Waiting for Matusila
Civil War separated Antley Kassa from his firstborn son. Now an ocean divides them
December 25, 2005
As the oldest of three boys, Matusila Kassa will have a choice bedroom in the new house. He'll have a full bed and cable-access television.
Matusila's family is "too, too happy" with the house, his father Antley says.
They moved from the Victory Court apartment complex on the West Side of Aurora, where World Relief, a Baltimore-based international Christian aid agency, placed them almost four years ago after a much-anticipated flight from Somalia.
They found service-sector jobs. They got their driver's licenses, and debit cards.
This summer, the Kassas bought the house on the far East Side, and this winter they could afford Christmas presents.
For 14-year-old Matusila there are clothes and a school bag. There are games and books carefully chosen by his younger half-brothers, Meryehane, 10, and Birhanu, 7.
The younger boys didn't put Matusila's gifts under the Kassas' squat tree, though. They suspected their big brother would not be home to unwrap them Christmas morning.
The Kassas have been awaiting Matusila's arrival in Aurora for the past six months.
Next week, he'll come, Matusila's stepmother Senait, 31, said in August. Next month he'll have a visa, Antley, 38, promised in September.
Antley and Senait doubt that Matusila has ever seen cable television or a remote control or a Christmas tree.
He lives with his grandmother in Antley's impoverished hometown of Wolyta, Ethiopia. He's never seen his half-brothers, his stepmother or even his father.
An orphan and a refugee
Matusila was born into a home broken by civil war. While Antley served in the thinly stretched Ethiopian army in the eastern part of the country, Matusila's mother, Astar, took refuge in Wolyta in the south.
Months before the boy's birth, two rebel groups overthrew the Ethiopian government. The former dictator escaped to Zimbabwe. The army disbanded, some of its members ending up in prison.
Antley fled.
He joined a group of fellow fugitives, men, women and children, bound for the Biyo Shinah refugee camp in northern Somalia.
It would be 11 years before Antley first spoke to his son.
In that time, Antley gained a new family. His second wife, Senait Gidey, is a resolute Ethiopian woman with stunning cheekbones and wary eyes.
When Antley met her, the cheekbones protruded from hunger. At Biyo Shinah, there was little food.
Refugee camps, says historian Kirk Hoppe of the University of Illinois at Chicago, are "just huge homeless shelters." Disease and crime are rampant. Famished locals intercept the food aid bound for refugees.
Meryehane and Birhanu were born while Antley and Senait were at the camp.
In Wolyta, Matusila was growing up without his mother. Astar had died in childbirth.
Her doctor adopted the newborn. Unlike most Ethiopians, the doctor's family could afford to feed an extra mouth. When Matusila turned 9, the doctor sent him to school with his own children.
Refugee status
Antley feared returning to his family in Ethiopia because he had fought for the ousted regime. He had no contact with his mother or his child.
"Are they alive?" he would ask himself. "Are they dead? I don't know."
Antley talks slowly and deliberately about his absence from Matusila's childhood.
"I am one person," he says finally.
In the late 1990s, conditions in Biyo Shinah improved. There was regular food and water. There was English class. Then one day, in late 2002, a UN officer collected applications for refugee status in the United States. He returned the following year and announced that 22 families had been accepted.
"He called my name," Antley remembers giddily. "I very, very too happy."
The Kassas' case file landed at the offices of World Relief, which resettles about 200 refugees a year in Aurora, and 50 times that number across the U.S. In March, 2002 Antley, Senait, Meryehane and Birhanu touched down at O'Hare International Airport.
Much to tell
New drivers both, the Kassas negotiate the teeming streets of Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood to visit a dingy mini-mart that caters to local immigrants. They tote home rubber-banded decks of $5 phone cards. There is so much to tell Matusila.
Antley's first conversation with his son, then 11, was jubilant and tearful. Antley promised to visit. Matusila wanted to come to Aurora.
Antley put the rest of the family on the phone.
"This is your brother, Meryehane," he remembers saying. "This is your mom, Senait."
Now Matusila's Aurora family calls him twice a week. Letters travel back and forth. "I bot you a lot of thing," Birhanu informs his new big brother in uneven second-grade handwriting.
Meryehane, a fourth-grader, promises to show Matusila "stuff in America" like restaurants and television and computers.
When Matusila comes, Meryehane says, they'll "play a lot" and "go to the library." Maybe Matusila will escort his brothers the five blocks to McCarty Elementary School. (To get to school in Ethiopia, the teenager walks for two hours.)
When Matusila comes, Birhanu will educate him on the difference between cable access and the DISH Network. They'll eat pizza and frequent Chuck E. Cheese.
Opportunity for education
Matusila's father and stepmother have more long-term plans for their son.
When Senait phones him in the half-hour break between English class at Waubonsee Community College and the 3:30-to-midnight shift packing boxes at Dart Container Corporation in North Aurora, she tells him he can get a "good job" in America. She describes his new room and his walk-in closet full of unworn western clothing.
But Senait talks most about American education.
"I need my children best school go," she says.
Matusila has a lot to tell his Aurora family. His letters to the Kassas are written mostly in Amharic with snatches of British English. One came folded around a picture of the teenager holding a book.
"I am very clever student," Matusila assures his father in painstaking lowercase letters. "Every day my life, library."
Matusila lives with his grandmother now. A portion of Antley's paycheck from his job at Dart Container helps support them. Converted into Ethiopian currency, Senait says, "it's good money."
Waiting in Aurora
Matusila is trying to be patient, but the lengthy immigration process is difficult. His voice — formerly full and jubilant — has grown weak on the phone, Senait says. She shakes her head. Her stepson is 14 years old and he's never seen his father.
"But what can I do?" she asks.
Since granting Matusila a U.S. visa would allow what immigration officials call family "reunification," the teen has an edge on most would-be Americans, the Kassas' caseworker says.
Still, the process is unpredictable. The American embassy in Addis Ababa is a 12-hour bus ride from Wolyta. Immigration officials want proof that Matusila is Antley's child. In August, father and son produced matching DNA tests. Matusila's arrival seemed imminent. Then violence in Addis Ababa temporarily closed the American embassy.
Senait really thought her family would be together for Thanksgiving, she confides one snow-caked afternoon over thick Ethiopian coffee and microwave popcorn.
"Christmas," she says finally. "Maybe he's come Christmas."
Half of Ethiopians are Muslims and about a third are Christian. The Kassas are regular church-goers. Before meals, Senait and Antley recite a prayer in Amharic that young Meryehane translates as "thank you God for bringing us here from Somalia and bring my brother."
A better life
Bringing Matusila to Aurora will protect him from the violence and instability that trapped his father at 14. Antley remembers being about that age when a van of military personnel pulled into a market in Wolyta, snatched him off the street while his family watched, and inducted him into the Ethiopian national army. Almost 10 years later, that service to his country forced him into the refugee camp.
When Matusila comes to Aurora, he'll hear the stories from Biyo Shinah, the ones Meryehane and Birhanu, too young to remember, try to digest from the cozy safety of the Kassas' new kitchen.
Senait doesn't talk readily about her past, but Antley willingly offers explanations of the scars that fleck his skin.
He might start with the silky pink patch on his forearm, a poorly healed gash carved by Somalian thugs in 1994, when the camp became a battle ground in an ongoing Somalian civil war. There was nothing to eat. Violence was standard currency. Antley hid during the day and ventured out after dark, to scrounge for food.
For about four months, Antley says, "there was no police, no government.
"Nobody was there."
Antley wants a different life for his first-born son.
When Matusila comes, he'll have his own room and health insurance and rides to school. He'll have parents.
For Matusila, Antley hopes, somebody will always be there.
