, the brother of the deceased will assume the wife and family of his brother, but Tabitha's mother would have none of that. She left her village, Yirol, and made her way to Kakuma, knowing that a life in Kenya, even in a refugee camp, might provide a more enlightened world for her children.
I was thankful for her mother's courage and wisdom. I was thankful each time Tabitha chose to attend home economics and each time she rolled her eyes and every time she smirked. She was the most intriguing young woman at Kakuma.
Eventually we were boyfriend and girlfriend, or as close to that status as was possible for teenagers at Kakuma, and I told her many times I loved her. These words, when I used them then, did not mean what they meant much later in America, when I knew that I loved her as a man loves a woman. At Kakuma we were so young; we were careful and chaste. It is not proper, even in a camp like that, for young people to parade their affections before the community. We met for walks after church, we snuck away when we could. We attended events at the camp together, we ate with friends, we talked while waiting in line for our rations. I stared at her heart-shaped face, her bright eyes and round cheeks, and it was everything to me then. But what was it? Perhaps it was nothing.
She left Kakuma before I did. This was extraordinary, for there were very few girls in the Sudanese resettled in the United States, and almost none who had parents in the camp. Tabitha claims it was luck but I believe her mother was clever throughout the process. When the resettlement rumors became true, her mother was brilliant; she knew the United States was interested in the unaccompanied minors. Anyone with parents at Kakuma would be far less likely to be considered. She allowed her children to lie, and she herself disappeared, went to live in another part of the camp. Tabitha and her three brothers were processed as orphans, and because they were young, younger than most of us, they were chosen, given early passage, and were even kept together once in America.
With their mother still in Kakuma, Tabitha and her brothers settled in a two-bedroom apartment in Burien, a suburb of Seattle, and all attended high school together. Tabitha was happy, was becoming an American very quickly. Her English was American English, not the Kenyan English I learned. When she graduated, she was given a scholarship by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to attend college at the University of Western Washington.
By the time I arrived in the United States, almost two years later, she had forgotten me, and I her. Not entirely, of course, but we knew better than to hold on to such attachments. The Sudanese from Kakuma were being sent all over the globe, and we knew that our fates were not ours to determine. When I settled in Atlanta, I had few thoughts of Tabitha.
One day I was talking on the phone to one of the three hundred Lost Boys who regularly call me, this one living in Seattle. There had been a cease-fire declared in southern Sudan, and he wanted to know my opinion, since he assumed I was very close to the SPLA. I was in the middle of explaining his mistake, that I knew as much as or less than he did, when he said, 'You know who's here?' I told him I did not know who was there. 'Someone you've met, I think,' he said. He handed the phone off and I expected the next voice to be a man's, but it was a woman's voice. 'Hello, who is this? Hello? Is it a mouse on the other line?' she said. It was such a voice! Tabitha had become a woman! Her voice was deeper, seemed full of experience, greatly at ease with the world. That sort of easy confidence in a woman is overpowering to me. But I knew it was her.
'Tabitha?'
'Of course, honey,' she said in English. Her accent was almost perfectly American. She had learned a great deal in two years of high school. We talked aimlessly for a few minutes before I blurted out the primary question on my mind.
'Do you have a boyfriend?'
I had to know.
'Of course I do, sweetie,' she said. 'I haven't seen you in three years.'
Where had she learned these words, 'honey' and 'sweetie'? Intoxicating words. We talked for an hour that day, and hours more that week. I was disappointed that she was seeing someone, but I was unsurprised. Tabitha was an astonishing Sudanese woman, and there are few single Sudanese women in the United States, perhaps two hundred, perhaps less. Of the thousands of Sudanese brought over under the auspices of the Lost Boys airlift, only eighty-nine were women. Many of them have married already, and the resulting scarcity makes things difficult for many men like me. And if we look outside the Sudanese community, what can we offer? With our lack of money, our church-donated clothes, the small apartments we share with two, three other refugees, we're not the most desirable of all men, not yet at least. There are countless examples of love found, of course, whether the women are African-American, white American, European. But by and large, Sudanese men in America are looking to meet Sudanese women, and this means, for many, finding one's way back to Kakuma or even southern Sudan.