Somali Refugees in Kenya

More International Articles

Swedish doctors urge action over autism-sunlight link

Madaxweyne C/llaahi Yuusuf oo Muqdisho ku laabtay

Dowladda Spain oo sheegtay in ay markab dagaal u soo direyso Xeebaha Soomaaliya

Summer Vacation?

By REBECCA RUTLEDGE

Last summer, I sent my husband Doug Rutledge away on a four-month trip to Europe without me. Acquaintances and customers at our bookstore commented on what a nice thing a vacation in Europe was, but it was hard for me to see what was so nice about it. I was alone, trying to do the work of two people while Doug was in Malta, Germany, and Greece. He spent one day in Malta admiring the cathedrals, since architecture is a passion of his. He spent one afternoon in Greece looking at the Parthenon, and snatched an hour here and two hours there for Germany’s cathedrals. He sent me post cards of those places, and post-card-sized visits were all he got, too.

Instead, he was traveling with our close friend, Abdi Roble, a Somali photographer, to see what life was like for the Somali communities in these places. In Germany, Somalis have to live in the ghettos where Jews once were confined, and now home to drug users and prostitutes. Here the bureaucracy allowed a man to come for medical treatment but kept his wife confined somewhere else, where he could visit her a few hours a day and never spend the night.

In Greece, Doug and Abdi found that most Somalis have no legal papers, so they live in warehouse-like places in the city where decent people would never let their children go or in abandoned buildings in the countryside where they are working as migrant laborers, often cheated of their pay. Since Doug is over fifty and suffering the typical American health problems of his age, I was glad that they gave him the best place to sleep on the night he visited the migrant workers, but my heart ached to hear about the conditions that they endured, too painfully familiar to any former Californian or reader of Grapes of Wrath.

In Malta, the government was not allowing Somalis refugee status, but instead gave them charity in the form a “Welcome Camps” (a 1984 speak for detention camps) without sanitary facilities, bedding, privacy, or human dignity. This system of “charity” was run by church officials who may well have been overwhelmed, but who nevertheless kept their eyes out for the chance to enrich relatives whom they allowed to sell goods donated to relieve the refugees. Needless to say, the money from these sales did not assist refugees. Worst of all, without refugee status, none of these people had much chance of being accepted by another country when they applied to leave Malta. They were trapped on this island.

As I talked to Doug on the phone, a grim picture of refugee life emerged. He and Abdi went to the police station with a young couple, the wife so pregnant she could hardly walk. When the police screamed at them because the police themselves failed to return their identity papers to them at their last visit, Doug, who is 6'3", stepped forward and quietly asked why the officials were angry. They calmed down and returned the couple’s papers. What would have happened if Doug and Abdi hadn’t been there watching and witnessing this behavior? These men had no respect for the woman’s condition despite a culture in which a young woman, heavily pregnant with her first child, is at the center of a story about no room at the inn.

In Germany, Doug and Abdi shared space in a flop house to better understand the plight of the refugees. A Somali man, in despair of ever being allowed a chance to regain his human dignity, perform meaningful work, create a family, or any other simple act which forms the meaning of our lives, stayed behind his locked door for three days. No one knew if he would kill himself behind that locked door. These were the stories I was hearing from the “vacation” trip to Europe. And I know they didn’t even tell me the saddest, the worst tales.

The Somali people have no government; the media refers to it as a “failed state.” That means that there is no authority to issue them official papers, protect their rights when they travel, or protest the abuses to which they are subject. I never realized how much I assume that my U.S. passport gives me the right to be part of the jostling, complaining public whom weary custom officials ask whether we travel for business or pleasure, stamp our books, and allow us to go where we please. To reach Malta or Greece, Somalis have to scrabble together as much money as their extended families can raise and trust themselves to people smugglers who will take them across deserts, into leaky boats, and on foot past border posts. These smugglers must be the worst sort of inhuman brigands, throwing children off boats to lighten them if they are pursued, ferrying people to islands in Turkey and saying they have reached Greece, allowing people to die in the desert for want of water. Often the reason they know how to avoid border posts is that they themselves are corrupt police or other officials, willing to overload inadequate boats with insufficient supplies in order to profit from desperate people fleeing the unending war in Somalia. I imagine all the heart-wrenching choices Somali families make: who to send, who must stay since there is not enough money, who will be separated from father, mother, husband, wife, or child. And those dearly-loved travelers, carrying the hopes of their families for everyone’s survival, so often have their lives cut short by the hardships of the travel and the inhumanity of those they encounter on the trip. No one will ever even tell many families how or where those loved ones died.

Now that Doug is graying, the Somalis he met on his trip wanted to treat him with respect. Someone in both Malta and Greece assigned himself the job of caring Doug’s computer case. It’s a laptop, but not the latest, lightest, just the one donated to him for doing this work. Ali, in Greece, told Doug it was heavy because of the weight of the sad stories it held. In Malta, Abdirahim carried the bag, and only after they had spent every day with him for a few weeks did Doug and Abdi learn that Abdirahim still had shrapnel in one leg from a wound inflicted in Somalia.
Perhaps the worst culture shock is coming home. Doug returned to find that I was two months behind in running the shop and had to resume an American life without any way to purge all the pain of his “vacation” in Europe. In fact, at the airport I did a double take when he walked down the hallway to the end of the security area where I was waiting. He was wearing a cowboy hat which he didn’t own when he left. One day in Germany when the sad and wearying stories seemed like too much, the German newspapers ran a political cartoon whose caption could be translated, “Foreigners Out!” Doug went down to the flea market and picked up the cowboy hat, just to be sure that no one would mistake him for a German citizen who might agree with such sentiments, as if his peanut-butter nourished, big-shouldered physique built by summer construction jobs as a young man didn’t shout out “American” as he towered over people on the street.

Back in the U.S. he began to write and to query various newspapers about whether they wanted to inform their readers about what he now knew. There was little response, so he posted an article on Malta on line. To our surprise, it was soon the first thing that came up when one googled “Somalians.” I think the first the Somali refugees in Malta knew of it was when the Maltese Ministry of Justice called a press conference to deny that the article was true. Since Malta was about to join the E.U., it was necessary to avoid scandal, and governments do that first by saying that what is happening is not happening. After all, that’s easier than doing anything about a problem. I was proud that Doug’s work had provoked the Maltese government to issue an official denial of what he had said. One American who could write with a computer filled with sad stories and his Somali-American friend who could take photographs so beautiful and sad that they bring tears to your eyes could actually make the government of a small Mediterranean island afraid. When they left Europe, Doug and Abdi were given koofis, the traditional caps for elders to wear in Somalia. One earns a position as an elder not by having enough birthdays but by acting on behalf of the people.

It’s almost a year since they returned, and a few days ago I met Abdirahim from Malta for the first time. He is now here in Columbus because the UNHCR has taken over care of refugees in Malta. Six hundred people, members of families, are in the process of being brought into the U.S. to become citizens. Before he left Malta, Abdirahim was invited to dinner at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. When Abdi translated this information as Abdirahim talked to me, my heart was suddenly too full for my rib cage and tears came into my eyes. Doug is modest, but I think he should wear a koofi when the occasion calls for it. The right words at the right time prompted a change in government policy which will improve the lives of many families. Abdirahim said to me, through translation, “Doug is my father” since he’s responsible for Abdirahim, his wife, his two sons and one daughter whom I have not yet met having a new life in America.

I’m pretty certain that Doug and Abdi would not be joyfully welcomed by officials if they wanted to return to Malta. But the truth is, I have crossed it off the list of places I want to see before I die. Doug and I will just have to vacation somewhere else. Look for Abdi and Doug’s book, The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away, which is being published by the University of Minnesota Press this fall. It tells the first part of their five year quest to document the lives of the Somalis forced to leave their homes. The next book will have photos and stories about their eye opening trip to Europe.