(2/12) “My father arranged for me to stay with a family in...

(2/12) “My father arranged for me to stay with a family in Atlanta while I attended high school. They were distant acquaintances. And they must have thought my family had means, because they kept asking my father for money. When he couldn’t send it, they treated me horribly. I was always getting punished. I was given one meal a day. After school I had to come straight home, because I was responsible for all the housework. I used to sit alone in my room and imagine having conversations with my family. It’s the only way I survived the loneliness of those first few years. After high school I couldn’t afford to go to college, so I moved to New York City to look for work. I shared a one-bedroom apartment with five Guinean cab drivers. We put a partition down the middle of the living room, and laid out mattresses on the floor. Some of us worked the day shift. Some of us worked the night shift. The only place that would hire me was a furniture store in Brooklyn. And since I was undocumented, the owner would only pay me $2 an hour. It wasn’t even enough to eat. I picked up a second job at night, burning and packaging bootleg CD’s in a Bronx basement. I got $20 for a box of 200. It was too expensive to call back to Guinea, so my only connection to home was a letter that arrived each month. I’d sit on my mattress and study every word. The paper would usually be divided into thirds; there’d be a note from my parents, a note from my brother Rahim, and a note from Fatou. Fatou was only twelve years old, but she was already the most clever in our family. Her notes would be full of ideas. There were no places for children to play in our town. And it always bothered her. So she’d write about playgrounds and gardens that she wanted to build. She even designed her own theme park, with a roller coaster. In one letter she told me that she’d decided to become a pediatrician. So much of her life had been around doctors, it’s really all she knew. In Guinea most people with her disease passed away in their twenties. But the treatments were better in the United States. People were living into their fifties. If I could somehow find a way to bring her here, she’d have a real chance.”