On the phone that night, Leo asked me what I did when I got the e-mail. “Oh my God,” I said, “I jumped off the bed and hit my head on the ceiling!”
It’s issued! I’ve never had such a big smile, never ever ever. It feels like the dream has just become real. I feel like I am not a refugee. This is not a refugee that is hiding from the police. I’m an American citizen!
Well, not exactly. But I had won the right to live and work in America. Not won. I had earned it. Years of practicing English, a lifetime of dodging bullets and bombs, risking death by refusing to join the Islamists, hiding from crooked cops, and above all never giving up. Leo asked Hassan if he had any jealousy that only I had won. He replied,
Actually, Leo, I tell you I don’t have the least jealousy at all. If two of us get visas to get out of here, it would be even better. But if someone told me right now, “There is one visa, which one of you will take it?” I would say Abdi. Because he’s new to this country and I know how we are so fearful at night. And I know how he can’t sleep at night. For him to get a visa is my biggest pleasure. Yeah, there’s luck there, but luck can be fair.
Leo asked the State Department if his phone call had made the final difference. They replied, “The journalist call played no role in the timing of the visa issuance. Any visa process coinciding with a press inquiry is merely a coincidence.”
Maybe, maybe not. I didn’t care. Abdi American was finally going to America.
On August 8, I got a call from DHL that it had my visa and I could come collect it. By noon I walked out of that building carrying my amazing, beautiful American visa. It was Friday in downtown Nairobi, and the streets were packed with thousands of people happy that the workweek was ending. But no one was skipping like me. I had to be the happiest man in Nairobi that day.
With my visa in hand Sharon and Ben quickly bought me a plane ticket for Boston. My flight was on Monday at five in the morning, connecting through Addis Ababa and Frankfurt. With all of this confirmed, Leo flew into Nairobi that weekend to meet me and finish the radio documentary we were doing together. Sunday evening, my last day in Little Mogadishu, Hassan and I snuck past the police and caught a matatu decorated with photos of President Obama. The driver was playing Michael Jackson songs. It was perfect. Before meeting Leo at his hotel, we made a quick shopping trip. I needed luggage for my stuff—all I had were plastic shopping bags—and some clean clothes.
At nine o’clock that evening, a small Mazda car hired by the BBC staff showed up in front of the hotel. I don’t remember breathing during the twenty-minute drive to the airport. What if a terrorist attack happens, or a bomb is thrown somewhere? They could lock down the airport and I would never be able to leave! Leo had his microphone in my face asking me what I was feeling like. I told him I felt like the clock was ticking. I was so nervous about the airport and if the immigration people would arrest me for being a refugee. Meanwhile, I was thinking Hassan would have to go back to that room, alone, in the dark with no company, just the brutal police.
At the airport entrance we were stopped by the police, they peeked into the car, Leo said hi, and the Kenyan driver waved. They let us go. We all got out and entered the airport departure terminal. Leo took some pictures of Hassan and me. We hugged and said good-bye. I was so choked up I couldn’t say anything to my brother. Hassan told me to stay strong. His last words were “Remember to support Mom!”
With that, I proceeded inside. The Kenya immigration officer looked at my visa, stamped my refugee documents, and waved me through. So easy with the right piece of paper. It was ten o’clock when I sat down at the gate for the long wait until my flight. I was the first passenger there.
Hassan and Leo decided to wait at a cafeteria inside the airport until the flight took off, to make sure I departed without being arrested. I sat there looking around the airport, watching people come and go. In a few hours many other people joined me in the wait. Finally our boarding was announced. I had a window seat. When we took off, the sun was just rising above the horizon. My American dream was now becoming real life, and it seemed like everything in my past life was becoming a dream that I needed to wake up from.
After a stop in Ethiopia we landed in Frankfurt, where I had to change planes. That airport was so huge I freaked out for a moment trying to connect with my flight to Boston. We had to take a bus to the departure gate on the other side. Again I boarded Lufthansa, the biggest airplane I ever saw. Again I had a window seat. An American lady with her teenage daughter sat next to me. After takeoff they shut their eyes and acted like the flight was boring. I was awake; I could not take my eyes off the window and the screen in front of me that showed where we were. At some point we were flying over the United Kingdom; I looked down, and I could see water and what seemed like a city. Then all was blue for hours and hours.
My heart was beating fast as the plane banked over downtown Boston and descended to Logan Airport. My face was glued to the window as I looked at the skyscrapers of America, then the blue waters of the Atlantic. Even though we were going down, I felt like I was going up to heaven. When the wheels bumped on the runway, I couldn’t control myself. “I am in America!” I shouted.
Even the bored lady next to me found a way to smile. “Welcome!” she said.
As we taxied to the gate, I thought of my brother in Kenya, my mom on the dusty streets of Mogadishu waiting for the good news, my friends in the tea shop in Little Mogadishu who applied for the visa lottery when I forced them, all the while assuring me it was hogwash. But I had no thought of saying “I told you so.” I was overwhelmed with joy, with tears melting down my cheeks.
Exiting the plane felt like a historic moment, like when the first man walked on the moon. I wondered if gravity felt different in America, but it seemed about the same as in Africa. People poured out of the flight; they were in some sort of a hurry. It seemed like everyone knew what to do and they knew where they were going. I just felt like standing there and watching everything. I looked around the immigration hall. So far no Hollywood, no Disney World, no Statue of Liberty or Harvard University, not even Walmart or KFC. I saw people who looked a little like Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, Eddie Murphy, Oprah, or Tom Cruise, and I couldn’t take my eyes off them. But I was not the only stranger there. A group of Asians speaking a strange language were lined up in front of me. People of other colors were everywhere. A black man right behind me in the line was glued to his phone.
“Hi!” I said.
“Hello.” To my surprise he had a thick African accent.
“I’m from Somalia. Where are you from?”
“Nigeria,” he replied, barely looking up from his phone.
It was the first time in my entire life I saw a Nigerian. He told me he had lived in America for ten years.
So many different kinds of people in America! I expected big, muscly white guys to be in charge at the airport, like the marines I knew from Mogadishu. But lots of the airport staff were Asian, short with round faces. As the line moved on slowly, I gazed up at the huge television screens flashing the news:
…actor Robin Williams has committed suicide…
…violent protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of a black man…
It was a police officer who shot the man, but people were protesting, taking to the streets. Although many Americans might not be happy with things in the United States, to me the protests were just a sign of freedom that people can get out onto the streets and show their unhappiness. Kenyan police would have killed Somalis who dared to protest in Little Mogadishu.
When it was my turn, an officer asked me some questions and handed me a form to fill out. I had to choose between being African, African American, Hispanic, or Caucasian. This threw me at first because I had never thought of myself as African. In Somalia we identify ourselves by our tribes.
An officer led me into a room where a nice American lady took my fingerprints and photo. She had blue eyes and blond hair, and she said my official green card would arrive at my address in Maine. “Welcome to the United States!” she said warmly. Everything was very quiet, official, and businesslike in the airport, not like all the chaos and shouting in African airports, and I wondered if all of America was this serious. But when I finally walked through the doors from the immigration hall into the terminal, I flinched from the sudden rush of activity. People were everywhere, holding signs, wheeling suitcases, hugging relatives. Now I was really in America! Somewhere out there in the crowd were Sharon McDonnell and her daughter, Natalya, both trying to catch sight of me. Then I saw them; they were holding a sign that said “Abdi Iftin.” Sharon had straight shoulder-length blond hair, and Natalya a dark ponytail. We met and I stooped to hug them. Both were so much shorter than I imagined, not like Americans in the movies or the marines in Mogadishu. They looked up at me with huge smiles. “Welcome!” said Sharon. “Let’s take you to your new home.”
We left through a huge revolving door to the curbside. My first moment breathing the fresh air of America! Except it smelled like diesel fumes right there, not much different from Africa. I ducked down and kept my eyes fixed on Sharon, this small person who had changed my life forever. I was looking at her like she was superhuman—not superhuman like the comic-book heroes I saw in movies but in some other way that was maybe even stronger. We took some pictures; I bounced from place to place asking for shots.
In truth I was also a little scared. A Somali living with a white family could be known as a converted person, someone who left the culture and Islam. What would my family and friends think? What if Sharon had a dog? What if the dog licks and sniffs me? How would I behave?
We got into the car. I sat in the backseat, still curious about the gleaming city of Boston, when Sharon said, “You need to put on your seat belt.”
I couldn’t figure out how to do it. Sharon and Natalya laughed and showed me how to buckle up. “You need to do this every time you get in a car,” said Sharon. “It’s the law.” I couldn’t believe I was in a place where people actually obey laws. Also I had never seen a female driver in my life, except in movies.
We left the airport on a busy divided road out of Boston heading up to Maine. I saw lots of big stores and restaurants. I saw a restaurant called Kowloon shaped like some kind of South Pacific island hut, but it was like no hut in Somalia; it looked larger than the huge Isbaheysiga mosque in Mogadishu. Next came some kind of cowboy place with a neon cactus sign as tall as buildings in Nairobi. I kept thinking, “Here I am in a car in America with friends who helped me and my family even though we are not in their tribe or even the same religion.” This was an aspect of humanity very new to me. I sat quietly as we drove and tried to make sense of it.
Night fell slowly and late, it was past eight o’clock and still some light. We kept driving through the twilight, zooming by more huge shops and parking lots, now blazing under blue lights. Soon there were fewer lights and buildings, more trees. I rolled down my window to get a better flavor of America, the cool late-summer wind slapping my face. When we pulled off the highway for gas and some food, I ordered a cheeseburger for my first American dinner. With a full tank we were off on the road again, this time Natalya driving. Sharon talked about the weather, how the trees will change colors, how snow will fall, Thanksgiving, Christmas. They already had plans for all these events.
Finally we pulled up in their driveway. Sure enough, at the door we were greeted by their dog, named Lacy. She jumped all over me, licking. Dog saliva is considered impure to Muslims, so now I was definitely getting butterflies in my stomach. I froze with fear.
“She’s friendly,” said Natalya. “She’s just excited.”
The two cats, Tigger and Jasmin, did not even bother waking up from their naps. But the dog followed me upstairs to my room and jumped on the bed. When Sharon and Natalya said good night, I wondered if the dog would leave me. She stayed there. I couldn’t sleep with a dog in my room, it was too scary, so finally I got her out and shut the door.
I was too excited to sleep, but fortunately the morning came soon: five o’clock and it was already light. America seemed quiet, not like the streets of Mogadishu or Little Mogadishu. I watched the morning light filter into my room from the large window overlooking the driveway and then got up to look outside. A herd of deer grazed like camels just beyond the cars. As they moved on across the lawn and vanished into the tall trees, the sun appeared between the branches where squirrels were playing. So the window faced east; now I knew which way to pray. The walls of my room were painted white and blue, strange colors for walls, which are always the color of mud in Africa. The ceiling was so flat and perfect; how do they do that? The house was built in the nineteenth century, but to me it looked brand new. There was a dial on the wall to adjust the heat. The room was obsessively neat: somebody’s clothes hung perfectly in the closet, not draped over a frayed clothesline like in an African hut, and pictures of birds and flowers in gold frames hung on the wall. A sculpture of Buddha sat quietly on the floor. I didn’t know who Buddha was, but I soon learned Sharon and her family believed in Buddhism.
Outside, tiny fast hummingbirds dove from a tree to a bird feeder for a quick drink of nectar. They were no bigger than African bugs, and I watched them for a while, wondering if they were ever killed by cats. The only sound coming from outside was a chime softly ringing in the gentle wind. This room seemed way too big for just me, probably double the size of the room my brother and I shared in Nairobi.
I got dressed and went down to see the family.
“Let’s help you fix your first American breakfast,” said Sharon. The breakfast would be milk, eggs, and toast. They had lots of eggs from their chickens. “And also there’s lots of leftovers in the refrigerator,” she said. I did not know Americans ate leftovers. The refrigerator was packed with leftover soup, rice, eggs, pasta, juice, sauce, everything. Drawers were full of food. There were crackers, granola, dog food, and cat food. There was food everywhere in the kitchen. The living room was full of books and magazines. There was a big red couch to sit on and read. A nice porch and a big Apple computer. I went on and updated my Facebook posts. This time I didn’t need Photoshopped pictures of me in America; I used actual pictures we took at Logan the night before. My friends commented with questions like “Are u living with a Christian family?” “Are you going to convert?”
My orientation started with using the oven and the toaster. I had seen kitchens in movies, but I never thought I would use such things. I learned how to warm things from the “fridge” using the microwave. Soon I learned about the dishwasher, the clothes washer, the dryer, which food goes where in the refrigerator. I learned how to measure things in inches and pounds, not meters and kilograms. I learned to leave tips at restaurants. And I was learning new English words every day, starting with “closet,” “vacuum,” “the vet,” “chicken coop,” “the barn,” “mowing,” and all different types of food.
I met Gib, Sharon’s husband, the most easygoing person I have ever come across. He is short and thin, and his deep blue eyes miss nothing. He seems to think very carefully before he says anything, and he likes things to be in order. Gib teaches postgraduate epidemiology at the University of New Hampshire in Manchester. Before he went out to “run errands,” he asked me, “Is there anything you want me to get you from the grocery store?” He spent his leisure time doing things around the house. He would disappear into the basement and work on electric wires, or out to the yard putting up a fence.
In Africa it is unusual for a man to know how to cook, but Gib cooked great meals—fried rice, guacamole, and the most delicious cakes. When we went together to buy groceries, we stopped at a drive-up window for coffee takeout. Gib explained how the speaker box worked. “There is a real person talking, even though we can’t see them,” he explained. It seemed like ordering food on a mobile phone, which I learned you could also do.
I could not get a job in the United States until my Social Security card and green card arrived. While I waited, the McDonnell-Parrish family offered me a job in their house. I would cut and stack firewood for the winter. I fed the horse, cleaned the stall and the chicken coop, watered plants, cleared fallen branches from the driveway. I spent all day working outside and came in only for a quick break for lunch of a sandwich and some orange juice. They paid me ten dollars an hour. I worked every day of the week and earned over six hundred dollars, but it went fast. After buying a bike, some new clothes, work gloves, and goggles for splitting firewood, I had enough left for my daily treat of doughnuts and coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts. At night I would relax by browsing on Netflix and watching movies.
I woke up every day enjoying work, and there was always something to do; even clearing spiderwebs from the barn was a job the family had long wanted to do. Natalya was scared of spiders, but years earlier I had cleared spiderwebs for Falis in her video shack, so I was prepared.
Natalya was a senior at Yarmouth High School, but this was still summer break, so she and I walked miles every day through town. As we walked, I waved to drivers passing by, and they waved back or smiled. Natalya told me some people in America are racists. I was not sure what racism was; all I knew was hatred and bigotry from Kenya, and that was not about skin color. She took me around to meet the neighbors so everyone would know me and not dial 911 when I walked around. We played soccer and video games and went on shopping trips to L.L.Bean in Freeport. Natalya described me as her adopted brother to everyone. She had not had someone at home to hang out with since her older brother, Morgan, moved to California; now she again enjoyed doing things with a brother. One day she posted a photo of me on social media holding my favorite chocolate chip vanilla ice cream, describing me as her older brother. My Somali friends started calling me on the phone, in shock. One said, “Have you lost your mind? You can’t make her a sister unless she is Muslim.”
Weeks passed. Fall came. The sun was setting and rising more like in Somalia around six, but it was getting much colder than it ever does in Somalia. The leaves on the trees were turning golden and red; I had never seen such colors on trees. In the house people talked about the weather, food, vacations, books, and movies. There was always something going on. But today we were talking about Halloween, which was in two days, and the huge pumpkin was at the doorstep. I got oriented about tricks and treats and wearing costumes. Sharon gave me a list of funny characters I could choose to be. I picked Spider-Man because I knew him from the DVDs I had watched in Africa, but other characters on the list were strange to me. Me in my Spider-Man costume and Natalya in her Victorian ghost costume, we visited neighbors’ houses for trick-or-treating. It felt a little weird because not many adults were dressed in costumes, but the neighbors filled my small bag with sweets.
I never heard of changing the time on clocks—I thought the time is what it is—but one Sunday morning everybody went around the house setting the clocks an hour back, and suddenly it was getting dark really early. Soon Thanksgiving was coming. When the day finally arrived, we had ten people around the table, mostly relatives. Everyone wanted to meet me, the new member of the McDonnell-Parrish family. We had turkey, sweet potato soufflé, apple pie, ice cream—so much food. I almost forget what it was like to be so hungry you are in physical agony. Almost. I couldn’t believe I was sitting at a large table surrounded by white people with glasses of beer in their hands, and I was like one of them. They talked about American football, TV shows they had seen, and hiking and other trips they did. They talked about their animals, their families. I watched and learned. I talked about my life, my story, and my new life in Maine.
I watched from across the street as the mailman dropped envelopes into the box every day. The idea of mail was so strange; even stranger was that it would be delivered to your house instead of your waiting in a line somewhere and paying a bribe, but I was getting used to it. I ran to grab the mail as soon as the mailman came, checking to see if my name was on anything. Mostly it was shopping catalogs, funny to look through and see all the things you could buy without even going to a store. I didn’t want to shop. I was waiting for my green card.
When it finally arrived, I wanted to just tear open the envelope, but I was careful not to rip the card inside. It turned out the card was hard plastic and not so easy to rip. The card had a computer image of me, the picture they took at Logan Airport, next to a picture of the Statue of Liberty. It said “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” and “PERMANENT RESIDENT.” Me and the Statue of Liberty, permanent residents.
My Social Security card came soon after, which meant I could work and buy a car. Most important, it was the first step to my goal of becoming a citizen of the United States of America.
Meanwhile, back in Somalia, neighbors poured into my mom’s shack in the Eelasha camp to congratulate her on my arrival in the United States. They treated her like she’d hit the jackpot. Distant relatives who had always avoided Mom were practically moving in, waiting for her to promise them something. But she had not received a penny from me. She expected money the day after I arrived, but weeks passed and I had not sent a dollar, because I could not find a job, and I had already spent the money I earned from housework. Sharon and Gib were so generous in giving me a place to stay and free meals, but once I had cleaned everything around their property, there wasn’t much more work I could do for them. I had my green card, but I was short on “greenbacks,” another new word.
No one in Africa believed me. When I spoke to my mom on the phone, she was deaf to my complaints about the lack of work in America, where money grows on trees. She thought I had become arrogant, that my newfound wealth had changed me. I had no way to convince her that life could also be hard in America. But her problems were bigger than mine; she and Nima needed money to survive and buy food. I stayed up all night browsing through JobsinMaine.com and other websites, applying for any work that I thought I could do. I tried warehouses, laundries, bakeries, bathroom cleaning, floor mopping, and many other jobs. Most of them ended up being too far away from Yarmouth, and I had no car or even a driver’s license. So I had to limit my search to jobs within walking or biking distance.
I walked around town, visiting neighbors, asking if they needed someone to work in their yard or help with anything. I visited local farms to see if they wanted help. Some of the online applications for warehouse jobs got back to me for interviews. The bosses smiled, and I felt good talking to them. I said how hard I would work. I filled out so many forms, signed papers, and answered questions. They all turned me down. Was it my English? I knew it wasn’t as good as most Americans’. Maybe they turned me down because I was new to the country. I did not have previous work experience here in the United States, something they always asked about. I had no résumé or references.
My fears of unemployment grew stronger after every interview. I was really struggling to understand how America works. What if I never find a job? I was ready to do any kind of work, the dirtiest jobs, but still I could find nothing. Gib and I put up a sign in the front yard of the house. Sharon helped me write a few lines: “I am a young man from Africa. Healthy, no drugs. I need a job. Any job. If you know of any please call this number.”
Maine is home to about fifty thousand Somali immigrants, most of them living in Lewiston, an old textile mill town in central Maine and the home of Bates College. Many others live in Portland, the state’s largest city. The Somali refugees get help from resettling agencies like Catholic Charities that give them money for the first eight months and assign caseworkers who help them assimilate and find jobs. But I was not technically a refugee. And while Sharon and Gib were doctors who traveled the world helping to fight diseases, they were not social workers trained to help an African immigrant navigate America.
Also there were no Somalis in Yarmouth, a bedroom community ten miles north of Portland with fewer than nine thousand people. In Lewiston and Portland, Somalis can ride buses around town. In Yarmouth at the time there were no buses, so I rode a bike around, asking every business on Main Street if it had any jobs. People would stare at me like they had never seen a black neighbor. Children looked startled; they would hide behind their parents’ legs and point. It felt strange to be so different. Somalis don’t look like Kenyans, but it’s a matter of degrees. Here I was like a space alien. I stopped by the Dunkin’ Donuts, Romeos pizza, several horse farms, the laundry, even the transfer station. But no one had a job. I thought maybe I could hawk socks on the sidewalk like in Nairobi, until I remembered that everyone was driving in cars and probably bought socks online or at L.L.Bean just up the highway.
After weeks of futile job searching around Yarmouth, we decided I should go down to Portland and ask around in the Somali community about jobs. As we waited for the day to come, at dinnertime one evening in November the house phone rang. It was Christine, one of Sharon’s friends who lived in Yarmouth and had seen the sign in our yard. She told Sharon that a local home insulation company was seeking men who could do tough work. Winter was coming and the demand for insulation was growing. I e-mailed the manager, and we arranged an interview that week.
The leaves of the trees were turning dull brown and falling as I walked to the interview. It was getting dark even earlier and getting even colder. The manager looked at my green card. “What is your name?” he asked. It was on the card, but I guess he couldn’t tell my first name from my last name.
“Abdi,” I said.
“Forgive me if I pronounce your name wrong,” he said. “You look good, strong and energetic; we need guys like you, Abbi. This job is dealing with heavy material and climbing roofs. Are you okay with heights?”
I told him I didn’t have a problem with heights and that I really needed the job.
“We pay eleven dollars an hour,” he said. “We might increase the pay if your work is good.” He seemed like he was apologizing for the pay, but to me it was great, the most I had ever earned in my life. He asked if I could work on weekends. I said I could work anytime day or night. I walked out of that building on air.
Monday morning, November 17, was my first day on the job. When my alarm went off at four o’clock, I dressed warm, in layers of silk and wool. I had my usual breakfast of eggs, milk, and toast. Everyone else in the house was asleep. It was a forty-five-minute walk to work and I headed out, with my new craft knife tucked in my belt, my staple gun in my back pocket, and my hard hat on. I walked through the woods; all was quiet and silent except the scared deer that dashed when they heard me coming.
“Welcome on board,” said the manager when I arrived. He introduced me to the guys I would be working with. They were all big, muscular Maine guys in dirty clothes and big construction boots. Whenever they talked, they cursed. Fuck, shit, bitch, ass. They wrestled and punched each other. Except for being white, they reminded me of Somali militiamen, but I was so happy to have the job that I ignored my fear.
The crew boss, Joey, told the workers my name, but they all struggled with it. Eddy, Abey, Abbdey. I told them whatever was fine. I could barely understand their thick Maine accents anyway. Until now I was proud of my English, but they kept correcting my mistakes and laughing at my accent, so I felt humiliated and different. To them I was a strange African man, not the American I wanted to be.
The sun was coming up as we gathered for the daily safety meeting. The workers talked about a couple of employees who had fallen off a roof and hurt themselves, someone else’s ladder broke, someone tripped and got hurt on his stilts. Every week there were stories of broken bones. I was told that I could go to a hospital for free if I got injured, which surprised me. I didn’t know it was the law, I just thought the company was being nice.
Joey assigned me to work with Milton and Sean, experienced workers who had been with the company for more than ten years. Milton read the instructions for the day’s job. It was a commercial building, six floors, we would “batt” the walls and the ceilings with fiberglass insulation. We were called the batting squad. Both Milton and Sean were big, strong guys with tattoos all over their bodies. Sean had piercings in his nose and lower lip; Milton was missing some front teeth.
I loaded the heavy rolls of insulation into the big delivery truck from “the shop,” which is what we called the Yarmouth warehouse. Heavy bundles of fiberglass sat everywhere. Milton used one hand rolling the whole bundle to the truck. I struggled with two hands. While I loaded one, he loaded three. The tiny strands of fiberglass got all over my clothes; even with gloves, a face mask, and goggles I was itching. The three of us, the batting squad, climbed into the cab and drove off, Milton behind the wheel. Before the truck left, Joey shouted out from his office, “Remember, everyone, don’t forget your hard hats and goggles! It’s the law!”
As soon as the truck left the shop, both men reached into their duffel bags and took out marijuana. “Do you smoke the shit, dude?” Milton asked me.
“No,” I said. I had never smoked marijuana or even seen it. I’d never even smoked a cigarette. As they puffed their weed, the smoke filled the cabin. “It smells bad,” I said. They just laughed, looked at me, and said something I couldn’t understand. They spoke so quickly and with sarcasm that was new to me. They talked about their wives, going to clubs, drinking beer, smoking weed, cars, winning the lottery, pizza, and professional wrestling. I sat next to them in silence, trying to absorb and learn their culture, looking out at the trees and buildings.
Milton got a call from his wife. He called her “the old lady.” At first I thought he was talking about his mom, but he said his mom was dead. “Hey, today we have a new guy, Abbi,” he said to his wife, then put her on speakerphone and signaled me to say something. I didn’t know what to say.
We talked about Africa. To them, Africa was one big country of naked people who eat snakes. More monkeys and lions than people. I told them that we have highways, airplanes, and cars, which surprised them.
Milton had barely any space for another tattoo, so I was surprised to hear him plan to dedicate a new tattoo to his late mom on his neck, which he said would cost him over five hundred dollars. I could never understand that, or the piercings, but one thing we shared was that these guys all loved their families. Milton hung photos of his wife and kids everywhere, on his hat, in the truck, and at the shop.
The walls of the building were made of metal studs, not mud or blocks. It didn’t seem very sturdy to me. While Milton and Sean smoked cigarettes and drank Red Bull outside the building, I started unloading the fiberglass batts and carrying them to the upper floors on an unfinished staircase. I was breathing heavy and my goggles fogged up, so I could barely see the stairs. Finally Milton and Sean put on their favorite rock-and-roll music blasting all over the building and got to work. They showed me how to cut open the bundles of insulation, then how to put on stilts so we could batt the ceiling. I saw the rafters above and now understood how Americans got such flat ceilings. Sean and Milton didn’t bother to wear masks or goggles, but they told me I should wear them because I was new and not used to the fiberglass. “You’ll take those off after a while,” Milton said, laughing. They were so fast they were actually running on their stilts. I could barely walk on mine without falling over. Then we did the walls, climbing tall ladders. Milton and Sean moved their ladders forward while they were standing on them, by jumping. They were like circus acrobats.
My first paycheck was a happy day; I had earned $400. Because I was living with Sharon and Gib and still had no car, my personal expenses were small, and I was able to send $340 to my mom. I was so proud as I walked into Portland’s halal market, which was the unofficial hawala money-transfer station. I handed over my cash to the guy behind the counter, he took an extra $6 for every hundred as a fee. Then he communicated by computer with the hawala kiosk in Mogadishu, where my mom went in and claimed the money.
She was so happy she bought a goat and slaughtered it, cooked a pot of rice, and threw a party for the neighbors. Macalin Basbaas came and enjoyed the meal. My mom said he prayed for me: “May God keep him safe and working hard.”
Every day we batted different houses and buildings in different towns. Ten miles, twenty miles, and sometimes as far as eighty miles. We had to finish batting a whole house within the same day, so we moved fast. Lunch break was only thirty minutes. Milton and Sean ate doughnuts, sometimes burgers they brought with them. I always sought a clean place and prayed. They both would come look at me bowing my head and reciting the Koran.
“What are you doing?” Milton asked me.
During the prayer I am not supposed to speak, so I was quiet and answered when I finished. “I was praying.”
Milton picked up his phone and called everyone else who worked at the company and even his old lady. He made fun of the whole thing. “This dude bows and says he’s praying,” he said with a laugh.
I had to tell them that I am Muslim, I have to pray five times a day. “They got Muslims in Africa?” Sean asked.
Of course they thought all Muslims look like Osama bin Laden.
After work, Milton and Sean would stop at a convenience store to buy beer and cigarettes. Often they would ask to borrow money from me until the next payday. I always gave them a few dollars when they asked, but they never paid me back. I wasn’t sure if it would be polite to remind them on payday.
One day on the job my hard hat disappeared. Another day my staple gun, then my winter coat. When I asked what could have happened, Milton laughed and said, “That’s what happens when you’re new here.” The boss said he couldn’t do anything. I had to buy a new hard hat and a new staple gun from the shop. I had no idea who was stealing my stuff until one day I found my hard hat in the back of Milton’s pickup truck. The same guys I’d been working with for months, and when I asked, they said nothing! It was humiliating, and it felt as if my American dream was shrinking.
I asked Joey to put me on a different batting squad, and I was told to work with a guy named Tom. He was respectful to me, rolling down his window when smoking weed. He had been to prison several times, due to drugs, and he said he wanted to stop. But he explained that he needed the weed to do his job. Tom wanted to go to college, and he asked me questions about my life back in Africa. I told him about the wars and the death and the escapes, and he shook his head in disbelief. “Dude!” he said. “I grew up with an abusive dad and I spent seven years in prison, but that’s nothing compared to your shit.”
Tom and I got along well. I felt it was safe to leave my things in his truck. He wanted to see the world outside the United States; he wanted to explore. He told me he liked watching National Geographic TV shows. He watched shows about the Maasai Mara and Serengeti national parks in Kenya and Tanzania. We talked about lions, hyenas, and wildebeests. I told him stories about my mom and dad facing lions in real life. I liked Tom, but I noticed the drugs he took to cope with work also seemed to cause his troubles.
There was always a radio on the work site, always blaring rock and roll, blues, or country music. The guys could name all the bands and artists, but they didn’t know anything about American history. They couldn’t name many presidents except the most recent ones or George Washington, and they didn’t know about the Black Hawk Down incident, even though there were pictures on the Internet of dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. They had no idea where Somalia was.
Many of the guys on the batting squad had lost their licenses from drunk driving, so they all gave each other rides home. Milton gave Sean a ride, and Tom picked up two other people. I asked if someone could give me a ride home, and Milton said I would have to pay him gas money. None of the other guys gave him gas money, but he wanted twenty dollars a week from me. I told him I was happy to walk home, even though I was so tired and dirty after work.
I don’t know if the guys on the batting squad were racist; I hadn’t been in America long enough to know about that. But it did feel like something I understood very well: the tribalism of Somalia. I have heard Americans complain that Africans bring on their own problems with their tribal feuds, and there is some truth to that. But these Maine guys had a tribe too. Maybe they didn’t call themselves Darod or Hawiye, but it was a tribe, and I definitely was not a member.
So I had to walk home, up Main Street, looking like some homeless guy in my filthy work clothes and covered in pink fiberglass threads. Fortunately, the people of Yarmouth got to know me and realized I was just a hardworking guy. When I got home, I took off my rough clothes, took a warm shower, dressed up nice, and walked back toward Main Street to relax at the Dunkin’ Donuts. People waved and smiled. I started to feel like part of the community and not just an outsider like I felt at work.
The batting squad guys were getting excited for winter because it meant they did not have to worry about sweating so much on the job. The trees went bare, like skeletons. A cold wind came straight in from the sea, but the sky was bright blue. On my day off I walked across the meadow of dry grass behind the house. Natalya’s horse was growing a winter coat. At the dinner table the weather news was on; there was a brutal and early winter storm coming to Maine, they said. A “northeaster.” People were instructed to drive slow; schools were canceled. Everyone around the table had been preparing. There were shovels ready at the front door. Wood was thrown into the burning stove.
“We’ll have to give you a ride to work tomorrow,” said Gib. “It will be hard to walk in the storm.” I went to bed at seven o’clock as usual and woke up at four, when it was still dark outside. Out the window of my room I saw it was snowing a lot—my first snow! I noticed the flakes falling silently, not like rain. The sky was glowing white and hazy.
I got dressed and went outside to help Gib shovel the walkways. Snow covered the cars and roofs. The roads were hardly recognizable. Trees were dancing in the storm; the only sound was limbs creaking under the snow, which kept falling and falling. My hands turned numb from the cold, even with gloves. As we drove to work, the car heater was still warming up and I was shivering, both hands buried in my lap. “This is what we call winter, Abdi,” said Gib, smiling. “It may get even worse.” All day at work I was freezing because there was not yet any heat in the buildings where we were installing the batts. I needed warmer clothes.
The winter went on. So much snow fell that I could hardly see our house, or out of our house; the snow was higher than the windows, and the paths we had shoveled became like the walls of a giant maze. We were running out of places to put all the snow. Dump trucks were taking snow from the store parking lots to the ocean. It felt good to come home from work in the evening for a warm shower and a tasty dinner. I turned up the heat, browsed Netflix, and watched lots of movies, one every night before bed. I watched movies I had seen back in Africa that inspired me with the American dream because watching again helped me understand many things. In Somalia once I watched The Grey, with Liam Neeson playing a guy battling wolves in Alaska after his plane crashes. I didn’t really understand how terrible it could be in the wilderness during a snowstorm. Now I watched it again and it made sense.
Every night after a great movie I buried myself underneath a warm blanket and thought about my past life, the tough times, the near-death escapes. My heart warmed with the knowledge that I was far away from that pain, even as I worried for my family. But waking up in the morning for work, I had to face another freezing day on the batting squad, my own real-life version of The Grey. At least there were no wolves. I didn’t mind the hard work, but I hated the cold.
One day the manager of the company called me into his office to tell me I was getting a raise to twelve dollars an hour. He put me on the night shift with a batting squad insulating a new school building on an island off the coast of Portland. Every evening we took our truck out to the island on a ferry, then worked all night as more and more snow fell. One of the crew members was Bob, a tiny guy who had piercings in his lower lip and tattoos on his neck. The other guys called him Mini because he was so small. His nickname reminded me of the militiamen in Somalia who had nicknames like “Long-Eared” and “One-Eyed,” and I called him Bob. He seemed to like doing his job, but he cursed a lot, maybe to make up for his small size.
One time during our midnight break, Bob started a conversation with me. “Man, I am fucking scared for my wife,” he said, explaining that he didn’t like leaving her home alone all night. He said his town had a bad record of gun violence and thugs breaking into houses. He had lost a brother to a drug dealer who shot him twice in the head. “I got a fucking gun in my house so my wife can protect herself,” he said. I asked him if he had ever seen anyone get shot and he said no, just animals when out hunting.
All of my co-workers liked to go hunting; they shot deer and turkeys and sometimes even moose and bears. They told stories about Americans getting accidentally killed by guns in the woods and how you needed to wear orange during deer season. They talked all the time about guns and what kinds of guns they liked best. I knew lots of guns too, but not the kind they took hunting. Of course I always saw lots of weapons in Hollywood movies but didn’t really understand how much Americans thought about shooting guns. It wasn’t just hunting; all over the news that winter were stories of black Americans getting shot by police. There was so much talk of racism; I didn’t know this existed in the United States. Every day was a new surprise.
I couldn’t believe Americans were scared for their lives in their own homes until I heard stories like Bob’s. I slept in my big white room peacefully, with no sounds of gunfire anywhere around or police kicking down my door for a bribe.
Then we had a gun incident at work. Jimmy, one of the older guys working at the company, was fired for smoking weed inside the office. I guess he couldn’t wait until getting on the truck. His co-workers had a day full of fun talking about their friend getting fired as I listened in surprise. But the next morning Jimmy returned to the shop with a rifle in his hand, threatening to spray bullets on us. It was a Friday and payday, so all the guys had been in a good mood, talking about how they would spend their money over the weekend. But the happy day turned into a frantic game of hide-and-seek as we scattered behind stacks of insulation. The cops soon arrived and managed to get the gun from Jimmy before they arrested him. It was still so early in the morning most of Yarmouth was still asleep. Until then the only white Americans I had seen with guns were those handsome marines in Mogadishu, and they always pointed their weapons away from us. I had no idea Americans turned guns on each other like Somali militiamen, and this left me scared and confused.
Months passed and the winter finally ended. The warm weather felt so good, but I realized I had been in America almost a year and without much progress. I was trying so hard to fit in, but I had so much to learn. One day I left the stove on, I forgot you have to turn it off, it’s not like a cookfire that burns out. Sharon and Gib were so patient and kind, but my pride made me embarrassed to make mistakes. Sometimes I went upstairs, lay in my bed, and remembered the good old days when thinking about America was heavenly. I was realizing nothing is easy, even in America.
Somalis are pretty reserved around strangers; until you know someone, it’s considered best to listen respectfully and be quiet. But most Americans speak their minds right away. They are not afraid of starting a conversation. I struggled for months to gain such confidence.
I didn’t want to admit this to myself, but I was also suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Since then I have learned that virtually all Somali refugees have some version of this. I would wake up at night in a sweat, having nightmares, which only made me more tired at work. When I wasn’t working, I spent more and more time up in my room watching movies and surfing the Internet. I talked on the phone with Hassan a lot, and for some reason I found peace talking to him about life, even though he was still at the mercy of the brutal Kenyan police. He kept telling me that everything would work out fine. Hassan was preparing to marry his new sweetheart—another Somali refugee, a woman he had met in Little Mogadishu who was selling fruits and milk on the street. Together we planned his wedding over the phone. We had fun talking about the music and food he would arrange for the wedding.
I found myself missing all my African friends and our shared language and culture. I missed drinking Somali tea and sitting around on floor mats eating dinner with our hands, no forks, no spoons. I realized that as horrible as my life was in Africa, I was homesick.
I knew I could not reasonably go back to Kenya even for a visit, much less Somalia, but I longed to see more of America. I wanted to see the America from movies, where black people in sneakers play basketball on the side of the street. I heard that a group of immigrants played soccer every weekend in Portland, and I decided to join them.
Gib gave me a ride down to the pitch on Back Cove. I couldn’t believe what I saw—Iraqis, Burundis, Rwandans, Somalis, Latin Americans, and other people, all playing soccer together. I heard Spanish, French, Swahili, Somali, Kinyarwanda, Arabic, and more. But together we all spoke English, our one common language. I had no idea all these people lived in Maine! About a third of the players were female, white American women who loved soccer. They played hard and scored goals, roaming the pitch as defenders, strikers, and even midfielders. I’d never seen anything like this either.
I joined up quickly and had an amazing day, even scoring a goal. We played rough, lots of tackling and tripping, stuff that would definitely draw penalties in a professional match. But at the end of the day it was handshakes and congratulations to the winners, so much fun. As much as I loved my family in Yarmouth, I decided I needed to be close to these people.