news-record.com

GREENSBORO - There they stood.

About 30 people, their expectant, hopeful faces scanning the monitors overhead, waited for the arrival of US Airways flight 3579 at Piedmont Triad International Airport.

They were African. American. And African American.

Some of them held handmade signs that said, "Welcome Zulu children."

And when the plane landed, they began to sing -- in English -- a Liberian praise song.

"God, you are wonderful."

"My God, you are excellent!"

As the first passengers started to emerge, one woman stepped away from the group, moving closer to the arrival area. Esther Zulu wore traditional Liberian attire: a long, ivory dress with gold and silver sequins and embroidery, with a matching scarf covering her hair. She stood alone, waiting to embrace the sons she hadn't held in 15 years.

Then there they were.

Kelvin, 19, and Dixion, 18, walked toward her with solemn faces, not as the little boys she remembered, but young men. They began to cry silently, the tears tracing bright, wet streaks down their thin cheeks.

Esther Zulu, no longer able to contain the emotions within her, started to wail as she embraced them. Her deep sobs could be heard throughout the airport terminal.

* * * * *

Kelvin Zulu slung an arm around his mother and wiped his eyes.

The crowd clapped, then formed a sort of impromptu receiving line, as each person embraced the brothers.

They met their sister, Dwonee, whose feet have never even touched Liberian soil. Dwonee, 14, wasn't born when the civil war that separated Kelvin and Dixion from their mother erupted.

And though they were dazed from fatigue and the emotion of reuniting with their mother, the brothers also met the community of people who helped make their arrival possible.

Staff members of the refugee resettlement agency, Lutheran Family Services.

Members of Mount Pleasant Christian Church, which sponsors the family.

And already established Liberians, who will help show them how to live in Greensboro.

According to Liberian culture, these young men aren't just reuniting with their biological relatives. They also are joining an extended family, a network of Liberians who help each other here.

In Liberia, the term "family" is broad and includes an entire village or community. Someone called "father" may not be a biological father but an uncle. The title of "uncle" may not be a biological relative at all. And in times of war, complete strangers may form a family just to survive. Kelvin and Dixion Zulu join a Liberian community in Greensboro that still honors the familial traditions of their homeland.

* * * * *

"Scattered" is the word Liberians use to describe what happened to family members when civil war broke out in their country. Everyone scattered when rebels invaded their villages. Children visiting relatives, fathers gathering food and those left behind -- all fled to survive.

Refugee stories are sometimes hard to document because of language barriers. Post-traumatic stress disorder makes it difficult for some refugees to nail down sequences of events. War survivors such as Esther Zulu mark time with major traumas, such as attacks on their villages or refugee camps and the deaths of their friends and family, says Heather Scavone, a staff attorney for Lutheran Family Services.

According to LFS, Esther Zulu's husband was killed by rebels. Zulu fled her village with her mother. The women hid in a sinkhole, where Zulu's mother died. Zulu remained in hiding alongside her mother's corpse for about a month before she felt it was safe to leave.

Liberia, Africa's oldest republic, was relatively peaceful until 1980, when its leader at the time, William Tolbert, was overthrown following food price riots. Civil war followed, and by the end of the decade, the country had collapsed economically. Charles Taylor, whose army invaded the capital in 1990, was elected president five years later.

Rebel groups splintered and battled each other, leading to the deaths of about 250,000 people. Many thousands more fled Liberia to refugee camps in neighboring Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast. Rebels even attacked refugee camps, forcing people such as Zulu to flee to other camps. Many Liberian teens -- including Zulu's youngest children, Godgive, 15, and Dwonee -- were born in refugee camps.

In 2003, under international pressure, Taylor stepped down and went into exile in Nigeria. The conflict left Liberia in economic ruin and overrun with weapons. Most of its people are poor and illiterate. Even now, its capital, Monrovia, remains without water and electricity.

Greensboro received most of its Liberian refugees about five years ago, when the Zulu family arrived. With Liberia no longer in civil war, most Liberian resettlement cases are family reunifications like the Zulus'.

* * * * *

When a family scatters, parents are left wondering if their children are even still alive.

Esther, Dwonee and Godgive Zulu stayed in refugee camps in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Until five years ago, Esther Zulu feared her other children had died. She found them, not through the Internet, but by networking with other Liberians in the U.S.

"It's a really amazing form of social networking where people are all vigilant about the fact that other families are separated," Scavone says. "They carry pictures in their wallets and talk to each other, spreading the news about who has gone to the U.S. and who's gone to what country."

Word is passed -- even across the country -- by word of mouth, and photos are shared.

Once they're located, work can begin to bring them here. It's important that a newly arrived refugee act fast because they have -- from the date of their arrival in the U.S. -- two years to apply for their spouse and children as derivative refugees. After that, it could take as long as 12 years to bring their families to the U.S.

Soon after her arrival in the U.S., Zulu discovered her children were at the Guiglo Refugee Camp in Ivory Coast. Scavone has worked since then to reunite Kelvin and Dixion with their mother. Their arrival to the U.S. came five years and one day after Zulu's.

Zulu, a single mother, earns a salary that's significantly below the federal poverty line, Scavone says. Yet she supported her two children here, while sending money to Kelvin, Dixion and daughter Mamie for an apartment near the U.S. Embassy, where they underwent numerous interviews.

It's a tedious process that requires constant follow-up and advocacy, Scavone says. Her job also becomes more complicated when, in war ravaged countries, documents are impossible to retrieve.

"Somehow they're expected to come up with these documents when they left their villages with just the clothes on their back," Scavone says.

In many cities, civil offices were destroyed. And birth certificates aren't always issued in remote villages. Scavone says there are about 60 cases similar to Zulu's, but not all of them will result in reunifications.

"Five years to bring your children here is pretty long, for someone who is otherwise eligible," Scavone says.

It's a double standard, she says, because a refugee such as Zulu can come to the U.S. without a birth certificate or other documentation. But for her children to join her, they must have DNA tests and formal documents from a country in which the infrastructure has fallen apart.

Scavone, who has a toddler son, says she awakens in the middle of the night, worried that something she forgot to do could further delay a family being together again.

"In the case of a refugee, who is displaced and put here without a choice in the matter, it's unreasonable to ask them to tolerate an indefinite separation from their family," Scavone says.

And Zulu's quest to bring her family together isn't over. She has seven children: five sons and two daughters. Her eldest son died last year of a food-borne illness in a refugee camp in Ivory Coast, and another son will remain there. Zulu now turns her attention to bringing over her eldest daughter, Mamie, still in Ivory Coast. Scavone says Mamie could arrive by the end of the year.

* * * * *

What family means to Africans is much more inclusive than what it means to Americans. But those relationships can also appear more distant.

The evening that Kelvin and Dixion arrived in Greensboro, their sister Dwonee and brother Godgive hardly acknowledged them.

It was not a tearful, emotional reunion between siblings. Kelvin and Dixion, so tired from their journey, just wanted to eat and sleep. Dwonee goofed around with her Liberian friends on the computer, and Godgive came home a couple of hours after their arrival. He shouted a loud greeting to one brother, then ran upstairs. Godgive and Dwonee hardly mentioned their brothers' arrival to those outside the Liberian community.

Such behavior could be misinterpreted as indifference. But family and what it looks like in American terms is much different in African terms, Maura Nsonwu says.

"It's much more fluid," she says.

Nsonwu has been married to a West African man 21 years, and her mother founded the Glen Haven after-school program for immigrant and refugee children. Nsonwu knows many of the African refugee and immigrant women in Greensboro. She knows one family unit -- a mother and daughter -- who became such because the daughter, orphaned at about age 10, asked the woman, "Will you be my mother?"

They became mother and daughter in a refugee camp, where it's not uncommon for people to just forge a family, even when they're not biologically related.

Zumo Kollie, chairman of the Association of United Liberians in the Triad, says family titles can be deceiving.

The man he called "father," for example, was actually his uncle. He called his biological father by name. He went to his uncle when faced with important life decisions, he says.

Though they may not express affection in the way that Americans do, they share deep bonds of support that extend far beyond immediate family.

In Greensboro's Liberian community, many of the women are single mothers. Their husbands were killed by rebels, and some women had relationships while living in refugee camps. Here, they form a close-knit, supportive network. No one knocks when they enter a home. They help care for one another's children and step in when there's illness or tragedy. When one woman had a stroke and spent several months in a rehabilitation center, the others visited her and helped care for her daughter. When the woman went home, her Liberian friends ensured she had the help she needed.

The Zulus also rely on those outside the African community. They receive assistance from Mount Pleasant Christian Church almost weekly. The predominantly African American church includes both cultures -- African and African American -- in its programs.

Volunteers provide transportation for the family whenever needed, including services. Members also attend doctor's appointments and school meetings with Zulu. When Dwonee had surgery to repair an arm defect four years ago, she stayed two weeks at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem. Members established a transportation plan for Zulu's visits and for Dwonee's physical therapy at Baptist Medical Center afterward. They recently helped Godgive open a bank account and taught Kelvin how to balance a checkbook and use his bank card.

That African proverb, "It takes a village to raise a child," applies to their lives here as much as it did in Liberia. For Kelvin and Dixion to succeed, they will need the help of not only their biological mother and siblings, but that of their extended family too: African, American, and African American.

Contact Tina Firesheets at 373-3498 or tina.firesheets@news-record.com