I woke up late with the TV remote still in my hand. I must have fallen asleep watching movies. There were many missed calls on my phone from Team Abdi. Time was running short. I had to leave Uganda that night for Kenya. Everyone was still worried.
I called Aleey, the taxi driver. He said he was already waiting for me at the hotel reception. I threw on my clothes—no bag to pack—and went downstairs. There were several white people getting ready for their day of tourism in Uganda. They had fancy backpacks, and they were stuffing them with hats, sunscreen, lunches, and water bottles. We got into Aleey’s taxi, and I told him to take me to the bus station. He looked at me like I was crazy.
“Don’t take the bus!” he said. “It’s a trap! They will find you at the border and send you back to Uganda, and then Uganda will put you on a flight to Mogadishu. They have done this to so many people I know.”
By now I felt I could trust Aleey, but I said I had no other options.
“I know a better way,” he said. “You can catch a ride on a tanker truck to the border. There after nightfall you can take a boda-boda across the bush into Kenya and meet the truckers on the other side.”
A boda-boda was a motorcycle taxi. Aleey told me that along the Uganda-Kenya border young men earned money by smuggling Somalis into Kenya on their motorcycles, avoiding the road crossings.
“It’s the best way,” said Aleey.
I called Hassan.
“I think he’s right,” said my brother. “If they check for visas on the bus, you will not be allowed into Kenya.”
We drove back to Kisenyi and parked at a gas station where a tanker truck was filling up. The two Ugandan drivers were eating mandazi and drinking tea. Aleey spoke to them. They approached me and said it would cost a hundred dollars for the ride. I handed them the cash, and they waved me into the cab. I said good-bye to my new friend, Aleey, wondering if I would ever see him again.
“Hide here,” one of the men said in English, pointing to the tiny sleeper bunk behind the seats. “Don’t make any move. Stay still.”
“Don’t worry, my friend,” said the other. “You will be in Kenya soon.”
We lurched off down the road. Soon darkness fell, but it mattered little from where I was curled up in the bunk because I could see nothing anyway. “Turn off your phone,” said one of the men. “We don’t want any attention. There are police everywhere.”
The road was bad and I kept banging around in that bunk. Hours passed, and we were still in Uganda. The two men played rap music all the way. Finally, at four o’clock in the morning, we were a few miles from the border. The tanker truck pulled slowly in to a side street, parked, and opened the doors.
“Come. Come. Come,” one whispered to me. “Go there, catch a boda-boda.”
I hopped out of the truck and ran across the street into a dark narrow alley. I could not see anything except the dim light of a motorcycle.
“Lete,” the motorbike man said in Swahili. Let’s go.
“How much?”
“Ten dollars.”
“No. Five dollars,” I replied. I was getting better at bargaining for my various forms of illegal transport.
“Okay. Lete.”
I handed him the cash and climbed onto the bike behind him. We took off through the forest and in five minutes were in Kenya. The truck was there waiting for me. It was still dark when we rolled into Kisumu, a big junction town on the Kenyan side of Lake Victoria. It was still more than 150 miles to Nairobi. We pulled in to a parking lot; the drivers said they were too tired to go on. “Let’s sleep here and proceed in the morning,” one said. They spread a piece of a cloth under the truck to sleep on. The night was dead quiet. I quickly fell asleep while the two men were smoking a cigarette. When the sun rose, I woke up under the truck to the sound of Kenyans coming to work. The place we had parked was an outdoor repair shop with many junk cars and components sitting everywhere. The two drivers were gone.
“Wewe amka!” A shirtless man was telling me to move on in Swahili. He needed to work on the truck and I was under it. I asked where the drivers were, but no one knew. I waited for an hour, two hours, three hours, but they never returned. I called Hassan; he was worried and so was everyone else on the team. By now it was obvious the drivers had betrayed me. I had paid them for a ride all the way to Nairobi, but I was hours away and on my own. I checked my pockets and was glad to find I still had money hidden in my pants. I was going to need it.
I walked around the muddy streets of town, past market stalls where traders were selling hay, long spikes of sugarcane, and pyramids of fruits. Women carried huge baskets on their heads, and people were running to catch matatus. Street kids in filthy alleys were sniffing glue from plastic bottles. I did not know where to go. Then I heard a voice calling: “Nairobi, Nairobi, Nairobi!”
It was a matatu conductor shouting out to passengers. I hopped on. The bus had fourteen seats, but by the time we left for Nairobi, the conductor had jammed more than twenty people on board. Passengers were literally on top of each other. Someone was sitting on my shoulders, while I leaned on someone’s back. The stereo was blasting Bob Marley when the conductor in the front passenger seat stretched out his hand to collect the fare. “Five hundred shillings,” he said in English.
I knew that was about five dollars. I had no Kenyan money so I handed him my last twenty-dollar bill. He gave me back some change in Kenyan shillings but not nearly enough. When I argued with him in English, he replied angrily in a native dialect I couldn’t understand, so I let it go.
“My friend, are you Somali?” asked a man sitting next to me, in English. He was middle-aged and wore eyeglasses, and he smiled all the time despite the discomfort of the journey.
“I am,” I said.
“Oh, I love the Somali people! But I hate al-Shabaab. I have seen them on TV. Very bad.”
We became instant friends, and he acted like a tour guide. I kept asking him the names of towns we were passing. Everything was very green like I had never seen; corn and hay grew everywhere. The road to Nairobi was so clean and smooth. Sleek cars, their tinted windows rolled up, sped past us. We stopped at a police checkpoint and my heart was beating fast, but the officer said something to the conductor and waved us on. It was not Mogadishu, they didn’t care where women sat or if we had beards. The afternoon turned to dusk, and as we came around a final turn into the city, the setting sun reflected off the skyscrapers of downtown Nairobi. It was so beautiful! The streetlights were switching on everywhere. I had never seen so many lights. I felt like a caveman dropped into the modern world. People outside were standing in groups talking, laughing, enjoying the evening. I texted Hassan, my heart pounding with excitement. Our bus inched through traffic, passing market stalls, banks, government buildings, and Christian churches. Everything was a wonder to me, but I thought we would never arrive. Passengers in a hurry were jumping out of the bus as it slowed down. Finally we pulled in to the chaotic Accra Road matatu station, and I descended in a daze.
The station was so busy, people shouting and bumping into each other. It was like watching bees. I strained to see Hassan in the crowd. Then someone tapped my shoulder.
“Abdi!” he said in a deep voice I did not recognize. I turned and felt I was looking into a mirror. It was my brother, Hassan, but in adulthood he had become just like me—tall, thin, the same long face and wide brow. When did we become twins? We hugged and held each other for several minutes. Both our phones were ringing from Team Abdi trying to find out if we had met. We ignored the phones and just hugged.
“Let’s go eat,” Hassan said. We turned a corner from the bus depot and entered a restaurant. The sign, with a white man in glasses and a white beard, said “KFC.” “It is American owned,” Hassan said, knowing how much I liked anything American. The fried chicken, French fries, and Coca-Cola tasted amazing to me.
“Do you eat here every day?” I asked my brother.
“No! This place is only for rich people. But we are celebrating.”
After dinner we jumped into a matatu headed for Eastleigh, the neighborhood also known as Little Mogadishu. We arrived around nine at night, but the place was as bright and busy as day. Every stall, every kiosk, and every shop was run by Somalis. Somali music and American rap were blasting from everywhere. The streets were filthy like Mogadishu, smelling of shit and piss. As we got off the bus, we had to jump over rank water onto a small patch of dry earth. I didn’t care about the filth. I just stood there and marveled at all the stuff for sale—shoes, clothes, belts, milk, candy, chewing gum, soccer balls. Anything you wanted. I smelled fried samosas and saw steam rising from teapots. Restaurants were selling goat, camel, and cow meat with rice. It was like being in Mogadishu but with merchandise and no bombs.
My joy was interrupted by a sudden clamor from the crowd, followed by panic and running in all directions, like frightened cattle. I had not heard any explosion, so I couldn’t understand why all the Somalis were running. Hassan grabbed me by the hand.
“This way!” he yelled. We ran, turned down an alley, and ran again. We ran for a quarter mile. “What is going on?” I asked between my panting breaths.
“The police,” said my brother. “They come like this every night to rob the Somalis.”
After a few minutes the police were gone and everyone was back on the street, business as usual. Tea shops filled up, and conversations went on, just like nothing happened. I was starting to think maybe life in Nairobi was no paradise.
Hassan had reserved a room for both of us at the Hotel Medina for one night. This was one of the best hotels in Eastleigh, with running water and a restaurant, owned by Somalis, but he chose it because it had the same name as our mom. We went to our room and talked for hours. I told Hassan about my adventures, and he told me about his own long journey to Nairobi, which he had only hinted at in his e-mails.
The green Mercedes had broken down in the bush, he said. The one-armed driver was picked up by another driver, along with the two women and the goat. There was no room for Hassan, so they left him in the desert; the goat was more valuable. He walked for days across the barren red land with no water, at times drinking his own urine. He encountered many human skeletons as well as lions and hyenas, which terrified him and reminded him of our mom’s stories.
He did not know the direction to Kenya, but eventually he caught up with other families walking toward the refugee camps. After eight days of walking, they were met at the border by aid agencies, then quickly registered as refugees with fingerprints and photos. With their new refugee IDs in hand they waited for transportation to the camps in Dadaab, their new home. When the truck that was carrying them pulled in to Dadaab, they were all told to descend and wait. But after the truck left, there was no one else. Slowly people who had walked with Hassan were met by family members or friends. Hassan found himself sitting under an acacia tree waiting and waiting. Two days went by, and no one came to help him, no food or water.
Finally, he hitched a ride on a dump truck carrying sand to the other side of Dadaab, ten miles away. There he saw people queued for food. He had not eaten in days, but Hassan was told he could not get food; first he had to get a coupon to apply for food. The food coupons were distributed along clan lines, and this area of the camp seemed to be controlled by the Marehan tribe from Kismayo. With hundreds of women and children from their own tribe arriving daily, no one was interested in helping a teenager with a strong Mogadishu accent. He was not even given a space to build his own hut. Whenever he finally got to the front of a line, the response was always the same: “Leave here!” Everyone was just trying to survive, and there was no room for pity.
Someone told Hassan to go and see a Rahanweyn man who lived about twenty miles deep in the camp. He went there and the man said he was not in fact Rahanweyn. But unlike everyone else he took pity on Hassan and handed him six hundred Kenyan shillings for a bus to Nairobi. “Nairobi has some chances for you,” said the man. “Don’t show the police your refugee ID, or they will send you back here. Tell them you are a kid and don’t have one.”
He caught the first bus out. When the police stopped them for checks at the border, Hassan hid his refugee ID. Finally his English, which we had practiced so many nights in our bedroom, was a lifeline to Hassan. In plain and simple English he told the Kenyan police that he was seventeen years old and had no ID. They let him go. When the bus dropped him in downtown Nairobi, Hassan followed other Somalis and ended up in Eastleigh, where he had been living ever since.
Hassan soon learned how to survive on the streets of Little Mogadishu. He picked up some Swahili phrases and was able to make some good friends, including his roommate, Siyad. The two of them were also business partners—hawking socks, sneakers, and belts on the streets of Eastleigh. They would buy in bulk from the shops; a bundle of socks cost about twenty dollars and could be sold on the street, by the pair, for a total of thirty dollars. This was illegal because the Kenyan police did not allow street vendors, especially refugees, who are not allowed to work. But like street vendors in cities around the world, Hassan and Siyad developed a sort of radar for the police, and they would snatch up their merchandise and dash away before trouble. In this way they could save enough money to buy dinner, pay rent, and pay off the police on the occasional times they got caught.
We talked until three o’clock in the morning, when we both fell asleep. I awoke at sunrise to the cries of the conductors calling out the destinations of their matatus. Eastleigh in the morning was a noisy place, filled with seemingly crazy people. I looked out the window. Young Somali men, dressed and shaved like American gangster rappers, wearing headphones, walked along jamming to music I could not hear. I saw beautiful Somali women in colorful dresses and exotic-looking Kenyan women of the Kikuyu tribe. Music was everywhere, people laughing and dancing. This place was lit!
We checked out of the hotel. Hassan and I had a list of things to do on that Sunday; first was buying me some new clothes and a haircut, then visiting Ben Bellows. I bought a pair of jeans for five dollars and a T-shirt with the American flag for three dollars. Then I walked into a Somali barbershop. There were portraits of soccer players, rappers, and actors all over the walls. You could choose your hairstyle from the celebrities on the walls! When it was my turn, I pointed to Usher, the American singer. “Like that,” I said. Sides trimmed down to skin, top and back growing wild. So cool.
Next I bought a necklace, a wristband, and some sneakers. I was sure no one looked more American than me. Hassan laughed, I changed so much in one day, but freedom from al-Shabaab felt like the best gift in the entire world.
Later that day Hassan and I jumped onto a matatu and headed to a nice restaurant across town to meet Ben Bellows and his wife, Nicole. They were so happy to see me and proud that they had helped Hassan and me reunite. The menu was confusing, we didn’t know what to choose, but burgers seemed like the most American dish, so we both ordered one. After the meal we went to Ben and Nicole’s house for a visit. They handed us a hundred dollars of their own money to help with getting me settled. After a few hours we were back in Eastleigh, but not to the hotel. Now I would be staying in Hassan’s room on Eighth Street.
The building where Hassan lived was home to dozens of Somalis, each family squeezing into one tiny room. The stairs, pitch-black even by day, creaked and swayed so much I felt they would collapse anytime. Jerry cans of water and sacks of charcoal sat everywhere. People washed clothes in buckets and hung them on their balconies, dripping down on the street below and adding to the pool of mud in front of the house. Cockroaches crawled on the walls. Of course this is the way tens of millions of Africans live, in cities across the continent, so residents of Little Mogadishu were just grateful to be out of a war zone.
Hassan lived on the third floor. Siyad had gotten married and moved back to the refugee camps with his wife, so I was the new roommate. The room was small but at least had two windows facing the street. There was no furniture, no bathroom, no kitchen. Basically Hassan lived outside and used his room only to sleep. Rolled up in the corner was a single foam mattress and a pillow; we used some of the money from Ben and Nicole to buy another set for me. None of this mattered or bothered me once I saw the main attraction in his room: a Toshiba laptop and piles of DVDs of Hollywood movies. Hassan told me there were thousands of DVDs sold on the streets of Nairobi. “You could never even watch them all in your lifetime,” he said. I decided I might try.
The next day was Monday, and all the offices would be open. That morning after bread and tea we jumped into a matatu to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Because I had been smuggled into Kenya, I was not yet registered as a refugee, which was the first step in getting to the United States. I was carrying all the letters sent by Team Abdi. We arrived and saw to our dismay that hundreds of other people had the same idea that morning. The line stretched around the building. After four hours we finally got inside, and I was seated with a hundred other people in a waiting room. Six hours after that, a Kenyan man in a dark suit came out.
“Time out today!” he yelled. “Come back tomorrow.”
We came back the next day. Same long line in the chilly morning, me in my American flag T-shirt. Same long wait inside.
“Computer problems,” said the man this time. “Come back tomorrow.”
Frustrated, we called Ben Bellows. He e-mailed someone at the office who got back to him: “I will see Abdi tomorrow.”
On Wednesday I got up very early and took the matatu by myself to the UNHCR office. Four security guards were pushing Somalis away from the gate. I jostled through the crowd and approached one of the guards.
“My name is Abdi Iftin. Someone who works here is expecting me.”
The guard put his arms on my chest and pushed me. “Go away!”
No one ever came out calling my name.
Thursday Hassan and I went back together, armed with a new strategy. We approached one of the security guards, and Hassan spoke to him in Swahili: “I will pay you.”
The guard took Hassan to a place where the camera could not catch him, and we handed him two thousand shillings—about twenty dollars. He let me into the waiting room. At three o’clock in the afternoon a man walked up and called my name.
In another room he took my picture and fingerprints, then led me to a desk for the paperwork. I was officially registered as a refugee living in Kenya! Now I could seek protection and resettlement in the West.
Every day after that, Hassan and I went to the UNHCR, hoping for a protection interview. Since coming to Nairobi, Hassan had been interviewed more than ten times. On the wall of the building they posted names of people selected for protection and resettlement. Hassan had been checking the list for years. He was never picked. But now, with all the letters of support from our American friends, we thought our chances were high. Still it was always the same: the officials wrote down our phone numbers but never called for an interview. We watched other Somalis whose names were posted who could not control their happiness, tears running down their faces. It was hard to watch; we could not share their joy. Life as a refugee in Nairobi was permanent for those whose names were never picked. Real life only began for those who were selected. The UNHCR was the switch between happiness and misery.
I continued to file radio reports for The Story, now from the BBC studio in downtown Nairobi. Instead of life in a war zone I told Americans about life as a refugee in Little Mogadishu. One big difference between Little Mogadishu and real Mogadishu: in the Nairobi version you didn’t wake up every morning wondering if this would be your last day on earth. So that was a definite plus. But Little Mogadishu was still a daily test. You were on your own, and survival depended on your strength, wits, and good luck. The Kenyan government and the UNHCR offered no help to the hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees living there, it was like we didn’t exist. Everyone had to fetch food, clothing, and shelter for himself, but refugee documents were not work permits, so there was no official way to earn money for those things. Your documents did not protect you from police harassment either.
You felt trapped in Little Mogadishu. To the east is Moi Air Base, a former British RAF base and the headquarters of the Kenya Air Force. Naturally, it is completely fenced off, a dead end. To the west, between Little Mogadishu and the skyscrapers of downtown, is the feared Pangani police station, from which corrupt officers fan out every night in search of bribes from refugees. And to the north is the vast and notorious Mathare slum, one of the worst in all Africa. Compared with the tin shacks of Mathare, Little Mogadishu appears as organized as midtown Manhattan, with straight numbered avenues, real buildings, and services.
But within Little Mogadishu was an armed Somali youth gang who called themselves the Super Powers. Those gang members realized the Kenyan police did nothing to protect people in Little Mogadishu; refugees ran from the police and would never dare to report a crime. So the gang members terrorized residents, snatching cell phones and cash at gunpoint. One night two Super Power guys held Hassan by the neck right in front of our building. They took his cell phone and some cash, then let him go. Another night they chased me down an alley. Luckily, I outran them.
Fortunately, there were a lot of places to blend in with the crowd. The two main north-south roads in Little Mogadishu are First Avenue and Second Avenue, both of them so packed with people day and night that you can hardly walk. The cross streets are lined up between them, starting with First Street in the north and all the way down to Twelfth Street. On just about every one of those streets you will find a mosque, a hawala money-wiring shop, a small shopping mall, tea shops, photo studios, barbershops, and tall apartment complexes crammed with people. Even Kenyans do their weekly food shopping in Little Mogadishu. People come from as far away as Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, and West Africa to shop for black market and often counterfeit electronics, which are cheaper in Little Mogadishu than anywhere on the continent.
The neighborhood is organized by the names Somalis have given to smaller communities within it—like the zone on Twelfth Street called California Estate because refugees who lived there mostly moved to the United States after a long wait of screening and interviews.
One resident of California Estate was a well-dressed young woman named Muna. She was short, of light complexion, and not as skinny as most Somalis, probably because she had grown up in Little Mogadishu, eating a lot of chicken. She was living with some roommates and was very independent. New refugees could tell she knew so much more about the world than they did. Watching her walk down First Avenue was like watching a confident American woman on the streets of New York. She feared nothing and was not the least bit shy like most Somali girls. People looked up to her, especially the neighborhood men, whom she completely ignored. Muna was mad about America and determined to marry a man who could bring her there. Naturally, I felt we had much in common, and I decided to pursue her.
My first love, Faisa, now living in the refugee camps in Ethiopia, had a phone and we still texted each other. One day she told me she was engaged to marry a man in Sweden. This was not love; like Muna she was only looking for a way out of her miserable fate of being a refugee. I understood, but it reminded me of my sister, Nima’s, marriage. Two goats or a ticket to Sweden, what’s the difference? I knew Faisa and I would probably never see each other again.
In the afternoon Muna liked to hang out at the Obama Studio, a sort of social club where they played American music and you could also rent minutes to use the Internet. One day I watched her on the computer, texting with a Somali man in Minnesota and another in Seattle at the same time. While doing this, she was also checking out other U.S. men on her Facebook account. A few days later I ran into her at the Balanbaalis Studio, another social club where young Somalis would dress up, dance to loud American music, and drink Cokes. These were mostly people who received money from family members in the United States, so if you were on the hunt for an American husband, it was a good place to hang. I walked up to Muna and told her in Somali that I wanted to date her.
She laughed. “You have no money. Why would I date you?”
“Because they call me Abdi American,” I said. I knew this was a thin argument, but it was my only card to play.
She stared at me, taking in my accent. “Are you from Mogadishu?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it like?”
“You have never been?”
“No,” she said. “My family was displaced from the south. I grew up in the camps. Anyway you are wasting your time. I don’t date men in Africa. Especially refugees.”
Meanwhile, Hassan and I kept trying to land resettlement interviews, with no luck. Sharon called from Maine. A friend of hers, a teacher at the University of Massachusetts named Margaret Caudill, was leading a group of American nursing students to Kenya to improve cardiovascular and metabolic health in rural areas. The project was called Afya Njema, “Good Health.” Hassan and I were invited to volunteer for them. With nothing else to do and tired of waiting for something to change, we gladly accepted.
One afternoon in May 2012, we stuffed some clothes in a backpack and jumped onto a matatu bound for the Methodist Guest House in Lavington, Nairobi. This would be our home for two weeks, and we couldn’t believe it had a swimming pool! We arrived just as dinner was being served, and when we walked into the dining room, the whole group of twenty-two American students and three teachers rose in applause. They had heard my stories on NPR, and to them we were celebrities. To us they were a dream come true. After the cheers, Hassan and I sat down at the dinner table as everyone listened to our stories. We were hardly able to eat, they had so many questions. I took selfies with everyone and posted them on Facebook. The first person to comment was Muna.
“Are you in the U.S.?” she wrote.
In the morning we got up early and rode a bus to the work site along with a group of Kenyan nursing students. As the bus sped out of Nairobi for the two-hour drive to Nyeri town, the American students put on their headphones. Some were reading books. Some took naps. I wanted to know everyone’s name and all about their American stuff.
“What is this?”
“This moisturizes your lips.”
“What do you use this for?”
“This is for your skin.”
When we got off the bus, we were surrounded by hundreds of Kenyans who were curiously waiting for the nursing students. They shook hands with all of us one by one. The Kenyans thought Hassan and I were African Americans.
I was assigned to register the patients, then measure their weights and heights. Hassan, who by now spoke fluent Swahili, had to translate for the elderly Kenyans who didn’t speak English. I was wearing a T-shirt that said “Chicago,” and a Kenyan student asked me if I was from there.
“Yes,” I said, walking away quickly to end the conversation. I was ashamed at having lied, but I was so happy to be around all those Americans that I couldn’t bear to admit to him that I was in fact one of life’s losers—a lowly Somali refugee. Or admit to myself that I would have to return to Little Mogadishu when the project ended.
By the second day, the Kenyan students figured out that Hassan and I were refugees. On the bus I heard some of them snickering and muttering, “Al-Shabaab,” but I tried to ignore them and made friends with an American woman named Shannon from Bangor, Maine.
At the end of our last day of work we threw a party at the guesthouse. Everyone danced and sang songs; the Americans drank beer. I grabbed a can of soda and danced like I’d seen cool stars do in movies, with a drink in their hand. The next morning we checked out of the guesthouse and said good-bye to our new friends. They said they would miss Kenya and would come back next year.
Margaret had brought some cash from Sharon for Hassan and me. It was enough for us to set up a street business selling socks and shoes. We worked seventeen hours a day to make enough to buy food and pay rent, waking up at five in the morning to grab the best spot on the side of the road and not going home until midnight. But it felt good to pay our own way and not constantly need money from Sharon.
After weeks of hard work and with a little cash in my pocket, I texted Muna and asked if she could meet for a hangout. She agreed, and we met at one of the restaurants in Little Mogadishu. She got right to the point.
“Abdi, you are wasting your time, bro. I am not going to date a man in Little Mogadishu. How can I date someone who is broke like me?”
Still, it was nice to sit with her. Later I came up with an idea. I went to the Obama Studio and had them Photoshop my picture standing next to the Empire State Building, the White House, and other famous places in the United States. I went on Facebook and updated my residence to California. I posted all the photos, along with the ones I took with the American students. When Muna saw it, she said she broke out laughing. It was worth it for that.
Al-Shabaab already had a presence in the refugee camps in northeast Kenya, and they were getting more aggressive in the country. In October 2011 they kidnapped two Spanish aid workers from Doctors Without Borders, taking them into Somalia as hostages. In response the Kenyan government declared war on al-Shabaab and sent troops, tanks, helicopters, and artillery to battle the terrorists deep inside Somalia.
It was called Operation Linda Nchi, “To Protect the Nation,” but the residents of Little Mogadishu had a pretty good idea we were not going to be protected. As the troops marched across the Somali border, police encircled Little Mogadishu, assuming that residents there would heed the call of al-Shabaab to retaliate against Kenya. Soon the streets were cleared, and businesses were closed. Everyone went home and turned on the TV. Hassan and I locked our door and sat quietly. Outside we heard sporadic shots.
Life changed overnight in Little Mogadishu. Police night raids increased, especially in mosques. Men with beards were taken out. Executive orders were announced: all refugees must leave Nairobi and go to the camps. This was the beginning of the hide-and-seek games between us and the police. I managed to sneak out early one morning, catch a matatu downtown, and file a report for The Story about a friend who got taken to jail overnight:
He told me [the police] threatened him because, they said, “you know the sympathizers of al-Shabaab here, you need to tell us. If you are not al-Shabaab, then you know the sympathizers.” And he was like “I don’t know!” He cried out that he doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t have any idea about al-Shabaab or al-Shabaab sympathizers or anything like that.
Soon after that, Hassan and I were on our way out of our apartment when two men in civilian clothes walked up quickly behind us.
“Show me your IDs or passports, please,” one of them said.
We stopped and looked at them. They brought out handcuffs.
“Where are your Kenyan IDs or passports?”
“We don’t have Kenyan IDs,” Hassan said. “We have refugee documents.”
As I reached into my pocket for my refugee document, the man handcuffed me and told me to follow him.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked. “Please show me your police ID.”
From his leather jacket he pulled out an ID; I couldn’t tell if it was real or fake. I tried to protest the arrest, and he pulled out a gun. He led me to a corner of the street where fewer people walked. Hassan was brought by the other man.
“I will take you to the Pangani station!” the man holding me shouted. My heart froze, but then the negotiation started. “How much do you have?” he asked. “Give me a thousand shillings!”
“I don’t have it,” I said.
“Seven hundred!”
“I only have one hundred.”
He pulled my wallet out of my pocket, shuffled through it, and took the hundred-shilling note with the picture of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya. He smiled, tucked away his pistol, and left, no doubt to find another refugee he could tap as an ATM. That’s what the police started calling us. Hassan also negotiated his way out of the other man’s threat. We walked away realizing this would be our new danger every night.
Nairobi was a roofless prison for me and my brother, and for the thousands of other Somalis. There was no future besides more police harassment and the terrifying fear of being deported to Somalia. The dim light at the end of our dark tunnel was the hope that someday our American friends might help us escape.
The police raids in Little Mogadishu and the Kenyan troops in Somalia were all good news to al-Shabaab, it was exactly the chaos they craved. The terrorists soon escalated the fight. There was a hand grenade thrown into a church in Nairobi, a matatu attack, a bombing in a Mombasa bar. Metal detectors and heavily armed police were stationed at hotels, restaurants, bars, and bus stations. The Kenyans blamed all Somalis. “Get Them out of Our Country!” the newspaper headlines shouted.
After several unexploded bombs were retrieved from an apartment in Little Mogadishu, more young men in the neighborhood were dragged off to jail. Often they never returned. There was no way to identify terrorists—they had the same refugee papers we did—so any young man was a suspect. Hassan and I kept our heads down, with our hearts in our throats. When Hassan and I had to be separated, we would text each other more than a hundred times every day, making sure we were okay. Women were no safer; they were being raped by the police. All of the people who lived in our building exchanged phone numbers. When the police were coming, we would all text each other: “They are coming down 6th, run toward 5th.” Refugees would lock down their stores, hide in the bathrooms, under the beds.
Meanwhile, the Kenyan citizens had stopped coming to shop in Little Mogadishu. The neighborhood was sealed off and surrounded by police checkpoints at all exits. The local media did not report what was happening in Little Mogadishu, but I did. Dick Gordon, the host of The Story, was growing more worried for our safety. He mentioned that his daughter Pamela was working for the Red Cross of Canada in Nairobi. She invited us for coffee on the rich side of town at a fancy shopping center called the Westgate Mall. Hassan and I managed to evade the police checks and get on a matatu. The mall was like something I had seen in movies of California or Florida: huge, clean, with gardens and moving stairs and shops full of people—white people, Kenyans, Asians. Everything was so expensive. We had a nice talk with Pam. She gave us her mobile number. “In case something happens to you, call me,” she said.
Because we had no luck getting resettlement interviews, Team Abdi’s next plan was to get us American student visas. To improve our chances and give us some college experience, Hassan and I began taking online English classes with one of our fans in America, an English professor at Lyndon State College in Vermont named Nene Riley. She assigned us to read literature and essays and write reports summarizing the main points of the pieces, our reaction to them, and how they applied to our own society. We had exchanges with several students from Lyndon State College, and it felt like we were studying in the United States. My writing steadily improved.
With Sharon’s help we applied to Southern Maine Community College as international exchange students. Sharon and her family sent a letter to the college confirming that she would support us financially and that they were our American family in Maine. Hassan and I had to take something called the Test of English as a Foreign Language, which took half a day. We both passed the test, and soon after that DHL Nairobi delivered official acceptance letters from the school.
We were going to college in America! The next step was getting our student visas, which required interviews at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. To support our requests, Team Abdi had gathered letters of recommendation from seven U.S. senators: Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine; Bernie Sanders of Vermont; Kay Hagan and Richard Burr of North Carolina; and Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. With everything ready, we paid our interview fees and waited for the appointments.
My interview was a week before Hassan’s. That morning I woke up at five, so nervous, and got on a matatu before the police would start searching for refugees. The interview was at eight. I got there at six. After intensive security screening I proceeded inside the embassy and joined a waiting room of people who looked just as excited and nervous. My feet were actually sweating. As I sat there, I thought of my mom and my sister back in Mogadishu. If I got the visa and went to the United States, I would go to college, get a good job, and send them money every week. Life would be great for all of us.
“B-20, proceed to Window Eight.”
That was me. B-20. I stood up and walked to Window Eight. The man behind the counter was a middle-aged, bald-headed white American.
“How are you today?” he asked.
“I am fine, sir. How about yourself?” I used my best American accent, trying not to faint from my nerves.
“Not bad. Have you ever traveled to the U.S.?”
“No.”
“Have you ever traveled to any other country besides Kenya and Somalia?”
“No. But I passed through Uganda on my way to Kenya.”
“What do you do now in Nairobi?”
“I am a refugee here, sir.”
“Did you ever go to college in Nairobi?”
“No.”
“And Somalia?”
“Yes, I went to a college in Mogadishu but it collapsed before I finished.”
“What are those letters in your hand?”
“These are letters of support from senators and other supporters. Do you want to see them?”
“Sure.”
He glanced quickly at the letters, looked up at me, and said, “I am sorry. You don’t qualify for the visa this time. Good luck wherever you end up.” Then he handed everything back to me.
I was frozen. I could not leave his window. He turned to his computer and started typing.
“Sir,” I said with tears in my eyes. But he ignored me and called the next person, B-21.
I walked out of the embassy like my dad when he returned to Mogadishu, crippled and wobbling. Like his, my dream had been destroyed. I felt I did not belong to this world and that I must have been created to have a permanent broken heart. I was so shaky that I was afraid of getting hit by a car, so I had to sit down and breathe. I texted Hassan. Soon everyone on Team Abdi was sending me condolences. Hassan got denied a week later.
We tried one more time, after Ben and Paul e-mailed people they knew who worked at the embassy. Again we were denied. One of the requirements of student visas is that you must have strong family ties in your home country so you aren’t tempted to stay in the United States after school. Of course staying in the United States was absolutely our goal, and the embassy officers probably knew that.
We decided to try to go to school in Kenya. It wouldn’t change our refugee status or help us get to America on student visas, but at least we would be improving our lives. And the police were less likely to harass a refugee with an official student ID. With the financial support of Sharon and her family, we had nothing to lose. First we applied to the best universities in Kenya, University of Nairobi and United States International University. We got turned down. We had no school transcripts from Somalia, and anyway Macalin Basbaas’s madrassa was unlikely to impress them.
We set our sights lower and finally gained admissions in October—Hassan to Methodist University, me to Africa Nazarene University. So without too much trouble we were both official college students, with student IDs. Classes would start in April 2013.
Excited to share my good news, I walked down to our favorite tea shop on Sixth Street and met my friends Yonis, Farah, and Zakariye. We were drinking tea and talking about the usual things—life, girls, and sports—when something caught my eye across the street. There, on the door of the Internet café, was a new sign: “Notice: Apply Now for the American Green Card Lottery.”
The green card lottery? I had never heard of it, but Yonis said it was a way to get a visa just by being lucky. You applied online and waited to see if you were picked. It was all about luck, not the people you knew or the skills you had. The Internet café owner was charging twenty cents to make the application, so he was encouraging people to try.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
“Oh forget it,” said Farah. “It’s a waste of time.”
“You never know,” I said. “It’s only twenty cents!”
I dragged my friends across the street, and we sat down and googled the lottery. It was officially called the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program and was meant to give people from poor countries a fair shot at U.S. immigration. Every October, some eight to fifteen million people around the world apply, and only fifty thousand get visas—a fraction of 1 percent. It would be much easier to get into Harvard. Nobody in the café knew any Somali who had ever won.
I am sure that if the application fee had been fifty cents, I would not have bothered. But for twenty cents, which we all assumed we were just throwing away, my friends and I took the chance and applied that day. So did Hassan. All we could do after that was wait seven months for the results in May.
The New Year arrived and Kenya was consumed by its upcoming presidential election. On March 4, 2013, the country voted for Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Jomo Kenyatta, whose face was on the money that the police stole from us every day. The son ran on a platform of national security, vowing to wipe out al-Shabaab, which of course meant even more al-Shabaab attacks. Somalis expected more police raids in Little Mogadishu, and on election night we all stayed locked behind our doors, praying there would be no bombs or shots. For months after the election, tensions were high everywhere in the city.
School started in April. My course of study was mass communication, the school’s version of journalism, and I was excited to be in classes every day. The hard part was getting there because the campus was fifteen miles away in the Ongata Rongai neighborhood, requiring two matatu rides. Anywhere along the route you could be hit by a suicide terrorist or a roadside bomb or grabbed by the police; anything could happen. One day I was in a matatu coming home from an exam when the passengers, noticing I was Somali, got worried that I was al-Shabaab and carrying a bomb in my backpack. They started yelling at the driver.
“Why is he here?”
“Kick him out!”
The driver pulled over to the side of the road and ordered me off. Unfortunately, he had stopped right in front of the Pangani police station. Al-Shabaab had bombed that station a few weeks earlier, and security was very tight. If I got off the bus there, I would be arrested at best, and maybe shot on sight. You could not offer bribes in that spot, because the station had cameras there. I begged the driver as the passengers kept shouting, “Kick him out!”
“I am a student!” I cried. “I am not a terrorist!” Finally I turned my backpack upside down and emptied out all my books, pencils, and pens onto the floor of the bus. I held up my student ID for everyone to see. This argument went on for five minutes until the driver sped off, then dropped me away from the police station. I stopped carrying a backpack and wore only a T-shirt in public so I could not be concealing a bomb.
Finally, May came, time for the lottery winners to be announced. My friends had forgotten about it, but not me. I had been thinking about it every day, waiting for the moment. I texted my friends to meet one afternoon at the Internet café.
We had to wait for a computer terminal, it was so packed with people checking the results. They had been coming since the morning, Kenyans, Ethiopians, Somalis, all of them walking out glum-faced.
“See, this thing is fake,” said Yonis.
When we got a computer, Farah went first. No luck. Zakariye. No. Yonis. Same. I went last. As I entered my application number and date of birth, I thought about all the good luck I had received in my life. There was the time my family escaped execution on our flight from Mogadishu when that fighter recognized my dad; the time I met Paul by chance that day in Mogadishu, setting me on a path as a radio correspondent; Sharon hearing me on the radio in Maine one evening; Aleey, the Somali cabdriver in Kampala who rescued me from Entebbe Airport. So much good luck. I clicked Submit, on the luckiest day of my life.