IN THE EARLY DAYS OF SUMMER, Siyad announced on his Facebook page that he was bored: “Life in Canada is boring. I feel like going back!!!!” He had successfully finished his summer courses and only had a few hours of work each week at the local Safeway.
He’d had no luck finding any other job. Often, he just stayed in his room at UBC and wrote messages online, his curtain separating him from the world outside.
Just below his window stood a carved wooden gate engraved with the words “Our future is rooted in our traditions.” The gate had been a gift in 2001 from forestry students who had escaped the Soviet invasion in Hungary in 1957 and had been welcomed as refugees into the forestry program at UBC. The gate, the sculpted pine trees and the open green space offered Siyad an incredible view, although his Dadaab friends might have envied him more for the Tim Hortons that was inside the Forestry building just steps from his door.
There were those who didn’t think Siyad appreciated how good he had it. Several responded to his Facebook message with comments on his page saying, “Going back to where?” or simply, “Irony.” Aden from Brandon wrote, “Hahaha.” One of the members from Siyad’s WUSC committee advised him to get out of his room more.
In Dadaab, Siyad had seemed the best-equipped student to handle adjustments in the West. Before working as a teacher, he had been an interpreter for journalists and dignitaries who came to the camp— until CARE “sacked” him in budget cutbacks. As an interpreter he had come in contact with Westerners, both male and female, and had learned to accept the habits and the dress styles of North Americans as part of their tradition. The message that advisers delivered to the students before they left the camps resonated with him: “When we were going through orientation they said respect people’s culture then you will be respected. And you have to accept that as part of your life.”
On campus he had made friends with students in the Muslim Association and with two Somali students. He knew the international students in his house and the students on the WUSC committee, but he hadn’t made friends with any of the Canadian students in his classes. He’d made more friends at the Safeway in Point Grey, where a diverse group of people worked. They were all young and, no matter their background, talked to him easily and shared the kind of camaraderie common among junior employees in their first jobs.
Siyad liked his job at the Safeway. The people whose carts he pushed were friendly. It was easy to collect the grocery carts. The only thing that caused him problems was price checks. He had to find items by reading the cards beside unfamiliar produce and products.
I sat one day with Siyad at the beginning of summer outside the Tim Hortons beside his residence. He was going to get the steeped tea he always ordered, but perhaps because he was feeling in a bit of a rut he decided to try the French vanilla cappuccino that reminded the others of Somali tea. “Oh yes,” he said, after his first sip. “I will take this from now on.”
Despite his knowledge of Western ways, Siyad had always been rather shy around me. It wasn’t that he was uncooperative or unwilling to answer my questions—he and Aden were the two students who responded quickest to emails I sent—but he hadn’t wanted to go out to dinner with me or go on an excursion. I never knew how much of that was his nature and how much was caution. Because he had worked around journalists, he knew how they wrote things about people, maybe things they didn’t want to share so widely.
When I’d asked if he had a girlfriend in the camp, he laughed and asked me, “Did the others talk to you about girlfriends?” When I replied that I hadn’t asked them yet, he said, “They won’t tell you. They wouldn’t tell a journalist that; they wouldn’t want it in a book.” In fact, he was partially right. Later, several of the Somali students did tell me about their attachments in the camp but didn’t want the relationships mentioned. Even from this distance, they didn’t want their families to know, and they considered it unfair to involve another person’s name in their story. They all qualified the terms “girlfriend,” and “boyfriend,” because of the North American connotations of physical contact. One of them even used air quotes when he described having someone “like a girlfriend” in the camp.
That day, Siyad showed me his route to work on the Number 19 bus, and walked me through the Safeway and introduced me to one of his friends there, an Asian woman who teased him about coming in on his day off. We went back together to the bus loop at UBC, where I could catch the bus downtown. After almost a year he still didn’t know where all the buses parked there went. In the winter, he’d told me that the UBC campus was like a city itself and he felt no need to leave it. But now that he had time on his hands, he wanted to explore beyond the university enclave. He was even thinking of taking the ferry to Victoria, but he wasn’t sure how to use the ferry or which buses would take him to the ferry station.
At the bus loop, Siyad asked me what I was going to do next and I said I didn’t know exactly, that I had left the afternoon to visit him. He casually said he might come downtown with me. The crowded bus crawled over the Burrard Street Bridge in the late afternoon. I leaned forward in my seat to talk to Siyad, who sat nearby. “Where do you want to get off? Do you want to go by the water or on a street with stores?” I asked. “Anywhere,” he said. I suggested we walk to the bottom of Burrard Street and along the harbour. When we got off the bus, he seemed surprised at all the tall buildings, the traffic, the fountain we passed. “But you’ve been here before,” I said. He said he had, but only at night and only three times. He didn’t remember seeing all those tall buildings on his previous visits.
At the harbour, I pointed toward Stanley Park. “It is one of the best parks,” I told him. He had a free bus pass, one of the most beautiful cities in Canada and time on his hands, but clearly he had not felt comfortable enough or curious enough to visit much of the city yet. In the camps, the first time I met Siyad, he’d had on wire-framed glasses that he admitted he wore for appearance’s sake only. They gave him a somewhat professorial look. The care he took with his clothing and the ease with which he spoke to Westerners in his clear English had led me to believe he was more urbane than some of the others. Even in Vancouver, he looked like a cool guy in a cool city, a tall, handsome man who blended in to the crowd on the city’s multicultural streets. But I realized I might have been fooled about the ease he felt, and I was reminded of just how many differences the students were still coping with. If I, who had seen him both in his world in Dadaab and in his world here, could forget those challenges, how could strangers passing him on the streets of Vancouver possibly imagine them?
As we walked along the harbour, we heard the roar of a floatplane’s engine. Siyad was amazed when he saw the plane skimming across the water. I explained how the pontoons kept the plane afloat as he craned his neck to watch it take off. We walked along the seaside path toward the park, stopping so Siyad could watch floatplanes take off or settle back on the water. With our meandering pace, we never made it as far as the park. Siyad had to get back to the campus for his sunset prayer. When we parted at the stop for his bus back to campus, he told me that now that he knew the way, he would come downtown again. He would explore Stanley Park on his own.
In Mississauga, the first warm days of summer were making Muno nostalgic for Hagadera. “I just realized I am even more homesick than when I first came,” she said. “Perhaps it is because of the summer when there are a lot of people outside.” When she arrived, there had been the excitement over her new life to counter her longing. Where would it take her? What would she become? Without the novelty of unfamiliar things to learn, she missed her family more intensely and came to realize hers was not an alienation that would slip away once she got used to her life.
Dressed in a brown one-piece hijab, Muno could have been on her way to Hagadera market—the market that she knew even before leaving would haunt her forever. Not much had changed in her appearance since the day she’d bartered for her prayer mat there. Some of the plumpness had gone from her face so that her high, sculpted cheekbones stood out more prominently. Her happy, curious expression had been replaced by a wiser, more wistful one, as if she had seen more sadness here than in all her years in the camp.
That summer day, instead of walking through the lanes between the kamoor fencing of the compounds, her feet sinking into the red sand of Hagadera, she walked on concrete sidewalks between the tall modern buildings of the UTM campus. After the winter term, she had taken her first summer courses at the downtown campus and stayed with Somalis. But now she had a course on the Mississauga campus, a part-time job working with an academic adviser at the registrar’s office. So she’d taken advantage of her sponsorship money to live in residence again.
The residence was large, modern and closer to the cafeteria than the first apartment she’d had. She lived in a unit for four, but no one else was around now. She sat in one of the chairs in the sitting room beside the kitchenette. Perhaps if she had been here in the winter, living with more women, closer to the buildings of the university, she might not have felt as lonely. Perhaps.
It wasn’t that she was sorry to be in Canada. It was just that she constantly felt conflict between her need to progress in life and her desperate wish to be back in her family compound again. In Dadaab, life was hard, especially for women and children. Here, food was plentiful and modern health care was available to everyone. Life was definitely easier. “It’s beautiful and everyone is nice,” Muno said of Canada. “I miss Hagadera. It’s nothing like Hagadera. It never feels like family. It never feels as good. It never feels like home.”
She had come to see, too, that people in the camps had “overestimated” Canada. “We didn’t think that there were mosquitoes or cockroaches in Canada, but there are. There are places downtown that are dirtier than Nairobi.” And violence. She had heard of killings in the city. “We thought it was some kind of heaven, with no crime.” And she’d believed that with all the health care and medicine in Canada, everybody would be healthy. She was shocked that people here suffered from illnesses, particularly mental illnesses.
Still, she was proud to have this “lifetime opportunity.” She wouldn’t trade it for the chance to go back home. She’d been the youngest in the group—nineteen when she left home, twenty when she arrived in Canada—but she saw getting her education as a filial duty. Somali girls, she said, were no strangers to responsibility: “Girls get married at fifteen and they’re responsible, although it’s a little different when you are at home and you have the one family.”
And that was the rub, the source of her conflicted feelings. She accepted her responsibility willingly even though it meant adjusting her personal desires. “I like English, but I cannot afford to feel, ‘I like this. I don’t like that.’ I feel like I don’t have the choice to do what I want.” But she had to carry out her responsibility alone, in Canada, far from her family, far from a mother to console her. “They took me away at the wrong time.” She laughed, a quiet, rueful laugh. “I am too young to be here. I should have stayed with my mom longer.”
Her certainty that she would never be at home in Canada added to her homesickness for a place where she felt she did belong. She suspected that her Muslim beliefs, especially those relating to men and women, meant that she could never fully be part of mainstream Canadian life. Muno paid far less attention to the news than someone like Abdi did, but the criticisms of the Muslim faith and the public association of her faith with terrorists still got through. “We are the ones from the outside,” she said.
As I sat with Muno that day, the voices of the previous sponsored students I’d spoken with echoed in my head. They had all—Muslims and Christians—gone through feelings of not belonging in Canada that had made them want to return to their homeland. When wars ended, when regimes changed, when it was safe to do so, many had gone back to visit. I didn’t have the heart to tell Muno what I had learned from them: that after years away from their homeland, they didn’t feel they belonged there anymore. Kakule Floribert Kamabu went back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo ten years after he first fled the country for his life. In those ten years, Floribert had become a nurse in Canada, fathered two children and brought two brothers and a sister to Canada. In 2007, when he returned to the DRC, he discovered he couldn’t live there anymore, that Canada had become his home: “Everything was gone. The way of life was not the way of life that I was thinking it was. I was completely out of place.”
Ambaye Kidane, now a senior civil servant in the Ontario Ministry of Finance, did find much of his old life and plenty of his old friends when he went back to Ethiopia. But while he was there, he longed to be at his Canadian job or the small Toronto coffee shops where he enjoyed drinking cappuccinos on Saturday mornings. He remains a news junkie who will forever follow the stories of Ethiopia and Africa, and he knows he will always feel torn between two continents. It is something he has come to accept: “The life of a refugee or immigrant is: You are here. You’ll never fully adjust. A part of you is there— a good part is there. But you can’t go back because you will be a refugee there. The first generation of refugees is in a perpetual state of being a refugee, a state of adjustment. You are condemned if you go back or if you stay here of feeling different.”
With less than a year in Canada behind her, Muno’s goal was to somehow mesh the two realms of her life. She believed she could take her Canadian education back to Africa, where she saw a real need for social work that would help women and children in their daily lives. Women in Canada didn’t need her help. From her perspective, they were doing fine. Maybe it was just the values she grew up with, she said, values that came from her religion, but she believed there needed to be some order in the family and that the wife should be obedient to the husband as the head of the household: “He doesn’t have to force you or abuse your rights or anything, but in life we need some order. Even if I was earning more, I would owe obedience to my husband. It is part of my faith.”
She resented the fact that people thought of an immigrant man working while the woman stayed at home to take care of the children as oppression of women: “If it’s a Canadian woman, everybody knows that is her choice, but if it’s an immigrant or a Muslim woman or an African woman, people think she was forced to do that. That may be true, but it’s not always true.” She didn’t think that she could go along with the kind of decisions social workers in Canada made about domestic situations. She had heard that parents could lose their child for spanking that child, and she didn’t think that was right.
It wasn’t just her religion that made Muno feel like an outsider. The traditions, the institutions, the way people behaved in Canada— they all made sense to her intellectually. But there was always something that tripped her up, such as how to talk to professors: “Back home, it used to be very formal and you never called them by their names.” She couldn’t grasp the way Canadian students spoke to their professors. It wasn’t quite the same informal tone used with friends, but it wasn’t formal either: “I don’t know if I have the right approach. I can talk to professors if I have a real question, but I cannot go up and talk to them and ask them general questions.”
She had met other Somali students in her classes who had come to Canada when they were four or five or were born here, and they knew how to act like Canadians and even felt Canadian. “I don’t know if I will ever feel like that,” she said. “I know if I have kids, the kids will feel like that, but I don’t know if I will ever feel like that.”
She was grateful to those Somali friends who had helped her that year, but she always felt different from them: “The Somali girls are actually between two worlds and I am still in the old world.” She now had a friend from her old world, a young woman whom she had once taught in Hagadera camp. The teenager’s father lived in Toronto. He’d recently developed a disability and had sponsored his daughter so she could assist him in his downtown apartment. Muno often stayed at the apartment so the two friends could talk about their days back home.
“And I have Jane,” she said to me that day. Through the year, my daughter, Jane, had become her Canadian friend. Muno was always interested in hearing about Jane’s writing in her program at York University. The first time she met Jane, she’d asked to read one of her poems. It was a complicated, angry poem about the poet Ted Hughes and his dead wives. On first reading, Muno had trouble with its meaning, but she persisted, checking her perceptions with Jane until it made sense to her. Jane was impressed by the stories Muno had written in English back in the camp. Jane had studied French in school, but it hadn’t come easily as a second language and she couldn’t imagine how anyone could express themselves so clearly in a language not their own.
Jane would drive out to the Mississauga campus and the two would go out for tea. Jane lent Muno books, encouraged her to try J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Muno recommended books from her class and from her knowledge of African literature. When I asked Muno if she found Western young women strange, she answered, “I find Somali-Canadian girls a little strange, different. But then for Jane, I thought she was going to be more different than that. I think what people see from outside, that’s very different from when you get close. We all like the same things, we almost all have the same kind of values.”
That day, as most days I met Muno, she talked about a book. This time it was a book she hadn’t read but wanted to read. It was by Senegalese author Mariama Bâ, who was raised a Muslim and wrote about the injustices women suffered. The book was The Scarlet Song. “It’s kind of a romantic book about a black guy who met a white woman and they fell in love and she decided to marry him against the wishes of her parents,” Muno said. The author, she added, wrote the book when she had cancer and only one year to live. “It’s very sad.”
Later in the summer, Jane and I took Muno to Niagara Falls for her first boat ride. It was also her first trip out of the metropolitan Toronto area. Her WUSC committee had not sent anyone to the annual assembly in Ottawa, and even if it had, she admitted, she wouldn’t have gone. She said she had been feeling like a coward in the autumn. Now, she said, she wanted to see places. She said it with the same determination she’d shown about meeting a dog for the first time.
Unlike Abdi, she did not look out the window during the drive or ask a lot of questions about the sights we were passing. In fact, she seemed unaware of the world outside the car. She talked to Jane about cellphone plans and books. Jane handed her a copy of Alice in Wonderland, but Muno said it was too late—she’d already bought the book. But it didn’t matter. She’d dropped the course in children’s literature because she was finding the biology course so hard. She hoped to take a course in detective fiction in September. “But I am reading again,” she said. She pulled a thin book out of her black handbag. It was a novel by the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah, From a Crooked Rib, another book about the hard lives of women. She said it was not great. Muno found the portrayal of women’s lives fairly accurate but somewhat exaggerated. When her friend Abdinoor saw her reading it, he warned her she would turn into a feminist.
Jane showed Muno her blue nail polish and said she could paint Muno’s nails sometime. Muno laughed. She described how girls who used henna in the camps applied it all around the top of the finger, not just on the nail. Jane said she tried to get the polish on the nail but usually got it on her finger as well, and described the small brush she had to use. I said I thought I’d seen nail polish on some of the girls’ toenails in the camps. Muno said it was not polish but something else. Her father let her use the henna but not the darker dye.
By the falls, I pointed out the Maid of the Mist. “Will I fall out?” Muno asked. Jane assured her she wouldn’t and pointed at the people on board in their blue plastic ponchos. The ponchos reminded Muno of the uniforms the students in her school had worn. She seemed hesitant to go on the boat now that she had the chance. But she found her courage, and once we started down the spiral stairs toward the dock, she got ahead of us in the crowd. She had a quiet way of moving past people, a skill I suggested to her she’d learned in the food lines at Hagadera. We laughed but then she grew serious when I asked her about a video I’d seen online of people pushing in the Hagadera food line and someone hitting them with a stick to try to keep them back. The lines were like that, she said. She’d seen the video too and thought she recognized the young man using the stick. She wondered what he felt being on YouTube, hitting people for the whole world to see.
We were the last three on the boat and stood on the lower deck. The wind was strong that day and the mist heavy. We got soaked. I couldn’t tell if the expression on Muno’s face was awe or fear, but I told her I could walk her to the stairs in the middle of the boat if she wanted to get away from the edge. She dismissed my suggestion with a tightening around her lips that hinted at both determination and annoyance, and held onto the railing. If it was awe she was feeling, she wouldn’t want to miss out on the moment. If it was fear, she would conquer it.
Friends Jane and Muno on a summer trip on the Maid of the Mist at Niagara Falls.
After the ride, Muno pointed to a frozen yogourt stand and suggested we get cones. I had made a picnic lunch for us, which we’d eaten earlier. She said she wanted to pay for the cones because I had already done so much. I was touched by her gratitude but knew the cones would be expensive so close to the falls. Jane protested openly. She had heard all the stories of the students by now, knew they had had none of her economic advantages in life and didn’t want Muno to spend her money. Muno glared at an oblivious Jane and I shushed my daughter, warning her to let it go. When it came time to pay, Muno pulled a debit card out of her purse. The vendor told her he couldn’t take debit. “Cash only,” he said dismissively, impatiently waiting for payment so he could serve the next person in line. Muno pulled a $5 bill from her purse, all the cash she had with her but not enough, and I handed the vendor another bill to cover the rest of the cost.
We took our cones, which were melting rapidly in the heat, and sat on the grass nearby, trying to eat them quickly before they dripped all over our clothes. “Thank you, Muno,” Jane said. “I don’t know what for,” Muno answered sharply. Jane didn’t seem to notice the tone or the frustration in Muno’s voice. And I didn’t know what to say at that moment that wouldn’t embarrass her further.
By mid-July the Islamist militia, al-Shabab, controlled much of south and central Somali and all but a few blocks in Mogadishu. In the capital they fought alongside another Islamic group, called Hizbul Islam, against national security forces and African Union soldiers who were protecting the government of Somali president Sheikh Sharif Ahmed. From Geneva, Navi Pillay, the UN human rights chief, charged that both insurgents and government troops were committing war crimes. Both sides were firing mortars into populated civilian areas. And, he said, the insurgents were using civilians as human shields and setting up tribunals ordering people to be stoned or decapitated.
Earlier in the month, Somalia’s Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke had warned, in an interview with ABC News, that foreigners backed by al-Qaeda were fighting alongside al-Shabab, making the country “uncontrollable.” He appealed to the international community for help, hoping to reignite American involvement in the country, involvement that had remained low-key since the disaster of Black Hawk Down.
ABC News also reported on the contents of a memo in which U.S. officials had requested an exemption to an arms embargo for Somalia that had been in place for seventeen years. ABC said that the memo requested “permission to ship 19 tons of ammunition including small arms, RPGs and mortars directly to Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government forces.”
In July, the United Nations reported that more than 200,000 had fled the capital since the fighting intensified there in the spring. Asha Sha’ur, a member of Somalia’s beleaguered civil society—a segment of the population that had worked through years of warfare to keep institutions running—told the UN’s news service, IRIN, that the situation in Mogadishu “was worse than at any time in the past. I know we have said so many times that the situation is bad, but I honestly cannot remember when the suffering was this bad.”
Most of those fleeing would get only as far as camps for the internally displaced within Somalia, but some escaped on boats to Yemen and some were still able to get through the closed border into Kenya and find their way to Dadaab. By late July, the biggest refugee camp in the world had swelled to more than 286,000 people. In June, UNHCR registered 7,000 new arrivals, up from 5,000 in May. UNHCR was still trying to get agreement for another section of land, calling the need for a fourth camp “urgent.”
Mohamed was taking four half-courses that summer, trying to get a total of four credits before his scholarship ended and he became a full-time, self-supporting student the next year. But even when he had exams to study for and difficult assignments to finish, Mohamed always found time to pay attention to Somalia. The events of the spring, and the failure of the expanded Somali government to take hold, had left him depressed. “I’m giving up hope now,” he said. “I’m very pessimistic about what is happening. I was hoping the new government would bring something out of nothing and they would create some peace. But out of the blue, we have this fighting. I think the last fifteen, sixteen years was a different war altogether. Now we are beginning a new phase. It might take another fifteen, sixteen years.”
Other than dealing with questions surrounding his transition, Mohamed didn’t see much of his WUSC committee at the Scarborough campus anymore. Everyone, including Mohamed, was busy, and Mohamed also wanted to “break” his dependence. Jennifer Cabell, who had helped him so much in the first weeks by getting him a computer and a radio and making sure he understood the financial arrangements, wasn’t often at the Scarborough campus during the summer. She said that the group wanted to take Mohamed to celebrate the end of his term but that he had said he was too tired and had a schedule so busy it was hard to find another free evening.
Jennifer says her goal on the WUSC committee was to become a friend as well as an adviser. She believes that sponsored students would come to trust her more that way. But at the same time she didn’t want to push herself on Mohamed, especially since she would be leaving the university. She also found that Mohamed began to feel more comfortable with the young men in the Muslim Student Association than with her.
Jennifer hopes to become an immigrant practitioner and is interested in the issues of separate societies in Toronto. She’d written a paper exploring the idea of whether encouraging newcomers to keep their cultural identity harmed them in the end. “You have these split identities within Toronto,” she told me. “You have all these people who do not identify with being Canadian. But the minute you move into a society and leave [your homeland] it’s never the same. I believe it’s a huge issue for people after they immigrate. Down the road, are they going to feel like they are lost, or are they going to mix with all those other individuals who are lost and have a bitter feeling towards the society?”
One of the reasons Jennifer believes in the WUSC program is the Canadian experience it offers students in their first year, something most refugees and immigrants don’t get when they first arrive. She knows of students who felt abandoned in their second year, after the scholarship ended, but she saw no signs that that would happen in Mohamed’s case: “He’s joined the soccer club, which is really good for him, made new friends, joined the Muslim Society so he has that support.”
With all the expenses ahead in his second year, Mohamed wasn’t certain he would be able to send much money home to his mother in Dagahaley. The last time he had spoken to his family, everyone was doing fine, he said. His brother had been promoted from a lower primary teacher to an upper primary teacher, which meant he brought home about $15 more a month. Mohamed’s brother didn’t have the grades to apply for a WUSC scholarship, but he was among the few teachers receiving training for the job. “That’s the good thing,” Mohamed said. “He’s going to be a professional teacher.”
But Mohamed knew things were getting bad in the camp. With all the newcomers, his mother and brother often didn’t recognize any of the people they passed in the laneways of Dagahaley. Prices were rising and resources were getting scarce. There wasn’t enough water to go around anymore; the same water-pumping stations had to serve so many more. People had to “line up for hours just to get twenty litres,” Mohamed said. Even so, he took a philosophical approach to it all. Things were how they were and he couldn’t change them. All he could do was concentrate on the reasons he was here and put studying before anything else. He knew he would never be like other students on campus who socialized as much as they studied.
The pressure he felt emanated from Mohamed whenever I saw him in Canada. I could see it in the far-off look in his eyes and the worry and impatience he showed when waiters were slow or traffic was congested. He still smiled, but not the gentle smile of his days in the camp. There was a new tightness at the corners of his mouth, a sadness in the clamped lips. He seemed as overwhelmed as he was determined. But he was always courteous and engaging. It was easy to see why Jennifer said, “He’s such a nice guy.”
During my summer visit I asked if he would like to go out to supper. He suggested we go to “our place,” which caused us both to laugh. “Our place” was Cafe Sinai, a small Somali restaurant in a strip mall on Lawrence Avenue East where Mohamed had eaten his first Canadian anjera. That evening he was feeling good about his own independence: “I can go downtown. I can go places. I know how to use the subway. I know how to use the buses.” He could laugh now recalling one evening soon after he arrived when he’d been lost on the Scarborough transit system. He had been to a mosque with a student who was showing him around. They had become separated when the student left Mohamed on a bus while he got a transfer and the bus took off before he got back. Mohamed had no idea where he was going. “It was during the first few days,” he said, “and I don’t know where to alight. If it had been daytime I could have seen the signs, but it was night and once more it was raining, and I was like, how is this going to end?” He got off at the first stop and the friend found him there without understanding his alarm.
On that warm summer evening, Somali men stood outside Cafe Sinai talking. Inside, there were only a few diners, all male. But Mohamed didn’t seem at all bothered to be the only Somali man sitting with a white woman. He ordered goat stew. The waiter asked me if I wanted a banana with my chicken. When I said yes, he nodded. “The Somali way.” Over glasses of pink guava juice, Mohamed told me about his university soccer league. There were girls on his team, which he found strange at first, not only because girls don’t play with boys in the camps, but because women don’t play on the same teams as men in professional soccer. He said the girls played well, though, and his team won, receiving T-shirts that read “Champions.”
Now that he had made so many adjustments, he wanted to help the next sponsored student, a Sudanese refugee who was coming from Kakuma. “I’ll probably be his mentor, taking him around,” he said. He laughed at the idea that he would be the one telling the new student, “It’s going to be okay,” just as people had told him. “People tell you it’s going to be fine, but you never know if it is going to be fine. You say, ‘When am I going to be fine?’”
In his process of becoming self-sufficient on the downtown U of T campus, Abdirizak had lost some of his reserve. “You have to get used to new people,” he said. “You can’t live on an island. You can’t be all by yourself. But it’s good to be careful not to make too many friends because you have to stay focused.”
As Abdirizak spoke to me in the lobby of the university’s main library, it was easy to see the change in him. There was a confidence that came from conquering the first year and being accepted into the commerce program he wanted. But he was also more affable, more expansive in expressing his ideas. It was true that he had come to know me better, and he had always said he was a man who took a while with people before he opened up. But there was something more to it. He seemed looser, less wary of the students who walked past us.
Abdirizak had had to learn tolerance to make new friends. “What can you do? You can’t complain all the time. You have to look for ways of marrying your values and attitudes with your new way of life. You’ll see that the way people dress here is different from the way people dress there. The way people behave here generally is different from the way people behave there. So there is always culture shock. I’m not denying that, but then you get used to it. You have to get acclimatized. That is the most important thing and of course not to lose the sense of yourself, your religion and identity, your values.”
But there were things that still surprised him. He had never heard about homosexuality before he came to Canada. He didn’t understand why men in his residence laughed at him in his ma’awis, the traditional wrap-skirt, and he didn’t understand why his Somali friend shook his hand away when he tried to hold it until the friend explained that two men holding hands was seen differently in North America. “It’s their way of life,” Abdirizak said, “and when I’m here I will be forced to get used to everything whether I want it or not, whether I do it or not. You just have to develop a mechanism of being yourself and also living among the people you are living with.”
If he had come to Canada thinking life would be easy, he knew better now: “Life here is not always a bed of roses. You have to work, and that calls for struggle. You have to grow up with life here, the social sense, the economic sense, and that calls for struggle. You’ll see people who are white Canadians and they are suffering. They’re very poor. You’ll see somebody asking for change. You’ll see somebody who does not have a home. You’ll see somebody who has been evicted out of his home because he has failed to pay the mortgage.”
As well as he was adapting, Abdirizak felt the same pressure as Mohamed did to use this opportunity both to help others in practical terms and to remain an example of hope for those left behind. He believed that it would be up to people like him, the lucky few who had escaped what happened to his generation in Somalia, to help rebuild the country someday: “Those people who are inside Somalia, all they think about is the short term because they have not been exposed to the real world. They do not know how stable and peaceful the world is. All they know is, okay, today you have someone who was killed by this person. Tomorrow you have to get revenge. All they know is, how do you get food tomorrow. So most of their thinking is preoccupied with really short, targeted thoughts and most ominous, really bad ones. And such people cannot think about the future. They can’t be expected to be good patriots. Those people who are outside Somalia, whether in Kenya, whether in Africa, whether in Europe or America, if anybody can help, they are the ones who can help and will. If anybody wants good things for Africa, those are the ones.”
He still couldn’t see far enough into the future to decide if he would move back to Somalia someday or help from afar, but he knew his ties to the country would never dissolve. How could he turn his back on it, especially when he still didn’t know if his father was dead or alive there? How could he turn his back on a homeland when he had followed each agonizing and violent new twist? “When we left our country we were small,” he recalled. “In Kenya we were pretty much in touch with what was going on in Somalia. If we had come to Canada when we were young, that would be a different story. I talked to people who came here when they were young. They have no sense of what I am talking about. They think that the clash is not as bad as it is or life is just as good as it is here. So that helps, the fact that when we came here we were older and more mature intellectually.”
Abdi felt the same pull toward the sorrows of his homeland: “As a human being, not even as a Somalia citizen, we can’t stop and look away from what is happening. There are innocent people killed there. There’s chaos there. There’s hunger. There’s disease. There are floods there and other natural disasters. A lot of people are dying. I’m related to those people by blood.”
The killings in Somalia took Abdi back to a time he wanted to forget: “It’s almost common to Somali people. Killing is common. You’ll hear someone is killed somewhere and they’ll say let’s go and bury him because it’s common. Millions are being killed. Thinking back on my family, I cope with living without them, but those other people who are in Somalia are now dying because of the fighting of al-Shabab. Al-Shabab is another disease now. That’s what I call them.”
There was no support among Somalis for the insurgents, Abdi said. Al-Shabab’s links to al-Qaeda and its call to wage war on neighbouring countries, such as Ethiopia and Kenya, could only make matters worse. “They don’t even understand that Kenya has been holding these refugees from Somalia for so long,” he said. Regardless of how restricted his life had been in Kenya, Abdi felt gratitude for the peace he had been able to find there. And if Somalia threatened Kenya, the refugees in Dadaab could become the victims of harsher treatment at the hands of their hosts, who were already suspicious that terrorists lived among them.
Abdi had no wish to go back to his restricted life in “dusty Ifo,” as he so often referred to it, but he longed to see his friends. He agonized at how stuck they were in their lives there. Throughout the year, he’d been sending about $200 a month back to his uncle, sister and friends and was often besieged by email requests for more help from others. “Some of them will tell you their health is not good. They are going to go for some testing in Nairobi. Some other friends will tell you they are going to wed, that’s expensive.”
He couldn’t help all of them, and couldn’t help any of them find a solution to their status as refugees in a situation that seemed to have no end in sight. “There’s no peaceful environment in Somalia, so repatriation is failing. And there’s no local integration happening. People are closed in that Dadaab camp. So the only way out of the camp is resettlement.” He was always willing to talk about Dadaab in any forum if it brought attention to the problems and helped find solutions. “I believe I am part of the change. My ambition is to make sure that there are no refugees in Dadaab. That’s what I want to see.”
But Abdi also felt the responsibility that went hand in hand with his new status as permanent resident and eventual citizen of Canada. He had little time for refugees and immigrants who lingered in public housing when they were capable of working: “If I have the opportunity to work, the opportunity to make money and help myself, then I have to take advantage of that and become a loyal Canadian taxpayer. Why should I be receiving tax from other people?”
He had done well through the year and during the summer, averaging 85 per cent, in courses that could lead to graduate work in either economics or pharmacology. But he had now decided he would choose economics and would narrow his studies down further to business and accounting. That way, he reasoned, “just in case” he didn’t go to graduate school, he could get a job as an accountant or a financial assistant.
One incident that helped him make up his mind was a visit to a restaurant in London. He went there one day to buy a shawarma wrap and ended up talking to a young man who had studied biology at Western several years earlier—”and now he’s selling shawarmas.” Then Abdi’s academic counsellor confirmed that someone who had come from a refugee camp and wanted to earn money to help others there needed to be in a field that could pay him back immediately.
When I talked to Abdi in August, it was one year after I’d first met him in the CARE compound in Dadaab. As soon as I saw him that day, I could tell something was bothering him. His face had the same anxious expression I’d observed in the camp. As we talked, I missed the sudden bursts of laughter that often emitted from him, the kind of laughter that made me want to say something funny just so I could hear it.
I had driven to Waterloo, Ontario, to connect with him before he went off to a WUSC leadership meeting—putting the inspiration he’d felt at the annual meeting into practice. Before travelling to that meeting, he had come to visit students from Dadaab who were working and studying in Waterloo. It was a hot, overcast day that reminded me of the weather in Dadaab when I’d first met him. But there was nothing about the street he had directed me to that looked like Dadaab. He was staying in an old yellow-brick house, the kind of house that was typical in southwestern Ontario a century ago but was now a residence.
There was a picnic table without benches on the side lawn. Abdi brought out two kitchen chairs so we could sit at it for our conversation. Pine trees and large maples shaded us. I reminded Abdi of the round picnic table we’d sat at a year earlier and was rewarded with a smile, not a laugh.
It didn’t take long to discover what was bothering him. He asked if I remembered our first meeting and how I had asked him about his clan. I said I did. I also remembered the email I had received from Ibrahim soon after, warning me away from the subject. “I request something when you are writing the book,” he said. He requested that I not mention the clan he was from or what clan had been responsible for his family’s death. “That’s the thing I’m most worried about, the clans. I mean, a lot of Somalis will read this book,” he said. He explained that he didn’t want to stir up the issue of tribalism. “The issue is,” he said, “people have a lot of expectations from us. We are people who are studying. We are learning. We are the people who are supposed to help the Somalis regardless of what happened. Any Somali is my brother or my sister, and one of my ambitions is to eliminate this clan issue. When people ask me if I am Somali, some people try to ask me from which clan, and I am not going to answer it.”
Other students had shared their family history with me, often advising me on the sensitivity of the subject. But with Abdi, who had lost both of his parents and his brothers, the issue was particularly raw. “When I associate myself with a clan,” he said, “I blame another clan for the tragedy of my family. That would be something I don’t like. It would be against my principles.” I acquiesced to his request.
By late August, Siyad was feeling more optimistic about both his summer and about life in Canada. He hadn’t found another job, but he was now getting close to full-time hours at Safeway. And he was realizing how lucky he was. “Sometimes I go to YouTube and look at the news in Somalia. When I find people being shot, small kids lying dead, I feel very disappointed. I say, ‘What is wrong with these guys? What happened?’ So when I compare my life with theirs, I say Alhamdulilah, which means ‘praise be to Allah.’ I thank God for giving me this chance to live in freedom, with this security. That’s how I feel about it.”
He was exploring more of his new world now. He’d found someone to help him with the ferry ride to Victoria. “The ferry is wonderful,” he said. But the small city of Victoria made him appreciate all that Vancouver had to offer. He was going on the bus more now, visiting downtown, taking the SkyTrain to visit friends in different suburbs of the city. “And I have been to Stanley Park. English Bay. I have been there.” And he was drinking French vanilla cappuccinos like the others. “Not only French vanilla, but I tried the iced cap,” he said.