Call Me American

by Abdi Nor Iftin

  “What is this?”

  “This moisturizes your lips.”

  “What do you use this for?”

  “This is for your skin.”

  When we got off the bus, we were surrounded by hundreds of Kenyans who were curiously waiting for the nursing students. They shook hands with all of us one by one. The Kenyans thought Hassan and I were African Americans.

  I was assigned to register the patients, then measure their weights and heights. Hassan, who by now spoke fluent Swahili, had to translate for the elderly Kenyans who didn’t speak English. I was wearing a T-shirt that said “Chicago,” and a Kenyan student asked me if I was from there.

  “Yes,” I said, walking away quickly to end the conversation. I was ashamed at having lied, but I was so happy to be around all those Americans that I couldn’t bear to admit to him that I was in fact one of life’s losers—a lowly Somali refugee. Or admit to myself that I would have to return to Little Mogadishu when the project ended.

  By the second day, the Kenyan students figured out that Hassan and I were refugees. On the bus I heard some of them snickering and muttering, “Al-Shabaab,” but I tried to ignore them and made friends with an American woman named Shannon from Bangor, Maine.

  At the end of our last day of work we threw a party at the guesthouse. Everyone danced and sang songs; the Americans drank beer. I grabbed a can of soda and danced like I’d seen cool stars do in movies, with a drink in their hand. The next morning we checked out of the guesthouse and said good-bye to our new friends. They said they would miss Kenya and would come back next year.

  Margaret had brought some cash from Sharon for Hassan and me. It was enough for us to set up a street business selling socks and shoes. We worked seventeen hours a day to make enough to buy food and pay rent, waking up at five in the morning to grab the best spot on the side of the road and not going home until midnight. But it felt good to pay our own way and not constantly need money from Sharon.

  After weeks of hard work and with a little cash in my pocket, I texted Muna and asked if she could meet for a hangout. She agreed, and we met at one of the restaurants in Little Mogadishu. She got right to the point.

  “Abdi, you are wasting your time, bro. I am not going to date a man in Little Mogadishu. How can I date someone who is broke like me?”

  Still, it was nice to sit with her. Later I came up with an idea. I went to the Obama Studio and had them Photoshop my picture standing next to the Empire State Building, the White House, and other famous places in the United States. I went on Facebook and updated my residence to California. I posted all the photos, along with the ones I took with the American students. When Muna saw it, she said she broke out laughing. It was worth it for that.

  * * *

  —

  Al-Shabaab already had a presence in the refugee camps in northeast Kenya, and they were getting more aggressive in the country. In October 2011 they kidnapped two Spanish aid workers from Doctors Without Borders, taking them into Somalia as hostages. In response the Kenyan government declared war on al-Shabaab and sent troops, tanks, helicopters, and artillery to battle the terrorists deep inside Somalia.

  It was called Operation Linda Nchi, “To Protect the Nation,” but the residents of Little Mogadishu had a pretty good idea we were not going to be protected. As the troops marched across the Somali border, police encircled Little Mogadishu, assuming that residents there would heed the call of al-Shabaab to retaliate against Kenya. Soon the streets were cleared, and businesses were closed. Everyone went home and turned on the TV. Hassan and I locked our door and sat quietly. Outside we heard sporadic shots.

  Life changed overnight in Little Mogadishu. Police night raids increased, especially in mosques. Men with beards were taken out. Executive orders were announced: all refugees must leave Nairobi and go to the camps. This was the beginning of the hide-and-seek games between us and the police. I managed to sneak out early one morning, catch a matatu downtown, and file a report for The Story about a friend who got taken to jail overnight:

  He told me [the police] threatened him because, they said, “you know the sympathizers of al-Shabaab here, you need to tell us. If you are not al-Shabaab, then you know the sympathizers.” And he was like “I don’t know!” He cried out that he doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t have any idea about al-Shabaab or al-Shabaab sympathizers or anything like that.

  Soon after that, Hassan and I were on our way out of our apartment when two men in civilian clothes walked up quickly behind us.

  “Show me your IDs or passports, please,” one of them said.

  We stopped and looked at them. They brought out handcuffs.

  “Where are your Kenyan IDs or passports?”

  “We don’t have Kenyan IDs,” Hassan said. “We have refugee documents.”

  As I reached into my pocket for my refugee document, the man handcuffed me and told me to follow him.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked. “Please show me your police ID.”

  From his leather jacket he pulled out an ID; I couldn’t tell if it was real or fake. I tried to protest the arrest, and he pulled out a gun. He led me to a corner of the street where fewer people walked. Hassan was brought by the other man.

  “I will take you to the Pangani station!” the man holding me shouted. My heart froze, but then the negotiation started. “How much do you have?” he asked. “Give me a thousand shillings!”

  “I don’t have it,” I said.

  “Seven hundred!”

  “I only have one hundred.”

  He pulled my wallet out of my pocket, shuffled through it, and took the hundred-shilling note with the picture of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya. He smiled, tucked away his pistol, and left, no doubt to find another refugee he could tap as an ATM. That’s what the police started calling us. Hassan also negotiated his way out of the other man’s threat. We walked away realizing this would be our new danger every night.

  Nairobi was a roofless prison for me and my brother, and for the thousands of other Somalis. There was no future besides more police harassment and the terrifying fear of being deported to Somalia. The dim light at the end of our dark tunnel was the hope that someday our American friends might help us escape.

  The police raids in Little Mogadishu and the Kenyan troops in Somalia were all good news to al-Shabaab, it was exactly the chaos they craved. The terrorists soon escalated the fight. There was a hand grenade thrown into a church in Nairobi, a matatu attack, a bombing in a Mombasa bar. Metal detectors and heavily armed police were stationed at hotels, restaurants, bars, and bus stations. The Kenyans blamed all Somalis. “Get Them out of Our Country!” the newspaper headlines shouted.

  After several unexploded bombs were retrieved from an apartment in Little Mogadishu, more young men in the neighborhood were dragged off to jail. Often they never returned. There was no way to identify terrorists—they had the same refugee papers we did—so any young man was a suspect. Hassan and I kept our heads down, with our hearts in our throats. When Hassan and I had to be separated, we would text each other more than a hundred times every day, making sure we were okay. Women were no safer; they were being raped by the police. All of the people who lived in our building exchanged phone numbers. When the police were coming, we would all text each other: “They are coming down 6th, run toward 5th.” Refugees would lock down their stores, hide in the bathrooms, under the beds.

  Meanwhile, the Kenyan citizens had stopped coming to shop in Little Mogadishu. The neighborhood was sealed off and surrounded by police checkpoints at all exits. The local media did not report what was happening in Little Mogadishu, but I did. Dick Gordon, the host of The Story, was growing more worried for our safety. He mentioned that his daughter Pamela was working for the Red Cross of Canada in Nairobi. She invited us for coffee on the rich side of town at a fancy shopping center called the Westgat
e Mall. Hassan and I managed to evade the police checks and get on a matatu. The mall was like something I had seen in movies of California or Florida: huge, clean, with gardens and moving stairs and shops full of people—white people, Kenyans, Asians. Everything was so expensive. We had a nice talk with Pam. She gave us her mobile number. “In case something happens to you, call me,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Because we had no luck getting resettlement interviews, Team Abdi’s next plan was to get us American student visas. To improve our chances and give us some college experience, Hassan and I began taking online English classes with one of our fans in America, an English professor at Lyndon State College in Vermont named Nene Riley. She assigned us to read literature and essays and write reports summarizing the main points of the pieces, our reaction to them, and how they applied to our own society. We had exchanges with several students from Lyndon State College, and it felt like we were studying in the United States. My writing steadily improved.

  With Sharon’s help we applied to Southern Maine Community College as international exchange students. Sharon and her family sent a letter to the college confirming that she would support us financially and that they were our American family in Maine. Hassan and I had to take something called the Test of English as a Foreign Language, which took half a day. We both passed the test, and soon after that DHL Nairobi delivered official acceptance letters from the school.

  We were going to college in America! The next step was getting our student visas, which required interviews at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. To support our requests, Team Abdi had gathered letters of recommendation from seven U.S. senators: Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine; Bernie Sanders of Vermont; Kay Hagan and Richard Burr of North Carolina; and Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. With everything ready, we paid our interview fees and waited for the appointments.

  My interview was a week before Hassan’s. That morning I woke up at five, so nervous, and got on a matatu before the police would start searching for refugees. The interview was at eight. I got there at six. After intensive security screening I proceeded inside the embassy and joined a waiting room of people who looked just as excited and nervous. My feet were actually sweating. As I sat there, I thought of my mom and my sister back in Mogadishu. If I got the visa and went to the United States, I would go to college, get a good job, and send them money every week. Life would be great for all of us.

  “B-20, proceed to Window Eight.”

  That was me. B-20. I stood up and walked to Window Eight. The man behind the counter was a middle-aged, bald-headed white American.

  “How are you today?” he asked.

  “I am fine, sir. How about yourself?” I used my best American accent, trying not to faint from my nerves.

  “Not bad. Have you ever traveled to the U.S.?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever traveled to any other country besides Kenya and Somalia?”

  “No. But I passed through Uganda on my way to Kenya.”

  “What do you do now in Nairobi?”

  “I am a refugee here, sir.”

  “Did you ever go to college in Nairobi?”

  “No.”

  “And Somalia?”

  “Yes, I went to a college in Mogadishu but it collapsed before I finished.”

  “What are those letters in your hand?”

  “These are letters of support from senators and other supporters. Do you want to see them?”

  “Sure.”

  He glanced quickly at the letters, looked up at me, and said, “I am sorry. You don’t qualify for the visa this time. Good luck wherever you end up.” Then he handed everything back to me.

  I was frozen. I could not leave his window. He turned to his computer and started typing.

  “Sir,” I said with tears in my eyes. But he ignored me and called the next person, B-21.

  I walked out of the embassy like my dad when he returned to Mogadishu, crippled and wobbling. Like his, my dream had been destroyed. I felt I did not belong to this world and that I must have been created to have a permanent broken heart. I was so shaky that I was afraid of getting hit by a car, so I had to sit down and breathe. I texted Hassan. Soon everyone on Team Abdi was sending me condolences. Hassan got denied a week later.

  We tried one more time, after Ben and Paul e-mailed people they knew who worked at the embassy. Again we were denied. One of the requirements of student visas is that you must have strong family ties in your home country so you aren’t tempted to stay in the United States after school. Of course staying in the United States was absolutely our goal, and the embassy officers probably knew that.

  We decided to try to go to school in Kenya. It wouldn’t change our refugee status or help us get to America on student visas, but at least we would be improving our lives. And the police were less likely to harass a refugee with an official student ID. With the financial support of Sharon and her family, we had nothing to lose. First we applied to the best universities in Kenya, University of Nairobi and United States International University. We got turned down. We had no school transcripts from Somalia, and anyway Macalin Basbaas’s madrassa was unlikely to impress them.

  We set our sights lower and finally gained admissions in October—Hassan to Methodist University, me to Africa Nazarene University. So without too much trouble we were both official college students, with student IDs. Classes would start in April 2013.

  Excited to share my good news, I walked down to our favorite tea shop on Sixth Street and met my friends Yonis, Farah, and Zakariye. We were drinking tea and talking about the usual things—life, girls, and sports—when something caught my eye across the street. There, on the door of the Internet café, was a new sign: “Notice: Apply Now for the American Green Card Lottery.”

  The green card lottery? I had never heard of it, but Yonis said it was a way to get a visa just by being lucky. You applied online and waited to see if you were picked. It was all about luck, not the people you knew or the skills you had. The Internet café owner was charging twenty cents to make the application, so he was encouraging people to try.

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  “Oh forget it,” said Farah. “It’s a waste of time.”

  “You never know,” I said. “It’s only twenty cents!”

  I dragged my friends across the street, and we sat down and googled the lottery. It was officially called the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program and was meant to give people from poor countries a fair shot at U.S. immigration. Every October, some eight to fifteen million people around the world apply, and only fifty thousand get visas—a fraction of 1 percent. It would be much easier to get into Harvard. Nobody in the café knew any Somali who had ever won.

  I am sure that if the application fee had been fifty cents, I would not have bothered. But for twenty cents, which we all assumed we were just throwing away, my friends and I took the chance and applied that day. So did Hassan. All we could do after that was wait seven months for the results in May.

  * * *

  —

  The New Year arrived and Kenya was consumed by its upcoming presidential election. On March 4, 2013, the country voted for Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Jomo Kenyatta, whose face was on the money that the police stole from us every day. The son ran on a platform of national security, vowing to wipe out al-Shabaab, which of course meant even more al-Shabaab attacks. Somalis expected more police raids in Little Mogadishu, and on election night we all stayed locked behind our doors, praying there would be no bombs or shots. For months after the election, tensions were high everywhere in the city.

  School started in April. My course of study was mass communication, the school’s version of journalism, and I was excited to be in classes every day. The hard part was getting there because the campus was fifteen miles away in the Ongata Rongai neighborhood, requiring
two matatu rides. Anywhere along the route you could be hit by a suicide terrorist or a roadside bomb or grabbed by the police; anything could happen. One day I was in a matatu coming home from an exam when the passengers, noticing I was Somali, got worried that I was al-Shabaab and carrying a bomb in my backpack. They started yelling at the driver.

  “Why is he here?”

  “Kick him out!”

  The driver pulled over to the side of the road and ordered me off. Unfortunately, he had stopped right in front of the Pangani police station. Al-Shabaab had bombed that station a few weeks earlier, and security was very tight. If I got off the bus there, I would be arrested at best, and maybe shot on sight. You could not offer bribes in that spot, because the station had cameras there. I begged the driver as the passengers kept shouting, “Kick him out!”

  “I am a student!” I cried. “I am not a terrorist!” Finally I turned my backpack upside down and emptied out all my books, pencils, and pens onto the floor of the bus. I held up my student ID for everyone to see. This argument went on for five minutes until the driver sped off, then dropped me away from the police station. I stopped carrying a backpack and wore only a T-shirt in public so I could not be concealing a bomb.

  * * *

  —

  Finally, May came, time for the lottery winners to be announced. My friends had forgotten about it, but not me. I had been thinking about it every day, waiting for the moment. I texted my friends to meet one afternoon at the Internet café.

  We had to wait for a computer terminal, it was so packed with people checking the results. They had been coming since the morning, Kenyans, Ethiopians, Somalis, all of them walking out glum-faced.