Jacob Deng Mach stood 25 yards from a row of torso-shaped targets, his hands numb and twitchy in the March morning chill. It had been seven months since he entered Atlanta's police academy, and things were not going so well. Despite three days of practice, he had failed on each of his first four tries to pass the firearms qualifying test, and his scores were largely trending in the wrong direction.
Mach, as a young man at the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.
Luke Sharrett for The New York Times
Jacob Mach, center, during his firearms training with the Atlanta Police Department.
Jacob knew that if he did not pass the test twice, he would have to start over and repeat the entire grueling curriculum. If he then failed the firearms test again, he would be dismissed from the academy altogether, quashing perhaps his best shot at an unlikely ascension from war-ravaged Sudan into the American middle class. Suddenly, his hopes for supporting a family on two continents, for paying down his credit-card balances and student loans, for keeping the Georgia Power bill collectors at bay, all hinged on obliterating those targets.
Jacob, who is 33, had been shot at plenty of times as a boy. But he had never handled a gun before joining the academy, and he was proving largely immune to instruction. All elbows and knees, he lacked the fluid coordination of more athletic recruits and sometimes struggled to unholster his weapon or to get shots off in time. He confused sequences of commands, paused inexplicably before reloading, even fired occasionally at the wrong targets.
The instructor positioned behind him, a former Marine named Jason Overbaugh, grew so exasperated that he literally threw up his hands. "Mach, you cannot follow simple instructions, son," Overbaugh told him. "I can't say it any other different way. That's why you're screwing this up."
A more seasoned academy hand, Officer Meredith Crowder, sensed that Overbaugh and Jacob needed a break from each other and suggested she give it a try. With her set jaw and spiky hair, Crowder could be as hard-nosed as any academy instructor. But she had developed an easy rapport with Jacob over the months, and she figured a familiar touch might help. She started by rubbing his back and then spoke to him in a soothing voice.
"Now, you were chased by lions and tigers, right?" she began in her West Georgia twang.
Jacob grinned. The part about the lions was right enough, and he was too preoccupied to explain that there are no tigers in Africa. "Yes, ma'am," he said.
"So," the instructor cocked her head, "what is the big deal with this?"
Jacob realized that Officer Crowder had a point. He certainly had overcome more. There was the death of his father, a rebel soldier, in the Sudanese civil war; the bombardment of his village by government tanks and planes; the barefoot trek at age 7, along with thousands of other tiny refugees, to a camp in Ethiopia; the loss of comrades to lions in the bush and crocodiles in the Gilo River; the starvation so severe that he ate leaves and watched friends drink their own urine.
He lost track of his mother for four years after new strife forced the boys to flee on foot back to southern Sudan. At 12, he had to escape the shooting again, this time hiking to the Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya, where he managed for 10 years on one meal a day. In 2001, after the United States granted refugee status to nearly 4,000 people who had been christened the Lost Boys of Sudan, Jacob was deposited in a drab apartment in Clarkston, Ga., just outside Atlanta. He arrived at age 21 with one change of clothes and a three-month guarantee of government support. There he confronted an alien world of flush toilets and microwave ovens, of impenetrable job applications and accents barely recognizable as English.
It did not take long for Jacob to realize that the streets were not, in fact, paved with gold. "All I knew was that America was the greatest thing in the world," he recalled. "Nobody knew how people struggle in America."
This new life would require new thinking. There was no such thing as ambition back in the village, where each generation of boys tended their families' cattle and crops just as the last did. But in Georgia, Jacob felt he had little choice but to buy fully into the American dream. Traversing Atlanta's sprawl by bus and train and foot, he worked the evening shift at a Publix, unpacking produce, and then the night shift at a Hilton, stocking minibars, at $7.50 an hour. He often found no more than four hours for sleep and snatched naps when he could. Once, regrettably, it was while he was stopped at a red light behind a bus, and his foot slipped off the brake.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
A Lost Boy Grows Up
Dengan url
http://koraninternetonline.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-lost-boy-grows-up.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
A Lost Boy Grows Up
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar