‘What do you find strange about the food?’ Pamela asked.
‘Well, it’s not too bad but it’s very dry. I don’t understand why they made the food so dry, and then they gave me something called gravy to make the food more wet.’
Mariam and Pamela laughed out loud. Alem smiled with them. Pamela hadn’t stopped laughing when she began speaking. ‘You see, this is meat-and-two-veg territory.’
Alem repeated puzzled, ‘Meat and two veg?’
‘Yeah,’ she continued, ‘meat and two veg; one piece of meat, that’s the centre of the meal – the centre of the universe – and a couple of vegetables thrown in for good luck. Oh yes, and a bit of gravy to help it go down.’
‘Does everyone around here eat meat and two veg?’ Alem asked, doubting the truth of what Pamela was saying.
‘Yes – well, not everybody but most people. We are only about thirty miles from London but you’ll find that London is a very different place,’ Pamela said as her voice began to settle.
‘I know, I went to London and it was very different. So much people, so many cars, so many big buildings and I only saw the parts where all the shops were.’
For the next ten minutes they let Alem talk to them about his impressions of London and how he had spent his evening in the West End with his father. Soon Mariam thought it was time for them to start talking to him.
‘As I said before, Alem, we’re from the Refugee Council. We know a little bit about how you came to be here and it’s our job to make sure that you’re looked after. We are not the police, we are not from the government and we don’t have any special powers, but we are on your side.’
‘We work with many people in the same situation,’ Pamela interjected, ‘so you have nothing to worry about.’
Mariam took out her notebook and began to make notes. ‘We have to apply to what we call the Home Office for political-asylum. We need to get you this political asylum status so that you can stay in the country. Because we want to make sure that your wellbeing is protected and you get the best of what we have to offer, we have to ask you a few questions to start with. Now, if you’re having problems with English you can speak in Amharic if you like.’
‘I will try to speak in English,’ Alem replied.
‘OK,’ Mariam said while making notes in her book. ‘Can you tell us what happened before you came here? What made your father bring you here, and what was life like where you came from?’
‘Yes, I will try my best.’
Chapter 3
˜ This is War ˜
My name is Alem Kelo. My age is fourteen. I am from Africa. I was born in an area called Badme. Some people think this area is a part of Eritrea and some people think that this area is a part of Ethiopia. My father taught me that it was a part of Africa and he said that there is no country in Africa that is bigger than Africa. In 1991 when the big war was over, I was five years old. My father and my mother and I went to live in Asmara. Asmara is a large city, the capital of Eritrea. My mother said we moved there so I could go to a good school and they could get better jobs. I did go to a good school there, it was a big school, a strong building. My mother and father did get good jobs; my mother worked in a court – she was the clerk – and my father worked in a post office. My father can speak six languages – Arabic, Afar, Tigrinya, Italian, English and Amharic. My mother can also speak these languages but I can only speak Amharic, Tigrinya and English. But I want to learn many more languages, and I want to make my English better. I did like Asmara, I had many friends there, but when I was ten years old we all went to live in Harar. Harar is in Ethiopia, high in the hills, the sun shines bright there but it is very cool. I found a new school and I had a good friend there, his name is Dawit. My mother found a new job in the bank and my father was the manager of the biggest post office in the city. He was the most important person there, and if there were problems everyone would have to come to him. We were happy living there until war broke out again and we began to have problems. Some of the other children at school started to pick on me, not Dawit but some others, and then one day my mother came home and said that she had lost her job because nobody did want to work with her. She said that the manager said she was causing too much trouble, the Ethiopian workers said that they are at war with Eritrea, so they will not work with someone from Eritrea. She was very upset. And then some weeks later my father said the people at work said that he must leave my mother because she is Eritrean and she is the enemy. My father said no, and he kept on working there but I think it was very difficult for him. Sometimes he came home from work and he didn’t talk to us and I think this is because he was having problems at work. And then one night when we were asleep, the police broke down the door of our house and then they began to break up the house. They broke all the tables and chairs, and they told us to get ready to leave in the morning because buses would be taking us back to Eritrea. My father told them that he was born in Ethiopia, so they said that if he loves Ethiopia he can stay but me and my mother must go. My father said that he loves Ethiopia, he loves Eritrea and he loves Africa. One policeman then asked my father who would he fight for, and my father said he would fight for peace, and then the policeman hit my father with his rifle and my mother started to cry. When the police left we stayed awake all night and in the morning we went into the streets and we could see lots of people in the streets, many of them crying and getting on to buses. My father went to talk to a man and the man said he does not talk to traitors and then the police said that we must get on the bus right away and go to Eritrea, and my father said no. Then one policeman pushed my mother on the floor and my father got angry and shouted at him and the policeman pointed the rifle in my father’s face and told him that we have fifteen minutes to go. So we went in our house and got as many things as we could, then we got on the bus and we went to Eritrea. The bus was full of Eritreans. When we went to Eritrea we stayed with my auntie. She is the sister of my mother. We had been there for about three months, then one day somebody was throwing some stones at my father when he was walking down the street. Then another day some women told my mother that she must leave my father and find a husband from Eritrea. In school in Eritrea the children started picking on me again and calling me Ethiopian, and one day after school some very big boys all started to beat me up when I was playing sport. They were very big, almost twenty years old. They beat my face and my stomach and when I was on the ground they just kept kicking me very hard. One boy said he was going to kick all the Ethiopian blood out of me. After this my mother and father were always talking about what they could do. They said Eritrea and Ethiopia were at war and our family is both Eritrean and Ethiopian. My mother said that we tried to live in both places and we always have problems. Then one day – it was my birthday – my father said I should have a holiday. He said that a holiday would make me happy and I will forget the problems. My mother was trying to find a job, she said she would not come, so my father took me to Djibouti by bus and from there we flew to Addis Ababa and from there we flew to England. I was thinking that we came here for a holiday, so that I could practise my English and see the buildings, but my father left me here so that I will not die.
Chapter 4
˜ Asylum Seeking ˜
When Alem stopped speaking the room fell silent. Mariam had witnessed the Ethiopia–Eritrea war herself and both she and Pamela had heard many horror stories of people fleeing war and persecution in the past, but they still found that no two stories were the same and each new story they heard still touched them.
Alem looked at them both and waited for a response, but there was none. ‘Have I said something wrong?’
‘No,’ Pamela said quickly, ‘no, not at all. You must say exactly what happened to you and your family. We need to know as much as possible about your experiences. Do you have any brothers or sisters?’
‘No,’ said Alem, shaking his head.
‘Do you have any friends or family in England?’ Mariam asked.
Ale
m continued shaking his head. ‘No.’
Mariam looked towards the photo. ‘Is that your mother and father?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your mother looks like a wise woman,’ Mariam said, stretching forward to get a better view without leaving the chair, ‘and she’s beautiful.’
The photo was a posed one. Alem was seated on a chair with his mother and father standing behind him. His mother was dressed in a bright orange, flowered dress that would have looked very out of place in inner-city Britain. Her shoulders were draped with a light-green scarf. Her face was dark and slim with a slightly pointed chin and gently smiling lips. Large earrings hung from her ears and her hair was plaited close to her head in rows going from the front to the back.
‘You look like a great family, there is a lot of love in that photo,’ Mariam observed. ‘Do you have a phone back home?’
‘No,’ Alem said, looking at the photo.
‘That’s fine. Enough for now,’ said Mariam.
‘One last question,’ Pamela said as she stood up. ‘Do you want something to eat?’
‘Yes,’ Alem said hesitantly.
‘What kind of food would you like?’ she continued.
‘Italian, Italian,’ Alem said with a hint of a smile on his face.
Pamela was a little surprised. ‘Italian?’ she said, looking towards Mariam.
‘If the man said he wants Italian, then the man gets Italian,’ Mariam insisted. She looked around the room. There wasn’t much in the way of personal belongings. ‘How much luggage do you have?’
‘Only one bag,’ Alem replied, ‘one small bag.’
‘Well,’ Mariam said, ‘you have to leave this hotel today, so what we’d like you to do is pack your bag now and come with us. The first thing we’ll do is to go and find some Italian food and then we’ll take you back to our office. At the office we’ll work out a plan and get you somewhere to stay.’
Alem went to the wardrobe, got his bag and put his few items of clothing in it. Then he went around the room and collected the photo and his schoolbooks and put them away too. He went to the bathroom and collected his toiletry bag and put that in his bag before zipping it up. The whole packing process took less than five minutes.
They left the hotel after saying their goodbyes to Mr Hardwick and then rode for forty minutes in Mariam’s slow old Volkswagen to Reading town centre. There they found an Italian restaurant where Alem indulged himself with a very large portion of spaghetti bolognese while Mariam and Pamela slowly grazed on some boiled vegetables and pasta. It was in their plan not to bother Alem with questions over the meal; instead they let him eat, only interrupting him periodically to ask him how the food was or if he wanted more.
After the meal they took a five-minute drive to their offices, which consisted of four rooms above a shoe shop. Every corner had a desk with a computer on it, as well as stacks of paper. Most of the desks were in use. Mariam introduced Alem to every worker, clearly stating their name and whether they were full-time, part-time or voluntary workers. Then he was taken into a small room, which was empty except for a round table with four chairs. As Alem entered the room he wondered why he was introduced to everyone. Was it for a purpose? He worried because less than one minute after the introductions ended he couldn’t remember one single name. The names all sounded strange and unmemorable to him.
As they sat down, one of the workers came in carrying a tray with a pot of tea, cups, milk, sugar and biscuits on it. The worker put it on the table and left the room.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Pamela asked as she began to prepare the cups.
‘No, thank you,’ Alem replied.
‘Would you like some biscuits then?’
‘No, thank you, I have no more room inside me. I’m full up.’
When the tea making was done, Mariam began the talking as Pamela made notes.
‘Right, Alem, as we said earlier, this organisation is called the Refugee Council. We are independent and our main concern is to look after the interests of refugees. Unfortunately it’s not up to us whether you can stay in Britain but we will try our best to make sure that the Home Office knows why you should stay.’
Once again Alem looked puzzled. ‘I don’t want to stay,’ he said. ‘I don’t really want to stay here, I want to go home – to Africa.’
Mariam responded quickly. ‘But you know why your father and mother had to get you out, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do, I told you why, but I don’t want to stay here for ever. It’s cold.’
Mariam smiled. ‘Yes, we know it’s cold and we hope that you don’t have to stay here for ever, but do you really want to go home right now? Do you think it’s safe?’
There was a long silence before Alem replied. He took time to think through his answer and as he answered he placed every word carefully. ‘I want to go home but I can’t go now because of the fighting. So I would like to go home when there is peace. Most of all I want to be with my parents.’
‘We understand completely,’ Mariam replied. ‘Let me explain something to you, Alem. It’s important that you understand this. We have to make an application for you to stay; we have to get permission. That permission has to come from the Home Office. The Home Office is a part of the government. These things can take some time but it has to be done, otherwise you will get into trouble with the police. Today we’ll fill in a form for you. That form will go to the Home Office and then they will decide what to do; they may want you to attend a hearing or they may ask you to see them for an interview. If they do, you’ll see that their interviewers are very different from ours. They will ask you a lot of difficult questions, and they sometimes ask the same questions over and over again to catch you out, and they certainly won’t take you out for a meal; but it won’t be too bad if you are prepared.’
Alem sat up in his seat and said very confidently, ‘OK, I am prepared.’
Pamela handed a form to Mariam, who began filling it in, stopping sometimes to ask Alem questions but mainly working from knowledge that she already had. The main purpose of the form was to confirm the fact that the applicant wanted to apply for asylum so it did not go into detail over the circumstances. What it did do was to ask the applicant’s name, age, country of origin and whether the applicant was under the age of sixteen, and if so, was he or she accompanied by an adult? Alem could see by how fast Mariam ticked some of the boxes that she had done this many times before. She finished by repeating some of the questions and answers to Alem to check that she had replied correctly, then she asked him to sign the form. Alem could sense how important the form was when Mariam looked it over one more time before signing it herself. Without taking her eyes off the form, she handed it to Pamela and watched as she signed it.
After signing it, Pamela put it with the rest of the documents into her folder and began to leave the room. ‘I’ll get this on its way.’
Mariam also stood up to leave. ‘Wait here, Alem, I’ll be back in a moment. I have to find somewhere for you to stay.’
By now Alem was sure that the two women were on his side, but as he sat waiting in the empty room, he couldn’t help thinking that they must be talking about him. He knew now that he had nothing to fear from them but still he was curious to know what conversations were going on behind the scenes. He could hear talk in the background but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Frustrated, he got up and put his ear to the door to see if he could hear more. He also had to listen for anyone approaching the door, so he still could not hear much but he did hear Mariam say his name in what sounded like a telephone conversation.
He sat down and waited for another ten minutes before Mariam re-entered the room alone. ‘Right, Alem,’ she said as she sat down. ‘I’ve found a place for you to stay for a while. It’s an OK place, clean, not very far from here, and there are not too many boys there.’
‘What do you mean, not too many boys there?’ Alem replied.
‘I mean that it’s not too overcrowded.
Some of these places have hundreds of boys in them, but this one’s not so bad.’
Alem was really confused. ‘Is this a hotel just for boys?’
‘No, not really, Alem, this is not a hotel, this is more like a hostel, actually it’s a children’s home. Because of your age you will have to go into the care of the local authority – the municipality. They will look after you, but we’ll be visiting you all the time. We’ll visit you as much as we can and we’ll get a social worker, someone whose job is to make sure you have no problems.’
Alem leaned over the table and said, ‘Kanchi gar menor ichilallehu wey?’
‘No, I’m sorry, Alem. I would love you to stay with me but it’s not possible. For the time being you must go into care or we could all get into trouble. We’re going to try our best to make sure that you don’t stay there too long and we’re going to make sure you’re looked after, but you have to go.’
‘What kind of boys are there?’
‘All different kinds of boys – big, small, black and white.’
‘Where do they come from?’
‘Well, I haven’t been there for a long time but you usually find that they come from everywhere, different parts of Britain but also from other countries.’
‘What is the food like?’
Mariam paused for a moment. ‘I don’t really know. It’s probably the meat-and-two-veg type but don’t worry, we’ll try and get some of the food that you like sometimes. I’m sure we can organise some spaghetti,’ she said smiling.
Alem exhaled hard as if he had been holding his breath. He spoke as if defeated. ‘OK, I will go there for now, but please, will you help me if somebody hurts me or if something goes wrong?’
‘Of course,’ Mariam replied, ‘but listen, these people want to look after you. It may not be the best place in the world. If they had better buildings and more money, things would be better, but you are in care and they want to care for you. We will of course help you if you need help.’
Refugee Boy Page 3