Newcomers E-Book

Greta Gorsuch

• Herausgeber: Gemma Open Door for Literacy
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 54

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport is bigger than the island of Manhattan. More than seventy million people pass through DFW each year. In Newcomers, five new people arrive at the airport. But they are not starting a vacation or traveling. They come to work. These young people emigrated from Bangladesh, China, Ghana, and Mexico. Some drive buses. Others sell coffee, books, and clothes. And some rub your aching neck and feet in day spas. Travelers pass by them without a second look. Yet their lives are challenging and complex. These employees become friends as they struggle to learn a new culture and understand a very confusing world of work.

Leseprobe

Greta Gorsuch

Newcomers

Greta Gorsuch has taught ESL/EFL and Applied Linguistics for more than thirty-five years in Japan, Vietnam, and the United States. Greta’s work has appeared in journals such as System, Language Teaching Research, and TESL-EJ. She is currently co-editor of Reading in a Foreign Language. Her books in the Gemma Open Door series include The Cell Phone Lot, Key City on the River, Post Office on the Tokaido, and The Night Telephone. She is co-author of Using Theories for Second Language Teaching and Learning (Bloomsbury). Greta lives in beautiful, wide West Texas and she goes camping whenever she can.

First published by Gemma in 2023.

www.gemmamedia.org

©2023 by Greta Gorsuch

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

978-1-956476-25-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

Cover by Laura Shaw Design

Named after the brightest star in the Northern Crown, Gemma is a nonprofit organization that helps new readers acquire English language literacy skills with relevant, engaging books, eBooks, and audiobooks. Always original, never adapted, these stories introduce adults and young adults to the life-changing power of reading.

Open Door

Chapter 1

Ababio Ollennu sat in airport shuttle bus number 36. Its engine rumbled. It was not the good rumble of a new engine. In fact, the rumble was loud. The windows of the shuttle bus rattled and shook. Blue smoke came out the back of the bus. Ababio thought the engine could stop any time it liked. And then, not start up again. He hoped he was not driving when that happened. He could call the airport shuttle office. He could ask for help, of course. But the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport was huge. It had hundreds of miles of roads. The airport also had hundreds of shuttle buses. It might take hours for help to come.

The last time Ababio looked, shuttle bus number 36 had over three hundred thousand miles on it. It was old and tired. It had hard seats. Its carpet had no color anymore. Number 36 smelled like old fried food. Still, it was better than any truck he drove in Ghana. In his college days in Kumasi he sometimes took trucking jobs with his cousin Folami. He needed the money. They moved old clothes, fresh fruit, and sometimes goats or chickens. Those trucks were so old you could not see how many miles were on them. He saw one truck stuck at three hundred fifty thousand miles. He was sure it had many more miles than that.

Once, after taking twenty-four goats to another city, the owner of the truck shouted at Ababio and Folami. “Wash out this truck!” he shouted. “The goats have pooped all over it!”

“Not our fault, man,” Folami answered in his lazy voice. “Goats get terribly excited in a truck. They poop.”

But the truck’s owner kept shouting. Finally, Ababio and Folami got buckets of water. They washed out the goat poop from the back of the truck. Ababio did most of the work. It was always that way with his cousin Folami.

But now Ababio was in America. He had finished a master’s degree at an American university. It was in West Texas, three hundred miles from Dallas. No one in Ghana had ever heard of it. It was not a famous school. But after two hard years, Ababio was done. Now he was looking for a job as a high school science teacher. He wanted to work in the “big city,” Dallas. He graduated in August. It was too late to get a September job at a school. But two schools told him they would talk to him in November. He could start in January. That was two months away.

For now, driving a shuttle bus at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport was okay. The money was okay. And sometimes the work was interesting. His driving assignment this morning was at the airport employee parking lot. The job was simple. He waited at the parking lot. Then workers got out of their cars. Some got off a city bus from Dallas or Fort Worth. Then they walked to Ababio’s shuttle bus. They sat and talked for a few minutes. Ababio had to wait until he had fifteen workers. When he had fifteen, he took them to the airport employee security checkpoint. Then they went through security. After that they walked away to one of their many jobs in the huge airport. The airport really was like a city.

Ababio waited. Workers got onto shuttle bus number 36 and sat down. They had to talk loudly over the rumbling, rattling engine. Many talked in English, the one language they shared. But Ababio also heard two or three other languages he did not know. He laughed. Here they were, in the second largest airport in America. And every single worker on his bus spoke another language as their mother tongue.

Chapter 2

On his second trip to the employee parking lot, Ababio saw some people he knew. They were waiting for the shuttle bus. The shuttle bus stop had a kind of umbrella over it. Today, everyone stood under it. It was only 8:00 a.m. But the early September sun was already hot. This was Ababio’s third summer in Texas. Summers were hot and bright. The heat stayed. It was like Ghana. He didn’t mind. But for his airport friends from China, it was different. It was just too hot for them. One of them, Wei Zhang, turned pink in the heat. Outside, he had to wipe his face with a towel all the time. Inside, with air-conditioning, he was better.