Lightening sliced through a violet sky and trees swayed as the 13 of us drove home from the Varsity, a drive-in diner in downtown Atlanta, on a Friday night. Our big green van soldiered on through the storm as we chatted about our week with Alternative Spring Breaks working at the International Rescue Committee, oblivious to what was brewing a mere 10 minutes behind us. Back at the church that was housing us, we decided to play a game with a neighboring ASB trip that had come to visit. Deafening thunder broke into our conversations and volunteers squealed with delight as they stood at the window, fixated upon Mother Nature’s temper tantrum.
Our friendly game of mafia was interrupted when a volunteer sprinted into the room to announce the news that her mother had just shared in panic: There was a tornado right in Atlanta. Our visitors had only just closed the door behind them when we turned on the television. We saw destruction. The monuments we had posed by that evening, the CNN building which we had gawked at, the stoic Omni hotel and the bridges we had walked under hours before had all been destroyed by downtown Atlanta’s first-ever tornado.
An eager meteorologist detailed the tornado’s path on a map. A thick yellow line tracing the tornado’s war path followed the course our own big green van had taken that night. Unknown to us, the cyclone had followed us home to the Atlanta borough of Decatur with top winds of 130 miles per hour, just missing our church’s street. The mayor and governor had both declared a state of emergency.
While immediate danger was no longer present, I couldn’t help but lose sleep thinking about the refugees we had connected with at the IRC that week. Many of them lived in the area. Were they OK? Did they know what had occurred? I became sick with worry.
I wondered if SingPei, a friendly 24-year-old from Burundi whom I had tutored in English, was OK. He was a shy man who had been a farmer back home. He had been in the United States for two weeks and told me he found Atlanta to be cold. I asked him if he missed his family back home, but he couldn’t grasp the concept.
Had Shenkha, a remarkable man from Nepal, been alone when the storm hit? Shenkha’s story is one of unimaginable tribulation. He left his family behind and escaped to America. Due to faulty translation at the Hartsfield Atlanta Airport, Shenkha was thrown in jail for six months upon arrival. His kind eyes stared into mine as he told me in broken English that all he wanted was to get his work papers and be reunited with his wife and son.
Had Ahmed, the adorable 2-year-old Iraqi child whom I had joked about kidnapping, woken up to the resonating thunder? I tossed and turned thinking about Navid, a 20-year-old charmer from Afghanistan who laughed at me when I mimicked a chicken when trying to explain what an egg was.
No refugee story was the same. They were all fleeing from different kinds of persecution and imminent death. The IRC brought them to Atlanta and set them up with housing, usually in an apartment. They don’t all have jobs, but their struggle in ESL classes was meant to help them with that.
I woke up at 6 o’clock Saturday morning to a text message from our site contact informing us the refugees were all safe. But my gut told me there was more to come as a dreadful roar crashed through the church hallways. Terrified that another tornado was on its way, I ran into the next room and turned on the news. As I waited for the weather, bolt after bolt of lightening bombarded the ground right outside the church. The lights flickered on an off, and I genuinely began to fear for my life. I’m from Massachusetts. Blizzards I can handle; tornadoes, not so much. The meteorologist assured the viewers that storms had calmed, at least until later that afternoon.
The next morning, we crammed ourselves and our luggage into the 15-passenger van, eager to escape the storms predicted. We booked it through Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, checking the weather every now and then. Tornado warnings were all around us, we were told. The road was long, but all we could see was two feet ahead. Rain pelted our windshield and winds attacked every surface. The big green van persevered and we entered much steadier rain in Virginia. We had battled the ferocious storms of the South and would eventually make it back across the Mason-Dixon Line unscathed.
Safe but with 14 hours of travel still ahead, I gazed out the window. The trees seemed to flicker in the frame as if in a flip book. We had weathered this storm, but the courageous refugees with whom we had shared both laughter and frustration at the IRC had weathered a much more significant one. To be forced to leave your family, career, hometown and culture only to plunge into the unknown, eager to start all over, is something that I doubt I could ever do. I recalled something Shenkha said to me as he showed me a book written in Nepali.
“This chapter is called ‘A New Man.’ That is what I am, a new man,” he murmured.
If these champions of humanity can make it through such difficulty, often times alone, a patch of bad weather here and there is survivable. And I am so grateful that we did.
Isis Madrid, a junior in the College of Communication, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at [email protected].