Seven members of the Kako family live in a two-bedroom apartment. Rihat, 2, is recovering from high levels of lead in his blood; a new baby is due next month.
Khayal and Heshyar Kako dream of an apartment in which they have a room to themselves and the walls do not poison their child.
The Kakos and their son, Rihat, 2, live in a two-bedroom apartment near Tower Grove Park in St. Louis with four other people: Heshyar’s mother and father and his two brothers.
In April, Khayal will give birth to the couple’s second child. They have been in the United States for about four years and married about three years. They share their bedroom with their child.
The Kakos are Kurds. They want an apartment of their own with Heshyar’s family living in an apartment beneath them. That situation would be more like their native Iraq, where extended families live in sprawling white stucco houses in which each nuclear family has its own space.
The Kurds come from a mountainous region on the borders of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. Since the 1800s they have struggled periodically for independence, often as pawns in the region’s wars. Powers including the United States first have supported and then abandoned them.
Saddam Hussein often has launched attacks on the Kurds, and the Kurds also suffer from internal political conflict. The Kurds are not Arabs but an Indo-European people. Most are Sunni Muslims.
Recently, little Rihat tested positive for lead poisoning. He has taken medicine. Their landlord patched the crumbling walls that seemed to be the culprit. The levels of lead in Rihat’s blood have gone down.
“Money; money is slow,” Heshyar said with a shrug and a bit of embarrassment. The lack of money has kept him and his wife in cramped quarters and nervous about their son’s health.
But Heshyar, 26, then smiled spontaneously, and Khayal, also 26, smiled too. They do that often, like newlyweds.
They were seated on the floor around a traditional luncheon meal. Khayal cooked tomato soup, pita bread, chicken with herbs. It was food from a painting, the white rice in a mound topped with brown noodles, the chicken golden, the soup scarlet. Most of the time the family eats traditional foods, but sometimes they order pizza. Their favorite: lots of cheese with bits of beef.
Their guests sat on cushions half the size of a couch cushion covered in a bright red and beige print. Khayal made the cushions, which approximate the furnishings in a Kurd’s Iraqi home.
Their baby, Rihat, climbed from lap to lap to get a hug and kiss wherever he landed. His grandfather, Hassan, 62, and his grandmother, Herea, 55, also were seated on the floor to eat. There was much laughter and many smiles.
Heshyar, who works as a bartender at the Adams Mark Hotel, has picked up a great deal of English and often speaks for his parents, neither of whom speak English. Khayal, who is learning English from the Immigrant & Refugee Women’s Program, is a promising pupil.
The lunch was for Khayal’s teacher, Sister Elise Silvestri, a School Sister of Notre Dame, who also helped the family navigate hospitals, doctors and public-health officials when Rihat was sick.
Khayal said that whereas many Kurds from northern Iraq had arranged marriages, she and Heshyar were a love match. “Yes, yes, a love match,” he said in agreement.
Had the couple not emigrated to America, they might never have met.
Both are from Zakho, a city of about 100,000 in the foothills of the mountains. They did not know each other in their native land, but both had ties to the Americans, who were in their city to help contain Saddam.
Khayal was a nurse in the children’s ward of an American hospital. Heshyar’s brother worked as part of a Kurdish security force for the Americans. Heshyar was a truck farmer growing mangoes, potatoes and tomatoes.
In 1996, rumors swept the city that the Americans, Britons, French and Turks who maintained the no-fly zone that kept Saddam from bombing the Kurds were pulling out. Kurdish Iraqis such as Heshyar and Khayal were certain that because they had helped Americans, Saddam would kill them and their families.
Most of Heshyar’s family sought refuge in camps first in Turkey, then in Guam. Khayal traveled the same route but alone.
In Guam, Khayal met Heshyar’s brother, Noori, and the two learned that they were distant cousins. From Guam, Heshyar emigrated to Charlotte, N.C.; Khayal to Kentucky, although she does not remember the name of the city. Those are the places to which the international refugee agencies sent them.
About three years ago, Heshyar worried about high prices – the family’s apartment cost $700 a month – and a lack of jobs, so he called a cousin who had emigrated to St. Louis. He learned that food and housing were less expensive here, and his cousin told him there were jobs.
He and his parents and brothers moved to St. Louis, where the families’ rent is $325 a month. Between 30 and 40 Kurdish refugee families live in th e St. Louis area. Five Kurdish families live in the same apartment building as the Kakos. Three of those families are the Kakos’ cousins.
Soon after Heshyar and his family moved to St. Louis, Khayal, who was having a difficult time making her way in a new country with a new language and without kin, called Heshyar’s family for help. Heshyar’s father, Hassan, an expansive man, told her to come to St. Louis to live with them.
So Heshyar and Khayal met. Like many Kurds, they are slight, slim people. He is about 5 foot 5 inches tall. She is smaller. Both have black hair and large, almost-black eyes, although some Kurds have blond hair and blue eyes.
He dresses like an American, in casual slacks and sports shirts. For the luncheon, she wore a long, loose-fitting caftan-like dress of burgundy crushed velvet. A plaque of yellow fabric and silver-colored beads trimmed the bodice.
The two asked their parents for permission to marry. For Khayal, that meant a telephone call to her mother back in Iraq. Everyone said yes, and the couple was married on Feb. 17, 1998, in the Daar-Ul-Islam Mosque in Manchester.
One of the bedrooms in the apartment is theirs. More fabric-covered cushions line the walls. Rihat’s crib is next to the window. Khayal washes all the woodwork, the floors and often the walls to eliminate dust and the danger of lead poisoning. The level of lead in Rihat’s blood is now at a level a child could pick up walking on the street.
Khayal does nearly all the cleaning and cooking. Her mother-in-law, Herea, has kidney problems; often her legs and ankles are swollen, and she is in pain. The house is spotless. Cleanliness makes its small spaces look large.
The family has its problems. Heshyar’s brother Talib Kako is trying, so far without success, to get his wife and son in Iraq the papers they need join him here.
Yet the family has its joys. Before the luncheon, Rihat demanded a glass of orange juice. Everyone was ready to scold him because they thought he wanted it for himself. But when he got the juice, he gave it to his grandmother, who wasn’t feeling well.
Heshyar spoke for all of them when he said he was glad to be in the United States. He does not want to return to the rolling green hills of his native land.
“Too many times,” he said, “I have seen war roar through.”
Neighbors
* Who: Khayal and Heshyar Kako, Kurdish refugees from Iraq.
* What: Their struggle and triumphs in the four years since they came to this country to build a new life for themselves and their extended family.
* Where: Shaw Neighborhood
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