ON A SATURDAY MORNING in mid-winter, Halima sat at her white desk in Birch 5 dressed in a red and white cotton African dress and a matching scarf that loosely covered her hair. Her bare feet didn’t reach the floor. As she watched video clips of the new Somali president on her computer, she rested one foot against the pull of the desk’s bottom drawer.
The room around her at Mount Saint Vincent had evolved since the night the WUSC committee had picked her up at the Halifax airport. Above her head, three wrinkled balloons, still partly filled with helium a month after her birthday, hugged the ceiling. On the table next to her bed was a pile of snapshots—some from Canada and some from home—beside a stack of books and the copy of the Qur’an she had placed there shortly after she arrived. Above the table on a bulletin board she’d pinned a yellow lei from an event at the residence around a photograph of her parents from the day she left. On the wall beside the bulletin board she’d stuck a black ribbon for “cutest Hallowe’en costume” from another residence event. Someone had posted a picture on Facebook of Halima bobbing for apples with the red wings of her ladybug costume sticking out behind her, but she had pulled it down. She was nervous about people posting pictures on her site, pictures that could be seen by anyone, although there was nothing inappropriate in the way she was dressed on Hallowe’en. Nothing but some red wings over her proper clothing.
The poster that Sarah had made of Halima’s name in Arabic and English hung beside the bed, and the purple teddy bear the students had bought sat on the dressing table surrounded by lotions, creams and makeup—some that had come from Africa and some purchased here.
Outside her closed door, Birch 5 had evolved into a comfortable home for a young woman from another continent. Shortly after Halima moved in, the other rooms had filled up with international students from China, the Caribbean, Finland and Sweden, students more comfortable in a residence where they could cook their own meals. The resident assistant, Loyan, from St. Lucia, ran a tight operation. In the kitchen, she’d labelled all the shelves of the refrigerator and the cupboards with each student’s name. On one cupboard door she’d taped a poster to get her message of good order across: “Your Mother Does Not Live Here! No One Else Wants to Deal With Your Mess! Please Clean Up After Yourself.” But Loyan also brought a spirit of family to the house through events, birthday parties and organized meals.
Paula Barry describes Birch 5, with its residents from as many as ten cultures, as “a little experiment,” with constant misunderstandings and mediation. “It’s a really positive environment to be in when you are trying to figure things out.” She found the residence that year particularly remarkable: “I’ve never seen a group like this in Birch 5 before. They have a big potluck every Sunday. And they’re really, really tight.” Halima had come to depend on Loyan, whom she was beginning to think of as a sister. In her adjustment to her new environment, Halima had suffered from frequent colds and flus in the fall and had turned to Loyan when she was feeling vulnerable.
Halima had midterms the next week in biology and chemistry, and she was supposed to be studying. She had been planning to go to the library to study with a friend, a young Somali woman named Mariam who had grown up in Canada, but she was two chapters behind in her biology textbook and had to catch up. When her sister called to give her news of progress in Somali politics, Halima put aside her book and went online to find the video of a meeting in Djibouti where the new president spoke about the unity parliament that he hoped would finally bring stability to the country.
Peace in Somali was not just a wishful fantasy for Halima, a mere matter of ethnic pride. Her concerns were far more concrete and personal. She had another sister, a married woman, who had left Dadaab and now lived in Mogadishu. The constant escalation of violence in the Somali capital left her sister in constant danger. And that violence also put more pressure on her family in the camp, as the number of refugees increased. More than ever, Halima was worried about her father. His condition had worsened in the months since she’d seen him; his diabetes had left him unable to walk. She felt panicked at the thought she might never see him again and tried to get her head around the finances and the logistics of a trip back to Dadaab in the summer or during the following winter break. She wanted to record her father’s stories from his long life while she still could and, like Abdirizak, she regretted she hadn’t taken the time to write them down before she’d left home.
Her concern for her father was also forcing her to reassess her program at the university. She was considering the possibility that she might have to transfer away from the Mount. In the camp, when she’d allowed herself to dream, she had seen herself as a doctor, and in August, she’d arrived in Halifax keen to study biochemistry. A degree in biochemistry would be a first step to her dream. But everyone told her how many years a degree in medicine would take, and she knew there was no way she could study that many years before she had to earn a living and found a way to help her family. And she no longer believed that an undergraduate degree in biochemistry alone would be enough to guarantee her a decent job. She had decided that a degree in nursing was the answer. She could transfer to Dalhousie University in Halifax, if she could get in there, or she could try to go to Alberta, where there were programs and perhaps a wider range of jobs available once she’d completed a degree in nursing. At the annual assembly in Ottawa she had talked to students from the west, and she’d come to think that moving there, to a city where there were more Somalis, might make her feel more comfortable in Canada.
Paula Barry counselled students from her sunny office in the main administration building. She’d advised Halima not to rule out biochemistry and graduate school yet, to talk to all the professors and to keep all her options open. She noticed that Halima, more than the other international students, had an “ability to self-advocate and talk to faculty. Halima was someone willing to do what she needed to do and figure out things for herself.”
That Saturday morning, though, Halima was set on nursing. There was an impatient quality to her thinking, a need to make decisions and move on. She was already figuring out how to make the change to the nursing program. Her science courses would count as credits, but her elective in Canadian studies would not. Her first set of marks had been good, an average of B+, but she wasn’t happy with them. Now she felt more pressure to get higher marks so she could be competitive when she applied for nursing. This term she felt more settled, ready to work harder.
Paula Barry often witnessed homesickness among the international students she advised; some of them couldn’t afford to go home during the five years they were in Canada. She didn’t find Halima’s homesickness any worse than others’, but she did notice that Halima’s concern for her father strongly affected her emotions in the first term: “I think that weighs on her, her dad being older and not being well. So she went through a little period where I would say she was probably feeling quite depressed and overwhelmed.”
She started seeing an improvement in Halima when she became friends with Mariam and then, by extension, became close to Mariam’s Somali-Canadian family. One evening Loyan had called Paula because Halima was ill. “She seemed quite sick and I thought it was digestive,” Paula said. “I wanted her to drink some Pepto-Bismol, and she did. She was supposed to have gone for dinner, so I had Loyan call Mariam’s family and the older women came. Having the community has really changed things for her, and it’s a connection to home, and I think that’s really helpful.”
Paula did worry about Halima’s eating habits. Sometimes she’d find Halima in the cafeteria at four in the afternoon eating her first meal of the day, a meal consisting of nothing but french fries. Paula noticed Halima seemed more tired than she had in the fall, so she took her to a doctor, who said Halima was deficient in iron and other vitamins. The doctor talked to Halima about nutrition, but Halima seemed more concerned with putting on weight than with eating healthy foods.
As the Somali president spoke from Djibouti on her computer that Saturday morning, Halima expressed surprise at the women sitting among the men in the audience. She had strong, sometimes confusing and somewhat changing views on how women should behave. She had fought hard for her education and believed that all girls had the right to go to school. News stories that fall of men throwing acid at the faces of schoolgirls in Afghanistan horrified her. “Where is it stated in the Qur’an that no woman should be educated?” she asked. She accepted the prophet Mohammad’s teaching that women should stay home if their husbands could do everything for them and there was no need for work, “but if I don’t have anybody to take care of me, I have to take care of myself. If a woman is not educated, who is going to take care of her?” Even with an education, though, a woman should behave modestly and look up to men, in her opinion. The women in that audience in Djibouti should have sat apart from the men, she believed. It was what the religion required.
Accepting religion did not mean she accepted what was going on in Somalia. Far from it. She deplored the extremist actions of the Islamist group al-Shabab—not just the violent incidents against women, such as the stoning of the thirteen-year-old girl, but also the erosion of women’s freedoms in their daily lives. In the regions of the country al-Shabab now controlled, the insurgent group had prohibited women from walking with men who were not their relatives and had told them they could no longer run businesses. “Women are more educated in Somalia today,” Halima said. “Daily life is managed by women. Some men are drugged, some of them have died in the war, so how could you say no women can do business?” At the store in Halifax where Halima bought her calling cards, she often talked to the shopkeeper about Africa: “He said, ‘Halima, do you feel happy with Somalia now that they are stoning girls?’ I told him, ‘No. I really don’t.’ I don’t think that was according to the religion.”
During my visit to her room, Halima lowered the volume on her computer so we could look at pictures together. The president’s low male voice continued to fill the room as she told stories of her friends and relatives in the shots. “Oh, I miss those guys.” She moaned a little over the picture of her and her mother on the day of her departure. “I can’t imagine that. It is right outside my compound.”
Then Halima looked at the pictures on my camera of the other students across Canada. This had become a routine in my visits with the students. They liked to sit and press the button that brought their friends from Dadaab to life. Photography was one of the first ways I had connected to them. They welcomed having their pictures taken, sometimes directing me to get their whole bodies in the shot as I focused in on a close-up, sometimes asking me to photograph them by fountains or cars or, in Muno’s case, shelves of books. After each visit, I would email them the best of their pictures. Some would send a message of thanks back; others would complain that I hadn’t included every picture. If I happened to be slow sending the photographs, a couple of them, including Halima, would email to ask where they were. Halima paused at a picture of Marwo on the University of Victoria campus. “I heard they had rabbits there,” she said pointing to a well-fed and tame bunny on the grass at Marwo’s feet.
Throughout that morning I sensed that Halima was feeling more anxious than the last time I’d seen her, at the annual assembly in Ottawa. She had asked me to bring her copies of the photographs from the assembly, photos that I had already emailed to her. She flipped hurriedly through the four-by-six glossy shots before stopping at one. “You know this picture caused problems back home,” she said. In the photograph she was standing with Aden and Marwo. It was from the first day of the assembly, when they all had been so thrilled to see each other. As the three of them had leaned to get into frame, Aden had touched Halima. Without thinking, she had forwarded my email with all the photographs of the assembly on to her family. To me, the picture of three friends was quite innocent. But to Halima’s brother it was not. I asked Halima if her brother was concerned that she was losing her way, but she didn’t really answer the question. She mumbled “yah” under her breath and moved on to another photograph. Later, she told me that her family had faith in her but people in the camp believed that young women who went to the West were bound to change and that belief led to vigilance on the part of their families. The three women who had come from Dadaab checked up on each other and warned each other if one of them was not behaving in a totally acceptable manner.
When we went to lunch that day at Cafe Istanbul on Spring Garden Road, Halima wore a grey hijab like the ones she’d worn regularly in Ifo. She seemed to enjoy her chicken kabob, but she acted more reserved than she had when we had eaten together in Ottawa. There she’d been happy to have me photograph her in her pretty green headscarf with tables of diners around her. Here she would not let me take her picture in front of the colourful mural that illustrated scenes of Halifax until there were no other customers—no men—in the restaurant.
In our discussions, Halima forcefully reaffirmed her commitment to her culture’s beliefs about women, as though it was me she had to convince of her steadfastness. “Girls are not equal,” she said. Women, she told me, could never be presidents. It didn’t matter if they were capable of being leaders, even more capable than men, they couldn’t be presidents. “Of course, I believe it. It is in the religion,” she said, sensing my Western skepticism. But hadn’t she cheered in Ottawa when I told her polygamy was not legal in Canada? She admitted that she didn’t want to have a husband who had other wives but said there was nothing she could do if her husband chose to marry more than one woman. “I am my husband’s property.”
Halima, dressed in the traditional Dadaab hijab, poses for her picture in an empty Halifax restaurant.
As firm as Halima was in her beliefs, she was open to debate on women and religion. She eagerly welcomed arguments with Paula and her friend Sarah Chan. After Halima went back to studying in her room that Saturday, I met Sarah in a small Greek restaurant in the north end of Halifax where she lived. Sarah is the kind of cosmopolitan Canadian student often attracted to WUSC. She has travelled to Asia and Haiti, and has a profound desire to see more refugees admitted to Canada. Dressed in a tweed jacket that could have been vintage and a blue scarf that looked Asian, she sipped hot chocolate from a diner-style mug and recalled the complexities of her relationship with Halima. Sarah wanted to understand Halima’s beliefs, not condemn them with a knee-jerk reaction, even if she found some of the details horrifying. The two had talked for hours about the role of women and about relationships between men and women and had come to no conclusions. But they left each argument, each visit, respecting each other.
Like all friends, they came to know what mattered most to each other. Halfway through the year, Sarah had heard about Dadaab so often she could imagine the place: “I could see different roads and where her school was. Even though it’s not real, it’s my own confection, but to me it’s no longer a refugee camp. It’s a society that she had and a home and a community, and things were really settled because no one ever thought they’d be there that long.”
Being able to visualize Halima’s home helped Sarah understand the depth of Halima’s dislocation: “There was one night I asked myself, ‘What are we doing, why are we doing this?’ We’re taking them away from everyone they know and they’re so isolated and it seems incredibly unnatural and severe. I don’t know if I’ve told Halima this, but I don’t know how many times I remember her specifically and it puts my whole life in context, any struggle that I have.”
On Sunday, I visited Halima again between her study sessions. Paula had advised her to concentrate on her studies that term and look for a summer job later and, as far as Paula knew, Halima was following that advice. So I was surprised when Halima wanted me to drive her to a Canadian Tire gas bar so she could drop off her resumé. She wanted a part-time job now, so she could start to earn more money to buy things and help her family. At the gas bar, she approached a young guy behind the counter who said the manager wasn’t in but would get the resumé the next day. It was all very quick and very polite. Walking away, Halima said she’d made a point of speaking slowly because people told her she talked too fast.
I assumed she would want to go back to her residence to study after that, but Halima had other ideas. Halima’s requests came so spontaneously, were often so out of the blue, that it took some time to get used to taking them as they came, one by one. It was easy enough for me; I was there to visit her, but I did wonder how her friends handled her requests. Now she wanted me to drive her downtown, to the harbour, so she could have her picture taken with the ocean behind her. The sky was losing light fast when we parked by the boardwalk. She stood shivering while I hastily snapped a few photographs, and then she said, “Let’s go.” We drove home the long way, looking for a Tim Hortons that was open late on a Sunday afternoon. On the way, Halima recognized the name of Sarah’s street, Moran Street, and, of course, wanted to stop. So she called Sarah and told her we were coming.
Sarah opened the door to the clapboard house. It was pitch black inside as we made our way up the stairs to her apartment. When we stepped inside the apartment, Sarah, dressed in a pink sweater and red toque to ward off the cold, explained that she and her roommates were doing an experiment. They had taken the light bulbs out of all the fixtures and were trying to live naturally with the movement of the sun and a few candles. “As you did, Halima,” she added.
Halima wanted to pray her evening prayer in Sarah’s room, but as we stood in the small kitchen a young man emerged from the darkness of another room and Halima hesitated, saying maybe we should go. What had seemed to her like a good idea was now, in the gloomy apartment with strange males, making her anxious. But the young man left, and Sarah assured Halima she could pray in her room with a candle. After, Halima didn’t want any of the jasmine tea Sarah offered her and seemed eager for me to finish mine so we could leave. She had adjusted to many new people and things in her few months in Canada, but even now when she felt confused by a situation, in the dark about what was happening around her, she quickly and quietly left. On the way back to Birch 5, we stopped at a Tim Hortons and she ordered a French vanilla cappuccino, wanting to see why the others liked it. “Yes,” she said, sipping it in the car, “it does taste like Somali tea.”
The next morning, in Halima’s chemistry class, the topic was kinetics. The professor’s first slide read, “In kinetics we study the rate at which a chemical process changes.” Thirty or so students, most of them young women, sat in the tiered lecture hall, writing in notebooks, watching the screen, whispering to each other. Halima and Mariam sat at the front—the only women with their heads covered. In the Ifo classrooms, where Halima had attended school and later taught, girls had always been in the minority and all of them had worn hijabs. As the chemistry professor explained how the presence of a catalyst speeds up reactions, I couldn’t help wondering how such an intelligent young woman would ultimately respond to the social catalyst of her new surroundings.
On another wintry Saturday morning, I found Aden in his dorm room across the country at Brandon University. He had slept in after a late WUSC party the evening before. He answered the door in shorts, a white T-shirt and sandals, and invited me in while he put on warmer clothes so we could go for tea. Scrunched-up clothing, empty juice bottles, books, a microwave, a small refrigerator, computer equipment and two beds filled the cluttered room. Aden had a Canadian roommate who often stayed the night elsewhere, so Aden had the room to himself most of the time.
His room was on the eighth floor of Brandon University’s McMaster Hall, the building at the centre of his existence in the cold prairie city. There was no need to go outside for tea. Aden had only to ride down on the elevator to the ground floor and walk through a link to the cafeteria. For many of his classes, he could walk through another link to the science wing. And if he had a question for his WUSC adviser, Brandy Robertson, he could find her in her office on the first floor, where she worked in a clerical job. Sometimes the closed environment gave him a false sense of what winter in Brandon was like. Earlier, he’d been fooled by the sun streaming in through the windows of McMaster Hall into thinking it was as warm outside as it was during his first days in Brandon. When he’d walked straight outside from the hall without a coat, he’d come to a new appreciation of what cold felt like, and he’d never made that mistake again.
When he gave me a tour of his campus, the cold didn’t seem to bother Aden. It was cold enough that I was bundled up, but he wore a light jacket, unzipped, and a New York Yankees baseball cap. He had no gloves. He showed me around the residence, the sports facility and the library. He told me about the election campaign he was running to become the science commissioner at the university. It would be a way of getting involved with campus life and making new friends, he said. The Student Union would give him money for the meetings he attended and the reports he wrote. “And if there is a scholarship, you’ll be the first considered,” he said. Aden thought he had a good chance of winning the election that week. He just had to do well at the “bear pit” session, where people would question him on his ideas.
As we walked across the small campus, Aden waved at most of the people he passed and stopped several times to introduce me as his “guest from Toronto.” Everyone we spoke with was a white Canadian, and most were female. There were some blacks on campus, Aden said, including the former wusc students he knew. But Aden seemed at ease with everyone he met. He asked questions about their studies and their families, and he listened. It was clear that those who received his attention were charmed by his open, friendly manner.
Aden’s big personality was probably the best thing he had going for him in coping with the isolation of his situation. He was too social a person, too curious a person to hide himself in his room for long. “That’s my biggest fear when they come here,” Brandy said, “that they are going to sit in their room and be lonely.”
Aden attended plays and concerts on campus and often accepted the wusc committee’s invitations to events off campus. “I can socialize with anyone,” he said. And it was easier for him in his jeans and T-shirts to blend in with the crowd than it was for the young women of Dadaab dressed in hijabs. He was a quick study, too, in the ways of young people. Listening to all the women talking about their boyfriends—something no Somali young woman in the camp would have done—he quickly accepted it as normal and sometimes told others he had a girlfriend even though he didn’t. Aden had become Jimmy Romeo Love online, after all, a guy who liked to trick people about his identity. Having different names for different aspects of his personality was nothing new to him as a Somali. In Dadaab, each child grows up with a variety of nicknames that define something about their age, their physical appearance, their character or even their relationship to a specific person. By March, Aden had changed his online alias to Anwar. In Arabic, Anwar means “bright” or “light.” His mother had given him the nickname when he was a boy to describe her “happy son.”
His natural ability to connect with people helped Aden out in practical ways. When he missed a chemistry class, he borrowed notes from a woman who was studying in the cafeteria. She was a nurse who had decided to take some courses that would help her get into medicine. He had talked to her about his own wish to be a doctor, and she’d given him some hope. She said schools were looking for candidates who weren’t white. She taught Aden the value of the word diversity.
Aden tried to balance his social need to fit in with his fidelity to the basics of his religion. He felt conflicted about socializing at university parties when there was alcohol served. Sometimes he went anyway just to dance, play pool or talk to friends. “There are other things you can do if you are not drinking. But most of the time I don’t go.”
While his loneliness had eased since this arrival, he still longed for some Somali companionship in his day-to-day life. He didn’t think he wanted to wait through all his years of education before getting married. He had an image of cooking with a wife in an apartment in Brandon, of sharing a life together, of never, ever being lonely anymore. Although he imagined his future wife as Somali, he said he didn’t care what country she was from as long as she was a Muslim.
On our walk on the campus, Aden wore his backpack with a Brandon University crest and posed for pictures by a bronze statue of a bobcat—the mascot for the sports teams—and the university’s stone marker. He knew the university’s history and took pride in it. But it was the small university’s respected record of bringing refugee students to Canada that impressed him most. In twenty-five years the university had sponsored twenty-six students through the wusc program. Two professors at Brandon, Christoph Stadel, who has since moved to Austria, and John Everitt, now retired, started the program with donations from faculty members in the early ‘80s. Over the years, they persuaded alumni to contribute money and university administrators to waive tuition and room and board for a year. Student involvement came after a referendum was held to establish a levy. “Everyone who gave money and was involved saw it as something they could do,” Everitt said. “In Brandon there is not much you can do to help the world. But the refugee students were a visible symbol of helping. You’d done something.”
Toward the end of his tenure, Everitt suggested that the last referendum contain two questions: one asking for support to increase the levy, and another asking if the students would support indexing the levy against inflation ensuring future costs could be met. In 2007, the students voted in favour of both questions, and by the time Aden came, the levy to cover his travel expenses, clothing, books and supplies, welcome budget and monthly allowances was $4.08 per student.
Brandy Robertson, who both works and studies at Brandon, is at the centre of the current wusc program. Each year, she reads the dossier of the selected student and makes it a point to learn about his or her country of origin, lifestyle and religion so she can help the new student fit in. “We don’t want to assimilate them into our culture. We want them to be themselves in our culture.” She believes that one of the ways of integrating students like Aden was dropping the “refugee” label as soon as possible. “We try to focus on the fact that they’re here and they’re here because they want to get an education. And then kind of forget about the whole refugee status.”
Despite her loyalty to WUSC, she was unaware of a tragic twist in the Brandon connection to the organization’s history. In 1986, when Brandy was just a toddler, the success of the Brandon program had brought Windle Trust’s Hugh Pilkington to the city. One winter morning, the tall white Kenyan was on an early morning run along the highway when a pickup truck hit and killed him. Without any knowledge of the man from another continent, Brandy sat in the cafeteria at the university more than twenty years later and echoed his creed: “Education should be a right,” she said. “And the fact that all students aren’t privy to that is quite sad, so if we can help one student a year then it makes a difference.”
On Saturday evening, I took Aden out to Joey’s, a restaurant in a strip mall where we could have fish, which is naturally halal. Aden seemed surprised at how long it took for our orders of salmon and rice to arrive at the table. In the camps, the “hotels” served the food immediately, because there was little selection. When the waiter finally brought our dinners, Aden ate quickly and asked why there was no bread with the meal. He seemed hungry, so I ordered some garlic bread for us. Even though the bread arrived soaked with butter, he spread more butter on it. “More butter on the garlic bread?” the waiter asked as he passed the table. “May I take it you are new to Canada?” Many would have found the comment insulting, but Aden took it in stride. “Six months I’ve been here,” he said. The waiter noticed the Brandon crest on Aden’s white T-shirt, and the two young men found common ground talking about the university where they both studied, ending their conversation with “Good luck” on the waiter’s part and “I’ll see you around” on Aden’s.
When I got the bill, Aden peeked at the total and was horrified. He stated decisively that for the rest of the weekend we would eat in the cafeteria. And he never budged from that position. I always got the sense that Aden genuinely liked women. He speaks fondly of his mother and sister and he has never made a single harsh judgement on the habits or characteristics of Western women, but he has a sense of chivalry toward women that most young Canadian males no longer possess or don’t show. He would not allow me to pay for what he saw as expensive meals and, while the other Dadaab students called me by my first name, as I had invited them to do. Aden always used the more formally respectful “Madame.”
Throughout the weekend, he was a generous host. I remembered how his mother had prepared sugary tea with milk and some of her cookies for my visit to his compound. As Aden saw it, I was now a guest in his home in Brandon. At lunch the next day, he insisted on using his meal card to pay for our food. I said I was happy to pay for lunch, but he would not accept that. When I picked out a salad, he said it wasn’t enough and I must get something from the grill. I added a grilled cheese sandwich and a coffee to my tray, and we sat at one of the large, round tables. He said I didn’t have enough food on my tray and I should get more. I told him I was older than he was, that I had to watch my weight, which he finally accepted.
That evening he wanted to give me a tour of the city. Brandon is the second largest city in Manitoba, a fact that makes it sound bigger than it is. With fewer than fifty thousand people, it is fifteen times smaller than the largest city in the province, the capital city of Winnipeg. It lies in agricultural land that gives it both its sobriquet and its purpose. The “wheat city” serves as a hub and a trading centre for the region.
Fresh snow was falling as I followed Aden’s directions in my rental car. He had me head down 18th Street, the main artery that leads to the Trans-Canada Highway. The roads were slippery, and although I warned him to tell me ahead of time where to turn, he often left it to the last moment.
I asked about his family in the camp, and he told me things were getting bad. The Kenyans had closed the border to goods coming in from Somalia. When the goods, which originated in the Emirates, arrived in Dadaab via businesses in Somalia, they were cheaper than when they came through Nairobi merchants. So now prices were going up. Each month he tried to send $100 home through the Dahabshiil in Winnipeg because his family was missing his teacher’s pay.
We turned in at a darkened mall and I wondered what he wanted to show me. “We only have one Walmart in Brandon,” he said as we sat in the idling car. Then he suggested we turn around and head back through the town. As we drove, Aden said he really wanted to learn to drive and asked how much cars cost. After I explained the prices and the added cost of car insurance, I reminded him, perhaps to soften the blow, that he’d wanted a camera in the camp and now he had one. Maybe someday he’d have a car too. “In three years I will have a car,” he said. It was hard to doubt his confidence.
I couldn’t make the right turn he wanted because I was in the left lane at a red light, but he said to never mind, there was another Tim Hortons farther along the road past all the restaurants and malls. Of course there was.
Even though it was a snowy Sunday night, the parking lot at Tims was packed with minivans and pickup trucks. Inside, there was only one free table. Aden agreed, reluctantly, that I could buy the hot drinks while he grabbed the table. When I brought his French vanilla and my tea over, he had squeezed into the small corner table. The coffee shop was full of white people, mainly male and mainly older. The motto of the town’s newspaper, the Brandon Sun, came from a poem by John Donne about the connection of all humankind: “No man is an island, entire of itself.” But in the Tim Hortons that night, Aden stuck out like a black island in a sea of white. The other customers glanced at him with curiosity. If they felt any hostility, they kept it to themselves. But Aden had lost some of his boldness. Usually he sat with his legs stretched out and an arm wrapped around the back of a chair. Although it was physically impossible for him to sit like that in the tight space he had, I could see there was more to the way he’d pulled himself in.
Aden on a winter’s night in Brandon, Manitoba.
We sipped our hot drinks in silence. Outside, the snow fell, lit by the Canadian Tire sign across the way and the spotlights over the pumping stations. Finally, I asked him if, back in the camp, he could ever have imagined being in a place like this. The question was awkward and illogical. Aden just looked around the Tim Hortons and said so softly I could hardly hear him, “I’m sure these people have seen an African before.” I assured him they had, and we let the matter drop.
I didn’t know if it would help Aden to let him know he was not the only wusc student who had ever found himself in a small community where he stood out. I thought of Ruth Mathiang, a Christian Sudanese woman who had lived in the large cities of Khartoum and Nairobi before ending up in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, in 2001. There were no noisy markets outside her window, no matatus—the packed minibuses that honked their way through the congested, polluted streets of Nairobi. There were only a few cows grazing in a green field.
And I thought of Ajmal Pashtoonyar, who, in 1998, left the crowded Peshawar area of Pakistan, where he had lived with his exiled Afghani family, to come to the small Newfoundland fishing community of Burin, with “one gas station, one bank, one grocery store and a Sears outlet, which was also a post office.” Even after Ajmal left Burin to continue his studies at Memorial University in St. John’s, he was still the only Afghani in the province.
Both Ruth and Ajmal endured, finished their degrees and found careers in bigger Canadian cities. Not only endured—they blossomed, in part because of the effort they had to exert to find their way in their strange environments. They became attached to those places more strongly than if they had lived with others from their cultures in larger Canadian cities. Even when Ruth came to live in Toronto so she could work with immigrant women, she remained an “Islander” at heart who missed the church and the families who had welcomed her there. And Ajmal, now a lawyer who has travelled the world for humanitarian agencies and has worked with Canadian federal departments in Ottawa, jokes that he is still an Afghani-Newfoundlander with a deep love for the ocean: “Now I am attached. I have to see it every six months.” He came to believe that those first lonely months in rural Newfoundland shaped him as much as any other experience in his life: “I think isolation brings in the natural instinct for survival to some extent.”
Despite Aden’s feelings of awkwardness in the Tim Hortons that night, I expected that he would endure and succeed as Ruth and Ajmal had. But I knew he had to figure that out for himself.
Our tour that evening was not complete until Aden and I returned to the cafeteria for movie night. Back on his home turf, Aden relaxed and took charge again, insisting we have a late-night snack. While we were walking to the cash, Aden stopped the middle-aged woman in charge and went into schmooze mode, asking if she had received his application for work. She told him she needed someone who had experience. “No problem,” Aden said. “I can learn fast.” The woman hesitated and said she needed a cashier on Monday nights. “I can work any evening,” Aden said. Again the woman looked a bit dubious but told him he could come for training the following night. “I have psychology class on Monday night,” Aden said. “Now, see, there’s the problem, you just said you could come in every night,” she said. The frustrated woman must have expected Aden to give up but he continued, calmly adding, “I can come any other night.” She relented and told him to come Tuesday evening for training.
The movie that night was High School Musical 3, playing on two large monitors in the darkened eating area. On the monitors, skimpily clad teenage girls and rich teenage boys cavorted in a lavish-looking school and drove around in expensive cars. I couldn’t imagine what Aden would make of it all. “School is fun in Canada,” was all he said before growing tired of the movie and returning to his room to study.
The next day, before I left (and before I assured Aden I didn’t need a meal for the road), we were walking in a hallway in McMaster Hall. He was dressed in his favourite T-shirt that read “Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.” He was late for his statistics class when he suddenly said, as if to answer my confusing question from the night before about relocating, “From Hagadera to Canada. I’m so happy.”
