Garad is back!
He's standing in the hall outside my classroom, wearing a new suit, two or three sizes too big, that he must have purchased in Africa. His shirt is made of blue cotton, open at the neck. Underneath that he's wearing a white t-shirt. His hair is cropped very close. I'm so relieved to see him I can't stop grinning. I want to hug him but I can't, because, as a strict Muslim, Garad will not touch a woman who is not family. So I'm standing here awkwardly, arms at my sides like oversized spatulas. Garad isn't returning my smile. His expression is stern, the kind of look you see in old frontier photographs, snapped after a long trip through treacherous terrain. I mean to say, he looks tough. His tea-colored skin has darkened to strong brew. A muscular wiriness is evident underneath his suit. Gone, I'm afraid, is the gangly young man with an infectious enthusiasm for English verb tenses. Something in his demeanor indicates that the past three months-his highly unusual sabbatical-have been a rite of passage.
Or so it seems to me.
In any case, this is the point when I start to worry all over again.
Garad is a refugee from Somalia. He was five-years-old in 1991, when his country spiraled out of control so spectacularly. A dictator deposed; ongoing civil war; hospitals, schools, banks, fire and police departments dismantled or destroyed; famine brought about by war and drought; fourteen-and-counting transitional governments. It's the longest running instance of complete state collapse in post-colonial history. When Garad's father and many of his family members were killed, Garad and his mother fled to Dadaab, a city in northeastern Kenya. He lived in the camps there for fifteen years before being admitted to the United States.
There are three camps in Dadaab, administered by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Together, they house between one- and two-hundred thousand refugees, mostly Somali. Because of Somalia's seemingly intractable political situation, periodic attempts at refugee repatriation have not worked. This has turned Dadaab into one of the world's worst cases of human warehousing. Many refugees, like Garad, have live there for a decade or longer.
Garad made a few extra pennies on the side by pushing a wheelbarrow. Hauling water, grain sacks from food shipments, fire wood. It's easy for me to imagine Garad doing this work. Drumming up business, haggling over payment. Surprising everyone with how strong a scrawny boy can be. Ha! Striding behind a wheelbarrow would be work that combined two of his favorite things: talking and walking.
When he first began attending my class I would ask him what he was planning to do with his weekend. His answer was always: Walk. He had a way of miming this by kicking his feet out in front of him while swinging his arms. Sure enough, if I was driving through the neighborhood on a Saturday or a Sunday, I would see him out walking. If I stopped to ask if he wanted a ride, he would shout in reply, No ride! Walking! He disapproved of cars and it annoyed him that Columbus had so many. Teachah, he often said, it is dangerous! Very, very dangerous! Then off he would go with his long, ground-gulping strides, arms swinging in big pendulous arcs. He was intent on learning the neighborhood, the ins and outs. Garad was going places.
After he had been here a little over a year, he confessed that life in America was not what he had expected. We were on our way home from Wal-Mart on Morse Road. It was early spring, still cold out, and we had just bought him another pair of sweatpants. He wore them under his clothes, like long underwear, to stay warm.
The cashier in the checkout line had been African American, her hair elaborately plaited into dozens of small braids that were then bundled into three pigtails and trussed up with pink satin laces. She scanned Garad's sweats and shoved them in a plastic bag.
Nigh city tree, she said, staring over our heads at something in the far corner of the store.
Garad looked to me for help. I was busy counting the cashier's braids and wasn't listening; it took me a moment to rewind and replay. Oh. I nodded toward the register display. $9.63.
Garad handed the cashier a ten dollar bill.
She took it, dug around in the register, held out his change.
No, he said. Here. He rapped on the counter with a long, brown finger.
The cashier ignored him.
Here. He rapped on the counter again.
She continued to hold out his change.
I stepped in. Would you mind putting the coins on the counter? I asked
She placed the coins where Garad had indicated, still looking at something above our heads. Garad picked up his change.
As we walked toward the exit, he dangled his coins in front of my face. I sighed, held out my hand, and he let them drop.
Garad didn't use coins. Only paper.
You should save your change, I said. It adds up.
He flicked his wrist-It is nothing-and strode ahead of me out of the store.
We drove most of the way home in silence. Garad wanted me to drop him off at his mosque, so I turned south on Westerville Road. With every mile we traveled our surroundings became more grim. We started to see fly-by-night businesses with hand-lettered signs. Abandoned cars, boarded up windows. This part of town was, for the most part, populated by African Americans and Somalis. It was a tense co-existence punctuated by an occasional blow up. Bricks and bats, that sort of thing.
It is difficult, Garad said to the windshield.
I know.
Very, very difficult.
I know.
I surprise!
I am surprised. I know.
My interview. He shook his head. Ten minutes only!
Interview? I asked, confused.
It turned out Garad was talking about an interview that had occurred back in Dadaab. Probably with an Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) officer. Such interviews were one of the final steps before being admitted to the U.S., and Garad's had lasted only ten minutes. In the absence of any other information, he assumed that his short interview meant he would do well in the U.S.
Of course this wasn't the case. He was, in fact, doing considerably worse than most. For months he had been losing weight. Every few weeks I weighed him on the nurse's scale, fully clothed. Together we watched the lever bounce up and down as I moved the weight forward and back: 108, 105, 103. The veins in his forehead had become prominent. His arms were like knitting needles.
Not long after our shopping trip he announced he was going back to Africa. For the summer. Something about the timing--Where does a new refugee get that kind of money?--triggered a sense of unease.
Where in Africa? I asked.
Adsuhbuhbuh. He said it so fast that it took me a minute to untangle the words. Addis Ababa.
Ethiopia? I asked. Why?
Because-he spread his hands wide, then seemed at loss for an explanation.
I waited but he didn't finish his sentence. Why? I asked again.
Because-he shook his head. Another long silence. Because holiday, he said finally.
This was April, 2007, and the fighting in Somalia was intense. An attempt, using Ethiopian troops, to install a U.N.-backed transitional government in the capital city of Mogadishu had triggered violent insurgency. Since mid-March the Battle of Mogadishu had been raging, and the inciting factor appeared to be the presence of Ethiopian troops on Somali soil. Thousands of civilians had been killed. Both sides were shelling indiscriminately. Nearly the entire civilian population of Mogadishu had fled the city and was seeking refuge elsewhere.
I wondered if this was such a good time for a Somali to visit Ethiopia.
And another thing crossed my mind, I couldn't help it. There had recently been more stories in the Dispatch about a "local web of terror." A man named Christopher Paul, a Columbus-area high school graduate, had just been indicted. Authorities believed Paul was involved in plots to bomb U.S. embassies abroad, as well as European resorts frequented by Americans. Another member of the local web, Iyman Faris, a Columbus truck driver born in Kashmir, was serving a twenty-year prison sentence for scouting out ways to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge. And a third Columbus man, a Somali named Nuradin Abdi, was in jail awaiting trial. He was accused of plotting to blow up a Columbus-area shopping mall. The plan had apparently been hatched at a coffee shop a few miles away from where I lived, the Caribou Coffee I passed every time I went to the library. But that wasn't what I was thinking about when Garad told me about his holiday. I was thinking that Abdi was also accused of falsifying travel documents.
In order to attend a terrorist training camp in Ethiopia.
Huh.
(names changed)
©Stephanie Harrison
Updated 3/22/09
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