An Ordinary Day — Not

It felt like an ordinary day even though it was only the second week of autumn term. Summer break had officially ended over a month earlier with the usual round of faculty workshops, tweaks to syllabi, and printing of reading packets. I’d worked at the University of Minnesota for several years by then, and, as unlikely as it had once seemed that I could ever face standing up in front of a roomful of students, I was still enjoying it. The students made the work rewarding. As immigrants and refugees from all over the world, they had interesting – and often hard – stories and were highly motivated to create new and better lives for themselves and their families.

Sitting on the number 16 bus to campus soon after nine o’clock, the fresh air blowing in through the open window felt good on my face. Thinking that with the worst of the season’s heat over, a lunch time walk might be just the thing, I noticed something vaguely odd about the African American guy in the seat opposite me. Rather than nodding along to the beat of whatever music he was hearing through his headphones, I realised he’d started shaking his head slowly and asking, ‘Damn, is this real?’ He repeated the question to nobody in particular, and as he stood to get off the bus, he concluded, ‘One thing’s for sure, we be goin’ to war with somebody after this’. It was odd, but if you take city buses often enough, it isn’t that surprising to hear someone talking aloud like that . . .

The corridors of Appleby Hall were quieter than usual, and that turned out to be because students and staff were gathered around televisions and computers watching news of a terrorist attack on New York City. The young man on the bus must have been listening to reports of what had been unfolding there. His ‘Damn, is this real?’ made sense now. The television images probably looked more ‘real’ than the news report had sounded, but were just as hard to take in.

My class was due to start at 10:15, and the students were talking quietly in their seats when I walked into the room. I thought of these first-years as “adults-plus” because although they were mostly only 18 or 19, many of them had already experienced more challenges than their peers would face in a lifetime. Some had spent years as interpreters and mediators for parents who struggled to learn English and adapt to the culture. Others had come more recently from refugee camps in Kenya and Thailand. Many of the students from African countries – Somalia, Uganda, Congo, and Burundi, to name a few – had fled from war.

They were preoccupied with the news, so rather than jump straight into what I’d planned for the class, I asked if anyone wanted to talk about what was going on. Gada said simply, ‘We are scared. We thought we’d be safe here in America. We came a long way to be safe’. I tried to calm their fears a little by talking about how faraway New York City was from us, and how rare it was for terrorists to attack the US directly.

Just then, we heard a loud noise from the corridor. Through the upper part of the classroom door, I could see that the janitor had dropped something heavy – a metal waste bin perhaps? I barely had time to register this when Mabina hit the floor. He crouched under the desk, head down, hands over his ears, shaking. I began automatically moving towards him without really knowing what I was going to say or do when one of the Somali students said to me with a quiet urgency, ‘No, wait, miss, he’s upset, he might have forgotten where he is’. He squatted down next to Mabina, and spoke in a soft, casual way, ‘Hey, man, that sound freaked me out too, but it was just a garbage pail or something. You’re here in Minneapolis, with friends. Look, we’re all ok. It’s all good’. He normalized his classmate’s actions and emotional state just like that. It was clear that he had been around people traumatised by violence before and knew exactly how to calm them down. Mabina got up and went back to his seat. Parts of his shirt were dark with sweat.

I don’t remember much else about that class session. At around noon, we got the word that the university was closing for the rest of the day. Most people felt compelled to watch and rewatch the news about the Twin Towers on television, presumably trying to process the shock. My students’ reactions to it had in turn shocked me into grasping that while I was ‘aware’ of some of their past experiences of conflict and violence, I had no real understanding of what it meant to carry the burden of such experiences.

By Renata Mariefitz