Thread: African man's instincts led to death on Dallas freeway

African man's instincts led to death on Dallas freeway

11:50 AM CDT on Sunday, May 4, 2008
By DAVID FLICK / The Dallas Morning News
dflick@dallasnews.com

Had Musa Bilay been able to read a map, or had he known something about American freeways, he almost certainly would be alive today.



MONA REEDER/DMN
Dahaba Bilay holds a portrait of her brother, Musa Bilay, who was fatally struck by a car last month while trying to cross LBJ Freeway.


But a confluence of cultural misunderstandings, linguistic isolation and simple bad luck led to the death of a man whose widow and 10 children are now struggling to survive in a country that is both unfamiliar and, often, incomprehensible.

Mr. Bilay and his brother-in-law, Chaku Kallafo, got off work late a few weeks ago and missed the last bus of the night. They decided to walk home, a nine-mile trek across northern Dallas.

The two men, who were dishwashers at Luby's Cafeteria along Midway Road, could have safely followed the road as it dipped under the nearby LBJ Freeway.

But to Mr. Bilay, 51, who had spent most of his life as a farmer in a rural area of Eritrea in East Africa, that route made no sense. Midway Road went south, and his apartment was to the southeast, on Park Lane in northeast Dallas.

"For us, we did it that way," Mr. Kallafo said. "We knew nothing of the roads in Dallas. We did not know where it [Midway] would go. We just knew what direction was home and that we had to cross the freeway to get there."

As they tried to do so, Mr. Bilay was struck by a car and killed instantly.

His wife, Signe Kallafo, still lives in the apartment with nine of the couple's 10 children. Beds and couches line the walls, there is no television, and a small coffee table and a fan serve as furniture.

The air conditioning and lights are kept off to conserve money. Only one picture adorns the walls – a photo of Mr. Bilay. Two crosses made of palm fronds are wedged in the frame.

"With my husband dead, there is no money. I am sick, and I have a 3-month-old daughter, so I cannot work," Ms. Kallafo, who speaks no English, said through a relative who acted as an interpreter.

"I don't know what to do. Everywhere, darkness is around us."

Two of the older children, who are in high school, work part time and are the family's sole wage earners.

A group of Dallas-area Eritreans and Catholic Charities of Dallas, which had sponsored the family since it arrived in August, donated money to give Mr. Bilay a decent funeral.

Eyassu G. Beraki, who is head of the Eritrean group, said the committee does not have the resources to continue to support the family and that support from Catholic Charities ended last month.

Questions to Catholic Charities were referred to a spokeswoman, who declined to discuss the case without the family's permission.

Because Mr. Bilay entered the country under a U.S. State Department program, the family can remain in the country legally. But no one is sure how they will live.

"We are hoping someone will hear their story and help them," Mr. Beraki said. "The American people are very generous."

That generosity allowed Mr. Bilay and his family to find refuge from a civil war in his native East Africa, but his isolation from the ways of a 21st-century metropolis may have contributed to his death.

Mr. Bilay was a member of the Kunama, the most ancient people in Eritrea, whose language is unrelated to any other ethnic group in the country.

After the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia ended in the late 1990s, large numbers of the Kunama – who had stayed in their native region when the Ethiopians invaded – fled from what they feared would be reprisals from the Eritrean government, according to a backgrounder prepared by the Cultural Orientation Resource Center at the U.S. State Department.

Soloman Addas, a nephew of Mr. Bilay living in Salt Lake City, said his uncle fled in 2000 after two family members were taken away by the authorities. He said he did not know their fate, although other family members said the men had been killed.

The family spent the next seven years at the Shimelba Refugee Camp in Ethiopia. They were granted refugee status and came to the United States in August under State Department participation in a U.N. resettlement program.

"They are but little-educated people who came to America for peace and a better life, but they had very deep problems," Mr. Addas said.

While other family members had come to the U.S. under the same program, they were located in other states. And though there are other Eritreans in Dallas, Mr. Bilay and his immediate family were the only people here who spoke Kunama.

"We were farmers. We knew nothing about life here," Ms. Kallafo said.

Larry James, president and CEO of Dallas Central Ministries, said such isolation is highly unusual. Most immigrants in Dallas quickly become part of a tight-knit ethnic community that eases their transition to an unfamiliar life.

"The Asians, the West Africans, the East Africans, they support each other and help each other navigate the system, and it helps transform them up and out of isolation," he said.

Two of Ms. Kallafo's children speak passable English, but they are in school and cannot always be with her. When she goes to the doctor, she said, she can communicate only by hand signs. She said she will receive letters telling her of appointments, but she cannot read them and does not know where the doctor's offices are.

Family members said Catholic Charities helped get Mr. Bilay the dishwasher job and conducted a cultural-orientation session.

But they said the orientation session was conducted in the Tigrinya language, unintelligible to someone who speaks only Kunama.

"I asked the family if they had a meeting with Catholic Charities, and they said they did, but they didn't understand what they said," said Stefano Dago, Mr. Bilay's cousin, who lives in Minneapolis.

Residents of the Shimelba camp were given orientations before their departure, but a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, the intergovernmental group that conducted the sessions, could not be reached for comment.

Todd Pierce, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration – which oversees the resettlement program that brought the Bilay family to Dallas – said that while resettlement in a strange country is difficult in the best of circumstances, he was unaware of a situation in which a family had been as isolated as the Bilay family.

Because the IOM, rather than the State Department, conducted the Shimelba orientation sessions, Mr. Pierce said he was unaware what the immigrants were taught.

"But obviously no orientation course could possibly prepare a family from rural Eritrea for a life in a big American city," he said.

To Mr. Bilay, a man who was virtually illiterate in his native language, Dallas was a bewildering place, family members said.

"He didn't know how to live in a city. At first he didn't know how to ride in a car," said Mr. Kallafo. "People at home ask me if they should come here. I tell them that America is a very hard country to live in."

On April 11, Mr. Kallafo said, he and Mr. Bilay left their jobs at Luby's only to discover that their regular bus had already left. As they had done several times before, they decided to walk home, although the trip took hours, Mr. Kallafo said.

They did not consider the freeway a barrier, he said, because in their country, if you tried to cross a road, the cars would stop.

Mr. Kallafo ran first, followed by his brother-in-law. Mr. Kallafo said he heard a noise, and when he looked back, he saw that Mr. Bilay had been struck by a car.

"I saw the car come to a stop. He was far away and he had skidded sideways and he had his lights on, but he did not come back," Mr. Kallafo said. "I heard later that he called the police and told them about it."

Mr. Kallafo said he stood by the side of the road, shaking with fear.

"I was scared, but I went out and got him and pulled him back to the side," he said. "I didn't want him to get hit again."

Mr. Kallafo waited until police arrived, and then walked the rest of the way to the family's apartment, where he informed them of Mr. Bilay's death.

"Their life is really hard," Mr. Kallafo said. "He was the father and the light of the day. Signe cries all the time. She says, 'I'm by myself. I have a 3-month-old.' "

Four days before he died, Mr. Bilay confided to a friend that he needed to find a second job to support his family.

"His only dream was to find a job," Mr. Kallafo said. "He wasn't happy because he didn't speak the language, but he was happy for his kids, that they would get an education.

"He said he hoped someday that his kids would grow up and they would have an education and get good jobs, and then he could rest."

Staff writer Holly Yan contributed to this story.

HOW TO HELP
Anyone wishing to help the Musa Bilay family may send a check to the "Bilay Ebbit Family Fund" at Wells Fargo Bank, P.O. Box 3488, Portland, Ore. 97208-3488. Or call Mr. Bilay's cousin Stefano Dago at 763-443-3954.

Link

THIS GUY HAD 10 CHILDREN. TEN!!!

Why are these people allowed to come here so unprepared? If I was going to Africa or any other country-you can be sure I'd do my "homework".

Insane and not too smart!

They did not consider the freeway a barrier, he said, because in their country, if you tried to cross a road, the cars would stop.

Well there was his problem. You never stop on a freeway unless you come to a traffic jam or hit something.

Mr. Bilay, a man who was virtually illiterate in his native language

Yep and we will continue to get plenty more of that here