7. WHAT ON EARTH HAPPENED
TO NASIF FARAH?
Nasif Farah was of the Hazara people of Afghanistan. He made up the trio of Afghani students sitting, as they regularly did, against the far wall of the kitchen at Michael's workplace. His shoulders were rounded and his face thin, humbled and pained. His eyes told tales of trauma and a lifetime of serving others. Nasif sat by the water cooler and handed his fellow Afghan students - Abdul Rah-Maan and the streetwise and very tall Rabee - a plastic cup of cold water each.
They took it and sipped the water. Like a servant, Nasif sat. He stood up when Michael entered the room and cast his eyes upon the only three students in the room.
Michael smiled and greeted each Afghani as he did without fail every morning. Nasif always held Michael's hands with both of his own and in his extremely poor, not even broken, English, he managed a "Goo-man." Whether this was "good man" or "good morning" remained uncertain to Michael, however, to him, it was a pleasantry nonetheless. He looked into Nasif's sad eyes that so wanted to be filled with hope.
Nasif had been a student here for over a year. He was too vulnerable to be simply transferred to a mainstream school. He wouldn't have coped with their curriculum. He looked like a withered old man. Wrinkled and beaten by the weather, and goodness knows what else. The team had deliberately kept him for as long as they could. To protect him. To give him life skills. To give him love. His first word to Michael had been simply "America?" As if it were a question.
Michael told him that he was safe, though "America" was uttered continuously until Michael led Nasif to a map and pointed to the United Kingdom and said, "England. This is England." Nasif frowned and hugged Michael, wrapping his thin, scarecrow-like arms around Michael's own slight frame.
Helmand Province in Afghanistan was where Nasif grew up. Due to his fellow Afghani students not fully understanding the Dari language Nasif spoke, it was unclear through the various translations whether Nasif was born mentally retarded or had been psychologically scarred in the war-torn country he had fled from.
Michael wondered about this and then his mind raced onto whether him even thinking the term "mentally retarded" was politically correct or not, as the PC Brigade were forever changing once suitably accepted phrases. Mentally challenged / developmentally challenged / Mentally Handicapped / Learning Disability, or even Cognitively Impaired. That's a good one too. To put it in the simplest of terms, Nasif Farah was a very slow thinker, but was incredibly reliable in the physical sense. Nasif had been an assistant to a cigarette seller on the streets of Helmand and also Kabul; a looked-down-upon Hazara who had suffered torment at every step of his life, in every town and country.
During an art session, Michael noticed Nasif was drawing eggs with feet and expressionless faces dotted around what looked like a hilly landscape. The task was for students to do their own version of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie. A colourful account of Manhattan on a grid, so titled because of Mondrian's love of the Boogie Woogie dance.
Nasif had never touched a pencil before coming to England, let alone attended an art class or even school, so allowing him free run in class was acceptable and interesting for both staff and student.
"Maybe he's drawing children," suggested Helen.
"Ah, yes. Maybe," replied Michael, as they both stood near Nasif, who was pressing his pencil down hard upon the white cartridge paper. "Actually, there's a test, the Goodenough test. I think it's the Goodenough 'draw a man test' or something," Michael said, impressing and intriguing Helen. "I'm pretty sure it assesses a person's intelligence levels when they're asked to draw a man just by using a pencil and piece of paper. You get points on how accurately the man is drawn."
Helen nodded her head, thinking. "So we can assess Nasif's levels using this method, d'you think?"
"Maybe. I suppose," shrugged Michael.
He was correct. In fact, the method was created by Florence Laura Goodenough in 1926. Florence was an American pioneer in child psychology, and wrote the acclaimed books Measurement of Intelligence by Drawings and, in 1933, Handbook of Child Psychology. The method, previously known as the 'Goodenough Draw-A-Man Test' is today called the 'Goodenough-Harris Draw-A-Person Test.'
"You get points for various elements such as arms, legs, head, fingers, eyes, that kind of thing, and those points equal a person's mental age I believe," Michael said, as he and Helen lowered their eyes to Nasif's first ever drawing.
"We should call it 'Egg Men on a Hill'," smirked Michael.
Helen chuckled.
Nasif looked up at them as together they raised their thumbs in approval. Nasif scowled and shook his head. "Bad. Very bad," he said, impressing both Helen and Michael with this addition of two words to his English vocabulary.
"No, it's good. Good work, Nasif," Michael noted, gently patting him upon the back.
Helen raised her eyebrows and stepped to the door.
"I'm going to look up the Goodenough test thing. Good work on that, Mike," she nodded.
The Goodenough Test didn't do justice to Nasif in the study and accuracy of his mental age. Helen and Michael were wrong in thinking Nasif might possibly have had the mental age of a four or five year old just because he was drawing people resembling eggs with legs, or eggs on sticks, scattered around yellow and brown hills with small, red rocks. In fact, his drawing was an accurate depiction of the Afghan terrain where he once lived.
The egg people were real people. The egg shapes were their bodies, which had either two legs, one leg or no legs, along with two arms, one arm or no arms, as well as each having no head. Why didn't they have a head? It was because the red rocks on the yellow brown hills and on the ground were the heads. It was the aftermath of an air-strike by foreign forces, raining their bombs down upon Nasif's hometown, killing, maiming and blowing apart literally all of his friends and family. The scattered arms and legs, severed heads and the walking, hopping dying and dead surrounded Nasif as he returned to his home from selling cigarettes that day. His village, his home, had been obliterated.
Was Nasif Farah mentally challenged, developmentally challenged, learning impaired or simply disabled before the air-strike? Or had the slaughter of innocent farmers, women and children caused this trauma to the harmless, blameless and once pure mind of Nasif Farah? Maybe something else contributed to the Nasif Farah who Michael saw before him. For Nasif, it was a year long journey from Afghanistan through Iran, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Spain and France in order to reach England. How many lorries Nasif Farah had travelled inside before he arrived in the French town of Calais was uncertain. Even he couldn't recall exactly how many. What was certain and clearly evident to Michael was that Nasif Farah showed every sign that he had been abused. Physically, mentally and sexually.
Nasif Farah was scarred.
The squeal of a metal door howled like a distressed animal in the indigo night sky. The door was large and caught the moonlight in its sheer metal, shiny side.
A number of feet lined up and trod upon the dusty, stony ground before stepping up onto a horizontal metal plate. Some feet seemed to levitate into darkness.
The feet, some bare, some in running shoes, some in sandals, were all male and tanned in colour. Dirty and dusty with cuts and sores. The feet were Afghani feet. At the ankles were traditional Afghani clothing. The shalwar kameez, the dress tunic worn by men and women. Pyjama-like trousers. Wide and baggy. Some wore jogging pants and t-shirts.
The men climbed up into an awaiting truck. Some were yanked upwards, disappearing into a black hole. A portal to another time and hopefully a safer time.
The thin, wiry Nasif Farah in his pale coloured shalwar kameez and black leather sandals, was pulled up with a jerking motion by a larger, heftier Afghani man, dressed in similar garb.
The grip on Nasif's hand was tight and strong.
His look into Nasif's eyes was equally tight and equally strong.
Nasif smiled and looked behind him. A second-long glimpse of his homeland,
Afghanistan. He took it all in.
The beautiful jagged mountains.
The bright and full moon.
The chilled night air.
Gone in an instant.
The door to the truck slammed shut leaving nothing but pitch black and shuffling feet and then the vehicle's engine started up.
The flame of a cheap plastic, disposable cigarette lighter flared up and flickered in the darkness. The tiny light captured several gasps and faces huddled in corners and along the sides.
With his knees held tight to his chest and eyes wide like a frightened dog on Fireworks Night, Nasif Farah looked at the big Afghani man holding the lighter.
He beckoned him over with the quick wag of his forefinger, threateningly.
Nasif's eyes glazed over.
The flame danced as it reflected in his pupils.
Other men, each in their late teens and early twenties, formed fearful faces.
"Hazara," said the big man to the Hazara Nasif Farah.
The Hazara were reviled by other races in the country. Blamed for apparent suicide bombing attacks on Coalition Forces and Afghan people, they were easy targets in a game of propaganda.
The Taliban took control of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. It had been a massacre of thousands of Hazara people. Mullah Manan Niazi was the new Taliban governor and vowed to kill every Hazara.
"Hazaras are kuffar. They are not Muslim. They are Shia. They are Infidels," said Mullah Manan Niazi in a speech he made in one of the many mosques he visited.
Hazara were for female rights. They even had an equal number of female students in the country, engendering further hatred in the Taliban.
Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, was bringing Taliban members into his government, rapidly changing laws, leading them down the path towards getting rid of human rights, making it even more difficult for the Hazara people to live at all, let alone live a normal life.
A tracksuit-wearing Nasif Farah, inside that truck full of Afghan and also Iranian men, was en route to Calais, the town that had acquired the nickname of 'the Jungle'. He had travelled thousands of miles and was thinner than ever. His expression was trance-like as several flames from cigarette lighters jerked this way and that.
The big Afghan man pulled up a pair of dirty white underpants over his hairy backside and buckled a belt to a pair of blue jeans.
The other men inside tried their hardest not to look at him.
A tear rolled down Nasif's cheek.
There were close to a thousand people inside the camp, based on the outskirts of Calais. It was all due to the closure of the Red Cross Reception Centre in nearby Sangatte.
Authorities in France and the UK had hoped that the removal of the centre would decrease the number of migrants determined to cross into England. They couldn't have been more wrong.
It was Nicolas Sarkozy, the then Interior Minister, who closed the camp.
A single tap on the roadside gave the mainly Afghan men drinking water. Rows of blue and grey tarpaulin sheets flapped in the wind. Dirty bodies infected the air. Their clothes were stained by goodness knows what and the stench of desperation was ever-present. Makeshift toilets had been constructed out of wood and plastic. Five or six men shared tent-like structures, assembled from cardboard and corrugated iron sheets and tarpaulin. Blue light from the plastic sheeting above shone down on Nasif Farah as he knelt on a piece of carpet, with several other men, praying to a God who would hopefully listen to them. It cost each of them hundreds and more often thousands of dollars just to get to this stage of their journey to the UK. How on Earth could the recently-orphaned son of a peasant farmer from Afghanistan have paid his way through all those countries in order to reach the goal of safety in the United Kingdom? Nasif Farah had been there for six months.
An Eastern European truck left the port of Dover and rumbled towards the A2 road of southern England. An ancient Celtic route that the Romans developed further still, with Anglo-Saxons calling it Wæcelinga Stræt. It was renamed into modern English as Watling Street and simply meant "a paved road". Britons used this as the main route between Canterbury and St Albans.
The Romans paved the track, using it as their gateway from London to Dover.
The Polish driver of the truck frowned when he heard a loud thumping noise from within the trailer. He slowed his vehicle down, pulled it over to the hard shoulder and clambered out of his cab, rounding to the rear.
The metal strip security seal had been bent and twisted. It was broken, and the additional metal cable which should have hooked into a fixed U-shaped loop had been cut.
The driver tightened his face, disappointed and disheartened. He reached up and opened the rear doors, like it had happened to him before; like it happened to him often.
A casually-dressed North African man leapt out the back, followed by several Iranian men, each nodding their head to the driver.
The driver retrieved a cigarette from a pack of L&Ms and placed it between his lips. He delved into his jean pocket and pulled a Zippo lighter, looking up to see Nasif Farah awkwardly making his way out of the truck.
Nasif extended his hand, smiling painfully at the driver.
"America?" Nasif managed to say.
The driver nodded his head, patted Nasif on the shoulder twice, gently moving him aside as he closed the door and made his way to the cab.
Cars raced past Nasif on the major road as he walked along the roadside. His shoulders hunched. His oversized trainers clobbered upon the ground, wet from the driven rain. His long, plain black t-shirt stuck to his disheveled body like cling-film. His baggy tracksuit bottoms became heavier with each step. He was having to hold them up as he walked. He stopped and looked upwards.
The rain spat in his face and dripped down his chin. The raindrops glistened white on his cheeks and on the tip of his nose and slowly turned into blue sparkles. They caught the swirling light of a police traffic vehicle parked behind him.
Nasif Farah's age was assessed by the Home Office as being fourteen. Like many of the overseas' students, he was given the birth-date of the first of the first. January 1st. It stood out like a sore thumb every single time it appeared on a referral form or register. Nasif Farah was in foster care. A strict, hardworking Muslim Pakistani family. He was continuously bullied by his Afghani peers who were the more streetwise and Pashto-speaking kids from Kabul. He was simply a slave and servant to their daily needs, whether it was inside or outside of their UK education.
Michael and Nasif looked at one another in the classroom as he held up his artwork.
"Picture," Nasif smiled.
"Good picture," Michael replied, returning the smile and holding up his thumb, to which Nasif beamed more, held up his own thumb and giggled.
Rabee, his fellow Afghani student, slapped Nasif round the head and laughed.
Nasif giggled again.
"Nasif do picture," mocked Rabee.
"Yes, picture. Picture good. Good picture," Nasif said, choosing a brown pencil from the tray, holding it like a knife.
As much as Michael and the staff tried to put a stop to Nasif's peers barking orders at him, they could not watch their every move outside. It was simply a cultural thing. It was tribal and it saddened Michael and his colleagues just to look at the weak Nasif Farah.
Nasif giggled again and looked at Michael. "Good picture. Good picture," he said with a smile.
8. AUSTRALIAN WINE
AND NEIGHBOURS
Michael sat on a table next to his colleague Paul in his classroom. Despite mathematics not being his strong point, he had supported the lesson; however, it had become more of a 'if you think it's the right answer, put it down' type of support. That type of response meant Michael had no idea if it was the correct answer or not. A reassuring pat on the back and a "Keep going, you're doing well" statement often accompanied Michael's maths support technique.
In front of Michael and Paul sat a row of six laptops on four classroom tables. Sitting at the computers were the thr
ee Afghan students: Rabee, Abdul Rah-Maan and Nasif Farah. Also there was the Iranian boy, Shaheen, the Somali boy, Guled Omar-Ali and the Angolan, Sinatra Umbundo.
Sinatra had been there for a few weeks and so had the harsh scowl on his face. Michael and Paul watched each of them curiously as the kids tapped away and engaged themselves in their free time. Each had headphones on that allowed just the faintest tinny sound to escape into the otherwise quiet classroom.
Shaheen was watching YouTube. It was an Iranian woman belly dancing.
Next was Nasif Farah, who looked blankly at the Google homepage, glancing every so often at his fellow Afghani, Abdul Rah-Maan, who was also on YouTube, as was the third Afghani, Rabee, who was sitting next to Abdul.
Michael frowned and looked at Paul, gesturing him to look at Nasif.
"Does Nasif want to just stare at Google?"
"Maybe he's plugged himself into it and we don't know. Perhaps he's controlling it that way," chuckled Paul, as Michael shuffled off the table and squatted beside Nasif.
My Name Is Not Jacob Ramsay Page 7