T
GO COMMUNITY
he students of Leah Juelke’s English Language Learner class have spent the semester writing about their journeys to America. The project started when Lost Boy John Bul Dau came to speak at Fargo South High School. Dau was one of the Lost Boys of Sudan who was featured in the award-winning documentary "God Grew Tired of Us." He now runs the John Dau Foundation. After meeting with Dau, Juelke’s students have been writing their own stories for the last two months about their journey of coming to Fargo. We chose Nepalese student Narayan Dahal’s harrowing story of coming to Fargo to feature in this issue. You can read all of the students’ stories at ellfargosouth.weebly.com. Disclaimer: The students in the classes have only been learning English for two to five years. The text has been edited slightly for readability, but, for the most part, it is left as Dahal wrote it.
fargo, n.d.
"We are going to the United States!" I happily yelled to my brothers.
“No way! We are not. You are lying,” my older brother said. “No, I am not lying. We are really going. I swear!” I yelled. My brothers started laughing at me because they thought that I was joking with them. “Go ask mom,” I said to them. My brothers ran to the other room and I heard them asking my mother many questions. “It’s true, we are leaving,” my mom happily told them. It was January 2011 when my parents were discussing resettlement. My brothers weren't at home and I had to go to school. I was so excited when my mom told me that we were starting the process for resettlement. There were only six people in my family. Compared to other Bhutanese families, mine is small. We spent some great times with each other, playing soccer and watching movies. I was six years old when I started elementary school in the refugee camp. Our classrooms were made of bamboo. They were in a small hut that held 35-40 students in one classroom. Our living standards were very low. It was hard to go to school
in the rain because we didn’t have a school bus or a car, so we had to walk. The road was so slippery in the camp. We could have sadly fallen down and broke our legs and nobody would have known. When we started our resettlement process, we had to go to a city called Damak. We had to go to Damak every two or three months for the legal process. We completed the resettlement paperwork on April 19, 2012. Finally, when the day came, we took all of our baggage to the airport. We took our first flight from Chandragadhi to Kathmandu. We had to stay in Kathmandu for five days because of bad weather. Even with the weather, it was a good time because we got to spend time with family and friends. After five days, we took a flight from Kathmandu to Hong Kong. It was morning when we got to Hong Kong. “How long is it going to take to reach our destination?” I asked my brother. “We still have 18 hours to go,” he said. We had to stay in Hong Kong for eight hours. My whole family slept for the eight hours until a stranger suddenly woke us up because it was already time for our flight. It took more than 18 hours to get to Los Angeles. When we got there, we had to do many things at the social security office like get our fingerprints taken and get our 81