Strangers in a Strange Land

Click on the video player above to watch a clip from Rain in a Dry Land, a film by Anne Makepeace. (Below) Makepeace and family members from Rain in a Dry Land attend the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C.

For the past two decades, filmmaker Anne Makepeace has been creating films that have taken her around the world and allowed her to share stories about extraordinary people, such as former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and the first modern-day native speaker of the lost Wampanoag language. Her films have received many accolades, including an Emmy award and an Oscar nomination, and have been broadcast on PBS, Showtime, Bravo, HBO, and the BBC.

Tonight, Makepeace will visit BU Cinematheque, a College of Communication program that screens and discusses the work of accomplished filmmakers, to share one of her latest film projects, Rain in a Dry Land. The film follows two Muslim Somali Bantu families who struggle with the transition from a Kenyan refugee camp — where they lived for 13 years after a civil war broke out in their homeland — to life in the United States.

BU Today asked Makepeace about the experience of creating Rain in a Dry Land.

BU Today: What inspired you to tell these families’ stories?
Makepeace: I was reading this article on the front page of the New York Times that said 12,000 Somali Bantu refugees were going to be coming to the United States over the next couple of years and were going to be resettled in 50 cities across the country.

They were farmers who had never seen stairs. They’d never seen ice. Everything in the United States would be completely new to them. And the Bantus in Somalia were an oppressed minority, not allowed to attend school or vote, so they were not literate in any language. And they were Muslim. So I thought, how were these illiterate Muslim farmers going to do in American cities?

But over the course of making the film, my feelings about what the story was about changed. The first thing that drew me to it was the stranger in a strange land story — how are these people going to manage? There’s a scene where they’re in the Newark airport. There’s this escalator about four stories high, and they’re intimidated, but they get on it. That first step, they just get on it. So to me, the story then became about the kind of courage and resilience they show.

How did you decide which families to film?
When I got to the refugee camp in Kenya, it turned out, almost a whole group from one cultural-orientation class was going to Atlanta, and only a couple of families were going to Springfield, Mass. Luckily, one of those two going to Springfield was the family I ended up filming. That was a family with a very strong father, a very depressed mother, and seven children — five of whom are male — so it was a very male-dominated family.

I had a larger choice from the families going to Atlanta, so in contrast to that very male-dominated family, I picked a family led by a single mother, Arbai, with two very beautiful teenaged daughters.

With the language and cultural barriers, how did you get the families to share their stories with you?
The way things started out in the refugee camp was really terrible, because it turned out that the translator I hired had infuriated a lot of people. There were actually death threats against him, so I had to fire him.

But as often happens in the world of documentary filmmaking, when something falls through and you think it’s all over, something much better happens. And that happened in this case. The replacement translator I hired is Somali Bantu, and he had somehow managed to receive an education in Nairobi. The community trusted him, so people were willing to open up. He also knew what I needed to get on film. And because he knew all their stories, he asked more questions to get them to elaborate on their experiences. The interview material is unbelievably intimate.

Once we left the refugee camp, we really didn’t have translators with us most of the time. So we had no idea what the families were saying, which they liked. And six months after we filmed the families, the footage was translated. We realized that we had gotten a lot more spontaneous material because the families knew we didn’t know what they were talking about while they were being filmed.

They had never seen movies before — how did they react to the foreign experience of being filmed and eventually seeing themselves on television?
I had big ethical questions while making the film. I explained to the families that they were going to be on television and millions of people were going to see it. But how can it be real for them? They saw television for the very first time in their cultural orientation class.

When I screened the film for the families, I was really worried that they would feel exploited and exposed. And at the end of the screening in Springfield, there was kind of a long silence, and then Aden — the father— got up and made a speech that was quite beautiful. The way it was translated was, “Thank you for telling the history of our family.” It was my best review.

But there’s also a scene when the family going to Atlanta first gets there, and the hosts who take in the family want the kids to pat the dogs, so they’ll be friendly. But the hosts did not know that some Muslims don’t touch dogs. So the kid quickly touches the dog, because he’s pressured to do it. When that clip was seen on the Internet, the child was teased by his classmates, so his mother wanted me to take it out of the film. But it was too late — PBS already had it, and it was about to be broadcast.

Have you been in touch with the families since the end of the film project to find out how are they adjusting now, five years after their arrival?
They’re doing all right. The adults are mostly staying with their own Somali community, but the kids are assimilating, the younger ones especially, and they are doing quite well in school. The older Springfield kids, however, got mainstreamed into classes in their age group, even though they had no formal education before arriving to the United States. So they got left behind.

In Springfield, the father, Aden, who was a farmer in Somalia, got a job partway through the film as a landscaper and carpenter. So for the first time in 15 years, he got to put his hands in the dirt and grow things, which was very moving. And Arbai, the mother in Atlanta, got trained by Goodwill Industries as a high-tech janitor, running huge polishing machines. She was first hired by the Georgia Archives and then by the Centers for Disease Control. So she’s got a good job with good benefits for her family.

They’re doing better than I imagined they would, given the hell they experienced. In Somalia, both mothers were gang raped, and they saw family members killed. And then they spent 13 years in refugee camps — hell in itself. So the fact that they can still have luminous smiles and figure out how to make a life for themselves in a new land is miraculous to me.

Has this experience changed your view of the United States?
The experience actually made me slightly more patriotic, because it really was a good and generous thing for this country to do. And I can’t see that there were any ulterior motives. It’s true that the Somalis provide cheap labor, but there’s lots of unemployment in the towns they moved to, where cheap labor is already available. So I think it was a really good thing for this country to do.

One reason I picked Springfield in particular was that the settlement agency there was Jewish Family Services — I thought that was really cool, that a Jewish organization was resettling Muslims. They did a really good job, but they couldn’t be with them all the time. The families needed somebody to be with them 24 hours a day for the first two months — I remember going over to the family’s house in Springfield one morning right after they arrived, and one of them was spraying the dishes with Raid, because it was under the sink with the cleaning products — and the resettlement agencies just didn’t have the staff to do that. You don’t think about the things that they would know to do or not do.

I do think that if you’re going to bring people over to the United States, there needs to be funding allocated for more support for a longer period of time. But they survived, and they’re doing okay. And none of them would want to go back to Somalia; there is still a civil war going on there. And they certainly wouldn’t want to go back to the refugee camp in Kenya, where they had two meals a day of gruel. So they’re glad to be here. They say things like, “At least we’re not going to be killed, we have food for our families, and our kids are going to school.”

What does the title mean and how did you develop it?
The title was inspired by an expression of theirs that I just found incredibly powerful and moving — that expression is “bish bish,” which literally means “splash splash.” They would say it when something great happened. What it means to them is that when the world is harsh, dry, and dusty and everyone’s hungry, finally the rains come, and it transforms the world. Everything turns green, the flowers bloom, food grows, everybody eats, smiles break out on peoples’ faces, and the world is new.

At first, I thought the title of the film would be Bish Bish, but nobody got it. So then I struggled, because how do you come up with a pithy phrase in English? The closest I could get was Rain in a Dry Land.

What effect did this project have on you and your own life?
I think about how petty my own concerns are. I want to learn how one becomes so resilient and how one develops that kind of courage. The families became role models for me. They consider what life has dealt them, and then they figure out how to go on. These are people who lost children, lost their parents, and they make a life. And to me that’s just completely admirable.

Rain in a Dry Land will be screened tonight, Thursday, February 26, at 7 p.m. in the College of Communication, Room B-05, 640 Commonwealth Ave., followed by a discussion with filmmaker Anne Makepeace. The screening is free and open to the public.

Robin Berghaus can be reached at berghaus@bu.edu.