THE PHOTOGRAPH
By Aruna KenyiI will tell you now about the night everything changed. It was the hour just after dinner when families go to visit each other. Everybody gets up and wanders from place to place, saying their hellos. My tribe, the Bari — we’re very friendly people. I was with three of my brothers, playing. I would have been five years old. Meanwhile, my parents had gone to our garden, to pick corn.That’s when the Arab militia attacked. Everything was peaceful, and then I heard a noise like an earthquake. I saw the plane coming, and they started bombing our village. Then they came in trucks. The soldiers were yelling at us to leave our homes, and they started killing people and burning everything.
Of course, everyone ran in a different direction to save his or her life. Some mothers and fathers even forgot their kids. That’s how I was separated from my parents. My brother led us into a cane field and we hid there for the night. We could see the fires and hear the screaming. There were many mosquitoes and the grass was sharp and wet on my face.
In the morning there was nothing left. No houses, nothing. My oldest brother, who was 20 at the time, said, “It’s no use. Our parents are probably dead, and we don’t want to die here, too,” so we got up from the field and started walking. “I’d rather die ahead,” he said.
I just wanted my parents, that’s all I remember. From that point on my life has been one of never getting to say goodbye.
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PONCE DE LEON WALK
By Kahiye Hassan
It was common for my father and me to take a walk around Portland in those first weeks. We were like Ponce de Leon trying to find the legendary “Fountain of Youth.” Our journey started on the October morning we headed out Danforth Street towards the Old Port. I had never seen so many dead leaves lying on the ground. The bright yellows, reds and oranges were like the sun lying on top of the earth. This was very weird to me because the life hadn’t been sucked out of the leaves. When I snapped the edge off the stem of a yellow and red leaf, white fluid oozed out. The trees didn’t look lifeless either. Their roots were healthy beneath the ground. The grass couldn’t be any greener. The ground was moist because it had rained a couple weeks earlier. Not like in Kenya. When it rained there, it rained — for hours, sometimes days. Here the rain was about a five-minute thing, and there wasn’t any sign of drought. . . .One night, it just got really cold. My feet and my fingers for the first time were frozen. I went to bed seeing the stars, but the next morning, when I woke up, it looked like someone had covered everything up in a lustrous blanket, or had a pillow fight. It was still cold. After eating jelly for breakfast, my father and I took our dirty clothes to the laundry. As we walked on this white pearl frosting, it felt like a sponge that didn’t keep its shape. The sun reflected on the blanket, making sparks. After we washed our clothes, we headed down State Street toward Danforth Street, and this white fragile puffy cotton came tumbling down softly from the sky. I wondered if it was raining, but I couldn’t hear it, and I couldn’t feel it. It just appeared. The atmosphere was getting warmer. I took my gloves off to reach for it, but it melted on my hand. I stuck my tongue out. It didn’t taste how I expected — it was just like water. My dad reached down, picked some up and threw it at me. He sprayed my face and put some more inside my jacket. I jumped up because it was cold — it felt like glitter was under my jacket. I tried to spray him, but it didn’t reach. This was how I first learned to make a snowball, pressing it together with my gloves. I tossed the snowball at him, hitting him in the back of his neck.
