Along with many other African refugees, the Myer family received government assistance and was brought to resettle in the urban center of a city, where problems of drug use and violence were and still are rampant. Like many immigrants and refugees, the Myer family experienced tremendous difficulties with language and culture differences upon their arrival in the USA. Mahdi and Gloria knew no English before they came to the USA. Once here, for a few months they attended ESL classes offered by the Catholic Charities, where they learned basic survival English. As Gloria pointed out, the short English classes only helped them to speak some simple sentences, but they did not learn how to read or write English. Mahdi also participated in a 6-week job training program and got a job in a meat factory as a meat slicer. Gloria stayed home for a few months before she got a job in a food factory about an hour away from their home. Their hard work eventually allowed them to purchase a two-story house in 2004 in the same neighborhood where they could afford to live.

The Myer family was grateful for the opportunities they had in America, but adjustment to their new life was difficult. Rahman put it succinctly, “Everything is different.” One of the biggest challenges was that “language is difficult” (Abok). For Rahman and Abok, the first 2 years had been especially difficult as they could neither follow nor understand many of the classroom activities. Rahman, for example, relied on his Sudanese classmates to translate for him in class. Though Gloria and Mahdi studied English, their short training was not enough for their daily lives, especially when they wanted to be more involved in their children’s homework. For the children, language became a barrier to doing well in school. Mahdi described the children’s struggles: “When we came here, don’t know anything about English to assimilate, so even they doesn’t know how to greet people that day. My elder son was just came when he was 10 years, and when we came, he was just couldn’t communicate full without knowing ABC … And he don’t [know] how to count one, two, three.”

Mahdi and Gloria also experienced a decline or drop in terms of their occupational statuses in the USA (Chiswick, Lee, & Miller, 2003). Although both Gloria and Mahdi were employed, their jobs here were very different from the positions they held in Sudan. For Mahdi, the most important thing was to have a job that enabled him to pay for the house and to support the children. He went to work at 4:00 p.m. and returned home around 2:30 a.m., except Saturday night. He slept about 2–3 h after he came home from work, then he would get up around 5:00 a.m. to drive Gloria to work. After he came back from Gloria’s workplace, he drove the children to school. After that, he attended classes at the community college where he took courses in business administration. When his classes finished at 2:00 p.m., he went to a computer lab to do his homework before he went to his job. Sometimes he went home to check the children’s homework or to take a quick nap before going to work. On Saturdays, he shopped for the family groceries in the morning and took the children to a laundry mat in the afternoon, and on Sundays he took the whole family to church in the morning. In the afternoon, he had a couple of hours to run errands or catch up with his schoolwork before going to his job. Though work (and life) was hard, Mahdi knew that this was what he had to do in America: “Now I know a little bit English. So, I want to go ahead. For instance, my major is now business administration because I was working as an accountant in my country. I like my job that time. But here like, can I do that? Here, I have to do, start from the beginning, so that I can get my degree or my certificate so that I can work … you don’t want [this meat slicing] work in my country. I don’t do that. I was sitting at the office and doing the calculation thing.”

For Gloria, the change was even greater. In Sudan, her job as an Arabic teacher was neither stressful nor physically demanding. At home, she had relatives to help with house chores, and she did not have to do much. Here, she had to get up at 4:00 a.m. every day to get the children’s meals ready before going to work at the food factory. In the afternoon, she took the bus home and was often so exhausted that she could barely move, but still she had to make sure that the children completed their homework while she prepared dinners for them.

From the perspective of outsiders, Mahdi and Gloria had achieved the so-called American dream—they had their own house, both were employed, and they had a car. But Gloria had never felt happy here; she really missed her life in Sudan and would return at any time if possible. “Here I have to do everything. I’m all alone here. I am not alone back home. I have a lot of people.” For her, being in America was like being “a guest in another person’s house.” However, she knew that she would not be able to return because her family had fled to different places all over the world as a result of the war in Sudan.

In addition to being uprooted from her family and community, Gloria also missed the vast safe and open spaces they used to enjoy back home in Sudan. She noted, “Back home, you know everyone, you have a lot of place for kids to go out and play. Here you don’t know your neighbors, and houses are so close to each other, no yard. No place for kids to play. It’s driving them crazy.” To her, the only solace was that she could get together with a few other Sudanese families on weekends once in a while.

The Myers maintained a strong Sudanese identity. Mahdi stated, “We are not African Americans, we are Sudanese American.” Gloria commented that even though African Americans and Sudanese have the same skin color, they “behave differently.” Mahdi explained the difference:

Africa is composed of many countries, more than 40 countries, and people say that I’m African American because they don’t know their origin from Africa. This is Sudanese, Nigerian, Egyptian, Ethiopian … you don’t know … you don’t know where you came from, but to me, or my kids, they know that origin where they came from. I know my country, I know my hometown. I know my village, I know my parents like that. Even my kids, I have to tell them, that twins, they were born in the USA. I used to tell them. Now Sudanese, their hometown is Waw, that village, something like that and also there were cultures, you, everybody … has to learn, to know, to teach them from his father [to] grand, grand, grandfather … they supposed to know that.

For the children, being Sudanese meant being respectful to others, while African Americans tended not to be. In their view, African Americans did not like to listen to elders or parents. The Myer children mostly socialized with Sudanese friends at school, because “you can talk to them normally” (Abok). They were also very sensitive to how others treated them as Blacks. Abok, for example, noticed that a White bus guard treated Black students differently from the Whites. “If a Black student chew gum on the bus, he’ll say it’s not good, but when White students chew gum, it’s okay.”