109 pages • 3 hours read
Sandra UwiringiyimanaHow Dare the Sun Rise
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
In Rwanda, Sandra’s family struggled, still barely able to feed themselves. Occasionally, a neighbor offered food or money. Still, Rachel maintained faith. Soon, Princesse got a scholarship to go to college in Kigali and a job at the government minister’s office—a rare opportunity for an undocumented immigrant. She helped support the family with her earnings. Shortly thereafter, the family joined a local church. One of the members of the congregation, whom Prudence befriended, was the head of a boarding school. The man helped Sandra and Alex re-enroll in school, which was three hours away by bus in the mountains. Both children made friends quickly and stayed in touch with the family by phone.
At the end of 2005, Prudence heard about a resettlement program organized by the UN. This opportunity would require the family to undergo a series of interviews with the UN in Burundi. Rachel balked; she did not believe that they could ever move to the United States.
The following year, Prudence went to the first two interviews by himself. After he was invited back for another round, he took the family with him. At the UN office, other families who survived the massacre waited to be interviewed by UN workers, all of whom were white. During their interview, Sandra and her family were asked a series of questions about the deaths in their family. She observed how the UN interviewer treated Deborah like another statistic. Sandra also worried about possible discrepancies in her responses, wondering if this could hurt her family’s chances of moving to the United States. If they did get the opportunity, she was not sure how she would feel about living abroad.
After a short wait, the family got the news that their application was accepted, and they would be moving to the United States. They all took classes to learn more about their future home. They watched videos that showed a cold, snowy place. One UN worker instructed them never to stare or point at people, which Sandra found absurd. They then got their departure schedules. Heritage would leave first, then Sandra, Alex, and all of the other children under 18 would depart with their parents. In April 2007, Sandra left Africa and moved to Rochester, New York.
Chapter 14 Summary
Sandra and her family boarded an airplane for the first time and were in awe of it, wondering how the cabin had electricity and where their waste went after they used the toilet. Other families who survived the massacre were on the plane too. Everyone was confused by the language barrier, as all the labels were in English, causing errors such as sprinkling packets of salt into tea.
They had layovers in Kenya and London, then the plane landed at JFK International Airport in New York City, during a snowstorm. To stay warm, Sandra and her family wrapped themselves in Rachel’s traditional, brightly patterned cotton dresses. They tried to find their connecting flight to Rochester, which was a challenge since none of them spoke English. They finally found their gate and arrived in Rochester at dawn. Heritage was waiting for them at the airport, accompanied by a Ukrainian caseworker named Katarina and a Ugandan refugee named Jacob, whom Heritage had befriended.
When they stepped outside of the airport, Prudence was so shocked by the cold that he felt he was being electrocuted. They arrived “at a run-down house in an inner-city neighborhood,” which was temporary housing for refugees (94). The house had plenty of food, but few things they could cook, such as peanut butter, and other things that struck them as strange, such as ground beef. They did not understand how to use a microwave, and the television that a caseworker brought provided little comfort, since all the shows were in English. Sandra eventually learned the language by watching children’s programs. The caseworkers asked the family what kind of food they liked but struggled to find the spices and sauces Rachel requested.
One caseworker, John, took the family to Walmart. Sandra worried about him because he was morbidly obese. She observed that many people in the United States were overweight and looked nothing like the Americans she had seen on television. In Walmart, Sandra noticed aisles full of junk food. Everything was very new to Sandra and her family, and they struggled more because they did not have translators.
Chapter 15 Summary
Sandra noticed that most of the people in their new neighborhood were Black, but she and her family looked different from them since they wore traditional, brightly patterned African clothing; additionally Sandra’s head was nearly shaved.
Rachel found the new country lonely and isolating. People locked their doors, and neighbors did not speak to each other. John returned to take Sandra and her family to a church’s clothing drive so they could find winter clothes. The children were amused by how ugly and outdated the clothing was. Sandra was also insulted by the assumption that refugees would wear anything and had no access to decent clothes in their homeland. Going through the piles, she was surprised by how many short-shorts she found and how women encouraged her to take a pair, though her father would never allow her to wear them (nor did she want to wear them).
Everyone managed to find some boots and coats. Sandra found some decent T-shirts and jeans, though they were generic and a little too big. The family noticed how the clothes smelled moldy and wondered if this was how white people smelled.
Sandra had never had any interaction with white people until she met the two little white girls who lived next door. They soon began hanging out in Sandra’s house all the time. This comforted Rachel, who loved opening her door to neighbors. Sandra noticed that the girls had many toys, including “an assortment of Barbie dolls” (101). She found it strange that the dolls looked like the white actresses on TV. Unlike the soft, faceless fabric dolls she had back home, the Barbies wore makeup and had large breasts. They seemed like toys designed for adults, not children.
Chapter 16 Summary
In April, Sandra enrolled at John Williams School No. 5, a local middle school. Though she was supposed to be in eighth grade, she was enrolled in sixth. Sandra understood this demotion was because she did not speak English, but she did not understand how being in a lower grade would help improve her language skills.
Sandra found certain things about the school curious and vastly different from her school in the Congo. For instance, there were many toilets and people whose job it was to clean them. Most of the children in the school were Black and Hispanic. The kids were standoffish, and Sandra’s teacher, Ms. Wilson, was unprepared to deal with a student who did not speak English. She gave Sandra math problems to do, which relieved Sandra because math is universal. While Sandra found most of the children obnoxious and unappreciative of their ability to attend school, she made one friend, a Senegalese boy named Abdul who spoke French. Ms. Wilson sat him next to Sandra in class so he could help her and translate instructions.
Those first days of school were miserable for Sandra. She kept unfavorably comparing her short hair to that of Black girls who wore long braids, weaves, or had relaxed hair. Her family then left their temporary housing for a home in another inner-city area, which was “rougher and poorer than the first” (105). The house was dilapidated and the stairs creaked. Children in the neighborhood threw rocks at Sandra and her family and called them “bootie scratcher” (105). They also made fun of her hair, either accusing her of being a boy or of having cancer.
The caseworkers instructed the family on practical matters, such as how to call 911 and how to write down their address to show someone in case they got lost. None of them had a cell phone, only a landline in the house. Sandra noticed a group of men who loitered on their street and catcalled her. The police were frequent visitors to the neighborhood. The only pleasant spot was a small store run by a Jamaican family that sold clothing and hair accessories. They were friendly to Sandra and her family. Prudence and Rachel looked for a church like the one they had attended in the Congo. They found the New Hope Church, where they felt at home, but the service was much shorter than the all-day services in Africa. It was also a more subdued environment.
The leader of the congregation, Pastor Linda, a white woman, became close with Sandra and her family. She began driving them to and from church each Sunday and helped the family with errands, such as shopping. She also helped the children with their homework. Sometimes, they visited Linda’s home, which was in a wealthy neighborhood near a lake. Sandra wondered why her family’s neighborhood was so much more dangerous than Linda’s. One afternoon, Alex went out onto the lake on a kayak and Sandra did the same. However, she did not know how to kayak, and the water was too deep for her to swim back. She began to cry. Her mother called out to her from the shore, also crying. Linda sent some people out on a speedboat to rescue Sandra.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
These chapters chronicle a more extreme form of displacement—moving to a new continent. Rachel’s skepticism about the move might have been a manifestation of her fear about what such a move would entail: learning new customs, being surrounded mostly by white people, and adapting to a setting that might have been inhospitable. Though the prospect of moving excited Sandra, she was put off by the UN workers who couldn’t empathize with her family’s trauma. This feeling of distance was widened by the fact that the workers were all white, reminding her of the UN relief workers who sexually exploited teen girls in the Congo.
At first, the United States embodies many contrasts for Sandra—snowy weather instead of warm and humid, like the Congo; overwhelmingly white instead of Black; and formal instead of familiar. On the plane, the family realized their new home would not accommodate them in any way, as no information was available in a language other than English. When they arrived at their new home in Rochester, they became aware of their lowly status, indicated by the dilapidated house. Their new neighborhood was both dangerous and unfamiliar and filled with conveniences that confused the family, such as a microwave. When Sandra went to school, there were no ESL instructors, leaving her in a standard classroom with an unprepared teacher who inadvertently caused Sandra to feel inadequate and alienated from her peers. These were indicators that they were in a place that did not understand them, and they would have to assimilate to survive.
One of the ways Sandra adjusted to her new home was by unlearning the falsehoods the United States had exported globally through media. She realized the country has an obesity epidemic, though it promotes thinness. She also realized poverty is rampant, though the nation projects the idea that most of its inhabitants are upper-middle class. Finally, Sandra learned that, even within the Black community, there were preconceived ideas about who could claim to be Black. These ideas often excluded Sandra and her family, whose distinctively African customs and modes of expression marked them as foreign and undesirable. Being called names because of these differences supports the theme of the internalized racism that plagues many Black Americans and the hegemonic tendencies, even among the nation’s most stigmatized group, to claim Blackness that excludes so many other Black people.
Among the many dichotomies of American life that Sandra was forced to learn was the immense wealth gap between Black and white people in a wealthy country. This became palpable when she visited Pastor Linda’s house on Lake Ontario. Pastor Linda, who is white, lives in a neighborhood with large homes and well-manicured lawns, whereas Sandra and her family, and other black and Latino families, live together in a rundown neighborhood. The alarm Sandra expressed when going out onto the lake near Linda’s home is curious, considering that Sandra and her siblings used to swim in Lake Tanganyika, a more massive body of water than Lake Ontario. Her panic reflected a worry over a different kind of drowning—that of becoming lost in America, within its confusing mores, intrinsic racism, and unrealistic standards of beauty.
For example, Sandra felt pressure to express a mode of femininity that had nothing to do with her own sense of what it meant to be a woman. Her boyish haircut and aversion to revealing clothing made her anomalous among girls her age. In Sandra’s homeland, girls are discouraged from developing their minds, but they are not hypersexualized as in the United States. For example, when Sandra sees a Barbie doll in Chapter 15, she believes it is a toy for adults. Young girls playing with Barbie dolls might equate Barbie’s appearance to an ideal standard of beauty, the pursuit of which is detrimental to a young girl’s self-esteem and body image. Despite these differences, Sandra notices the similarities between the United States and the Congo regarding the devaluation of girls and women, including the tendency to shame women and girls who are raped, and the unfounded feeling of failure connected to having a miscarriage.
