Debra Pickett

First of all, you should know what the graffiti said. It said, "Niggers not wanted."

And, second, you should know who some of the "niggers" in question are. They're my friends.

I wrote about the Sambola family in my December 23 column. (The full text is posted at the bottom of this blog entry, since, ridiculously, it is no longer available for free on the Sun-Times' website.) Daniel and his daughters Mariama and Jariatu are refugees of the Liberian civil war, and were living in a refugee camp in Sierra Leone before coming to the US in August.

I arrived at their building on Monday evening to find police cars and TV news trucks assembled outside -- never a good sign. It was just before dark and the black spray painted sprawl was still clearly visible.

I went in to find Daniel, the girls, his fiance and her sister and children all staring out the window at the chaos going on just below their 3rd floor apartment.

As I walked in, Daniel asked, "What does this mean - 'niggers?' Do they mean us, the blacks?"

I had no idea what to say.

And, hours later, I'm still way too angry to figure anything out. A man risks his life and leaves behind everything he has to come to a country where his daughters will have, he hopes, a safe and healthy future. And then some a**hole vandalizes his building.

What gets me most is not how upset Daniel is -- he has every right -- but how utterly calm his daughters are. Being hated by their neighbors doesn't surprise them at all.

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December 23, 2005

BEST PART OF HAVING SO MUCH IS SHARING WITH THOSE IN NEED

The whole thing started with some extra pots.

Between the stuff from my place and the stuff from his place, we had a serious surplus of kitchenware. And that wasn't counting the wedding gifts.

So, wanting to be a virtuous citizen and to assuage some of the guilt that comes with incredibly conspicuous consumption, I called Catholic Charities' Refugee Resettlement office and asked if there were any families who might be in need of pots and pans.

Caseworker Sarah Aulie returned my call right away and told me about some Liberian families who'd just arrived from refugee camps in Sierra Leone. She'd asked them what they needed and the first thing anyone thought of was a pot with a lid.

WHAT WOULD OPRAH DO?

Probably for a normal person, the transaction would have ended there. But I'm a global busy body with a slight Messiah complex, so when Sarah asked if I'd like to meet some of the new arrivals, I immediately said yes.

She soon introduced me to Mariama and Jariatu Sambola, sisters who, with their father Daniel, had landed in Chicago in August and were trying hard to adjust to life in a strange new city.

Now, a few months later, we're friends.

The cliche thing to say is that I get more out of our relationship than they do. And, yes, certainly, while I have offered help with reading and, on an extremely limited basis, biology homework, they have given me invaluable practical advice on things like how to use the camera feature on my cell phone.

But when it comes to stuff -- and, in the true spirit of the holiday, let's just be crass and materialistic for a moment -- I've got tons of it, and they've got almost none.

So I like to give them things.

MEET THE GIRLS

Mariama is 15 and the kind of older-than-her-years kid who can break your heart with a single, world-weary sentence. Like when she told me about how she hadn't made any friends in her new school because all the kids she met liked to smoke cigarettes and steal things. She is the neighborhood baby sitter and is quicker to scold her charges ("all my small ones," she calls them) than most teen sitters would be, but that's got at least a little something to do with her memories of spending weeks in the bush, hiding from marauding soldiers in the Liberian civil war. If you weren't quiet then, you were liable to be killed.

It takes a while for Mariama to warm up to people, and she doesn't always speak up for herself, so she spent her first two weeks of American high school going through the cafeteria line each day only to be told that she couldn't have anything to eat because her free-lunch paperwork had somehow been misplaced.

On Monday, we spent an hour sitting on the couch and reading together from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Her smile grew with every paragraph.

Her younger sister Jariatu, 11, is more of a free spirit. Much of her life has been spent in a refugee camp, which sounds dismal until you realize how much better it is than war. As a camp kid, Jariatu learned how to charm people. We went to dinner one night at Bolat, the West African restaurant in Lake View, and, within about five minutes, Jariatu had a table full of Nigerian cabdrivers wrapped around her finger. At the end of the evening they were eager to pick up her not-insubstantial bar tab (three orange Fantas) and to chauffeur her wherever she might like to go.

Jariatu hates the cold, and she's picked up the habit of loudly declaring "S---!" whenever she steps outside. I try hard not to laugh at this or at the way she keeps her hat and gloves on inside my house as a protest against the budget-conscious thermostat setting. If she does not become a lawyer or movie star, she will make an excellent tabloid photographer. "Let's take snaps!" she shouts whenever she comes across any electronic device that might have a camera feature. And then she scans the room for the person who looks least like they want their picture taken.

PLAYING SANTA

It's possible that I went a little overboard when shopping for their Christmas presents.

"You know," my husband said, as we made the third trip out to unload the car, "I'm thinking maybe you going to Target by yourself is not such a good idea."

But I wanted them to have hip-looking school supplies that the cool kids might notice. And I wanted them to have warm, fuzzy blankets. And funky hats and mittens. And books.

Somehow, though, it didn't feel like the usual Christmas spending binge.

It was way more fun than that.