Cleo Harris: 'I just don't know what to do'

FIRST OF THREE PARTS

On the morning of her daughter's eighth birthday party, Cleo Harris came home from working the night shift and started frying doughnuts. The familiar feel of the dough, the cozy kitchen of her Brooklyn Park townhouse, the thick smells of hot oil and melting sugar -- all helped push aside the looming question: Was this the last birthday party she would ever throw for her little girl? Harris was pregnant with Yatta in 1998 when she fled Liberia in the chaos and murder of a bloody civil war. She had to leave her firstborn child behind -- lanky, shy Quantah Cooper. It was a wrenching decision, but the 15-year-old girl had no visa. She stayed behind with grandparents. Now 45, Harris has missed Quantah every day of the nine years they've been apart. And now she is confronted with that pain all over again. Later this year, Harris might be forced to return to Liberia. And this time, she might be compelled to leave little Yatta behind. "Yatta has a right to a better life ... a right to stay here," Harris said. "But who would she stay with?" Harris and thousands of other Liberians who are not U.S. citizens have been allowed to stay temporarily in the United States for years while civil war raged in their West African nation. While here, they found jobs, bought homes, started families. Yatta was born here and so is a U.S. citizen. But now, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security says Liberia has stabilized, and Harris and others who are here temporarily must leave by Oct. 1.

This forced departure represents the latest dramatic chapter in the intertwined history of the United States and Liberians. Many of their ancestors first came here shackled in the holds of slave ships. A generation or two later, thousands of freed slaves were sent back to Africa to get rid of them. A country was founded for them.

But indigenous tribes did not welcome the newly arrived "Americo-Liberians." Over time, this tension erupted into the violence that eventually drove Harris and throngs of others back across the Atlantic to America, seeking sanctuary.

And now they may be sent back once again.

The sudden departure of thousands would be a dramatic change to their communities. Officials are just beginning to assess what would happen if hundreds of houses are dumped on the market, if dozens of nursing homes lose skilled workers, if scores of children are pulled from school or left behind.

Cleo Harris' story is just one of many. And to her, the prospect of leaving is nearly unbearable.

She packed up the doughnuts to take to the birthday party. It would break her heart to say goodbye to another daughter. But it would also break her heart to take happy Yatta to a country so destroyed by war.

A looted, violent city

In the lawless capital city of Monrovia, armed thugs had routinely robbed Cleo Harris' house. Once, they yanked her from her bed, tore off her nightgown and beat her with their rifles. Her route to the airport on the day she fled snaked through a cemetery of a city where her brother's bullet-riddled body had rotted in a riverbed, one of more than 200,000 war deaths.

The city had been so looted after two decades of anarchy that every doorway she saw was doorless. Former workers sold stolen goods on the streets. Cassava and other produce were harvested half ripe because of the urgency of the hunger.

What finally sent Harris to America, though, was her pregnancy with Yatta.

For the sake of her first child, Harris had stayed for years while hundreds of thousands of other Liberians fled. With Quantah nearly grown and another daughter on the way, it was time to leave.

"I had to do it," Harris said. "I just kept telling myself, 'You can't bring another child into this hopeless country.' "

African and American

Yatta's eighth birthday party, held at a cousin's house, was rowdy and joyous. Kids raced up and down the basement stairs to grab doughnuts while Harris and the other mothers stirred bubbling pots on the stove. The kitchen steamed with the spicy smells of Liberian stew.

In her second-grade class at Fair Oaks Elementary School, Yatta excels in spelling. At home, she is all energy -- flying braids slapping her shoulders when she and her best friend, TeTee Hill, jump rope. She loves the Disney Channel, PlayStation, Frosted Mini-Wheats straight from the box and teasing her mother.

"I know you like me, Mommy," she taunts when Harris is glued to her favorite TV show. "But you love Oprah."

In Liberia, would Yatta be able to go to school? As an American, would she be targeted by thugs and thieves? Would she fall ill with malaria, which plagues West Africa? And if she did, would there be medicine?

One day Harris finally threw up her hands and said she's trusting God to decide what is best for Yatta because she can't decide herself.

"I don't know ... I just don't know what to do," she said.

Liberia's unique history doesn't help solve the riddle of where Yatta belongs. She is American. She is African.

Yatta's ancestors had been taken to America as slaves, and generations later they returned to Liberia as colonists. They settled near a place called Louisiana, Liberia, and built a big, gray plantation-style house on a hill.

"The house stood on pillars, and I remember playing underneath it," Harris said.

It was there that Harris' grandmother, Dedeh Lambert, taught her to sing when the going got tough.

"She told me that singing would uplift your spirit," Harris said. "It had worked for the slaves in America, and it would work for us in Liberia, too."

Harris also spent a good share of her childhood with a side of her family that had never left Africa -- her mother's tribe, the Kpelle, who lived in the lush rain forests and swamps. Despite ethnic tension in Liberia, marriages were common between indigenous Africans and those who came from America.

When Harris fled the civil war, it was the third Atlantic crossing for her family. Now, she faces a fourth.

Sending thousands back

Estimates of how many Liberians are here under temporary protected status range from 4,000 to more than 10,000 nationwide. More of them are believed to live in Minnesota than any other state, but officials in Homeland Security's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services don't have a precise count. (Minnesota also is home to thousands of Liberians who have become U.S. citizens or won permanent residency and won't be affected by the ruling.)

Homeland Security's announcement last September landed like a ticking bomb. Even those who don't have to return to Africa worry that forcing thousands of expatriates to go home could jeopardize Liberia's fragile hold on peace and stability.

Liberia's new president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has said that the country isn't ready to absorb that many returnees. In a speech in October at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., she said that termination of temporary protected status "would put an unbearable burden on our already strained resources."

Sirleaf's Cabinet took office in buildings without indoor plumbing. Electricity came from private generators because the power grids had been looted.

With international aid, the government has begun restoring electrical power and roads. But unemployment is 80 percent, and Liberia has yet to reform its "criminal culture," Sirleaf said.

Rape remains rampant, said the most recent report on the U.N. mission in Liberia. And tens of thousands of ex-combatants roam the country with no jobs or skills other than killing.

"Liberia is still one of the poorest countries in the world, and noticeable change will take time," said the latest consular information sheet issued by the U.S. State Department.

For all of those reasons, Yatta's father, Pete Cooke of Minneapolis, is leaning against taking her to Liberia. He, too, is here under temporary status. But what would happen to Yatta in Minnesota without her parents?

"This is the big question," Cooke said. "We just don't know."

Liberia needs skilled workers

The national mood is not on the Liberians' side in the United States now. Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, pushed a bill in the last Congress that would have given the Liberians permanent residency.

That bill died, but Reed plans to re-introduce it this month.

One compelling argument against the bill is that skills the Liberians have acquired here could help their homeland rebuild. Many of the Minnesotans who face possible deportation are health care workers. Harris and Cooke, for instance, each hold two nursing assistant jobs. Others in line to lose their residency include teachers and technicians.

Further, Liberians should have known that they were here temporarily, said Marilu Cabrera, a spokeswoman for Citizenship and Immigration Services.

"There is some misconception that this might be a program that could lead to permanent residency," Cabrera said. "It is not. ... Liberia had free elections that this country recognizes, and their civil war is over."

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., helped Somali immigrants win an extension of their temporary status last year. He does not plan to intervene on the Liberians' behalf, but he will try to assist individuals where he can, said his spokesman Luke Friedrich.

"The encouraging aspect is that conditions in Liberia, while far from perfect, have stabilized enough to warrant this change," Friedrich said.

Planning to go, hoping to stay

Several times a week, the phone on Harris' nightstand starts ringing as early as 4 a.m. with calls from friends and family in Liberia who need help paying for medicine, kids' clothes and other necessities.

Now she wonders if she will be the one calling next year.

Meanwhile, she schools Yatta in Liberian culture. When Yatta came home one recent afternoon, Harris had Liberian food on the stove -- thick okra gravy with chicken and fish that she ladled over steaming rice.

Yatta enjoyed the meal enough to ask for seconds, even though her favorite food is a McDonald's burger with fries.

Later, when Harris corralled Yatta to do homework, the two sat face to face at their lace-covered table, and Harris probed the back-to-Africa subject with some gentle banter:

"You have to go to Africa, to Liberia," Harris said.

"No," Yatta said.

"Boy, I'm going there," Harris came back.

"I'm not," Yatta said with emphasis on the "not," then turned to her spelling list.

"Why not?" Harris persisted. "Tell me a reason."S-T-R-O-N-G," Yatta spelled from her list, ignoring her mother.

Sharon Schmickle• 612-673-4432

RESETTLEMENT VS. PROTECTION

People who flee troubled lands may have several options for safe havens. Liberians in Minnesota fall generally into two categories:

Refugee status. Someone who meets international standards as a refugee has several options, including resettlement in a new country. The United States accepts certain numbers of such refugees each year and grants them permanent residency.

Temporary protected status. The United States offers law-abiding nationals of certain countries blanket protection from deportation until the threats in their homelands are abated. Countries listed for the status in recent years include El Salvador, Honduras, Liberia, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan. Each person seeking the status must register with the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. The information provided can be used to deport that person once the status expires. The status for Liberians is set to expire on Oct. 1.

SHARON SCHMICKLE