Sitting in the small, hot hall, warmed by an old-fashioned tile wood-burning stove, the Sudanese talked. From time to time, their mobile telephones, the absolutely necessary adjuncts to the refugee existence, as important here as on the streets of Cairo, rang. Heike Estolen, driving in from the airport, had spoken of standing on the border in Bosnia, watching refugees waiting to cross, their mobile telephones in their hands, making one last call before the battery ran out. It was not easy, the Sudanese said, one after the other, describing how they filled their time when not studying. The Finns were generous and always pleasant. The Dinkas were short of nothing. They liked their new gadgets and their television sets, and they liked feeling safe and knowing that their children were safe. But the language was so difficult, and they were not quite certain what they were doing in this dark northern city. Every one of them would have preferred Canada or the United States, had they been given a choice, and those with relatives already settled in North America are puzzled about why they have not been allowed to join them. Then they talked about their year’s compulsory Finnish-language course, and how they wished they could learn English, for they still believe English is the only possible language of their future. They talked about not having understood about the restrictions on their papers: it will be at least eight years before they can become Finnish citizens, and until then they will not be allowed to travel abroad, not even briefly, not even to visit friends or relations. Alem, a man in his thirties, with deep tribal scars carved across his forehead, said that he had believed that he would be given the proper education, schooling and then university, that war had prevented him acquiring in Sudan. He spoke of education as something concrete, something that could be handed over, as a gift. The Finns have indeed given the Sudanese education, but it is not the education they dream about.
Later, at a church service in a classroom lent to them by the Lutheran church, sitting at desks in rows, their long legs folded awkwardly around the tables, the Sudanese sang revivalist hymns, the African beat loud in the utter silence of an Oulu Sunday afternoon, and they prayed, for the government of Finland, for one of their congregation soon to undergo an operation, for a newborn Dinka boy, and they prayed for peace to come to Sudan, so that, one day, they could go home.
And always, all the time that I spent with them in Oulu, the Sudanese talked about work. Work, their failure to find or have work, is a subject that never goes away. As they know well and as they tell each other every day, of the 250 refugees who were resettled in Oulu before them—Iraqis and Iranians, Bosnians and Somalis, Afghans and Burmese—only two have found work, and both of these are interpreters for social workers. Among the seventy-one Sudanese are teachers, electricians, nurses, farmers, and university students. Talking about their lives, they said that they had simply assumed that resettlement would bring with it education, and that with education would come work and a future. Now, it seemed, they would learn Finnish but not much else. They had never imagined, they said, never conceived it possible, that there might be a life without an occupation. “We watch television, we eat, we sleep,” said Malish. “We visit people. And we sit. This is really useless for me. I had a dream. It was about how I would work, and learn things, and become someone. If I don’t succeed in my dream, I don’t know how my life will be. My dream is dead. I have nothing to look forward to. All of us talk about work and education. It is all we talk about. We eat and we sit and we talk about work.” I asked some of the other men what they did to fill their days. “Actually,” they said, using the word in a way particular to Africans speaking English, “actually, we do nothing.”
Oulu has no work. It has employment for skilled information technology specialists, and it has a little work for men in the paper mill. Twelve percent of the workforce are unemployed, and levels of alcoholism are, as elsewhere in Finland, high. For the Dinkas, there are no jobs, and it is very unlikely that there ever will be any. One, perhaps even two, may find employment eventually as a cleaner or looking after old people, if their Finnish is judged good enough by the authorities. But for the engineers and the teachers, the nurses and the would-be university graduates, there is nothing.
So the Dinkas in Oulu wait, like the Palestinians in Shatila and the Liberians in Realmonte, for real life to begin, the dreamed-of life which, like Malish, they carried with them into exile. In the dream they have work and education and they know who they are. Having held tight to this dream during the transit years in Cairo, where it became a form of protection against an unacceptable present, they are trying to come to terms with the fact that Finland will never really provide it. Like Malish, they fear their dead dreams, and like Malish, they prefer to start dreaming again, to plan for the day when they will become Finnish citizens, with Finnish passports, and will be able to move on, to the life they hope for, in another country.
Yet even if Finland is now just another stage in a journey toward another future, the Dinkas in Oulu still worry about those friends and relations who have not passed the first hurdle. By the time I left Oulu, I had a list of names of those still in Cairo or Sudan and now in need of help, names that were not among those of the fifty-eight new Sudanese due to arrive in Finland very shortly as part of the continuing quota. The refugees brought these names to me one at a time, written on little scraps of paper. There were the younger brother and sister of Jeremiah, who has multiple sclerosis, and who joined him in Cairo from Sudan when his illness grew severe and who, not invited to accompany him to Finland, are now alone and on the streets in Egypt. There was Elizabeth Zacharia Arop and Simon Maderi Agei and Peter Dhykwan, all still in Cairo, all penniless, all with “Files Closed” many years ago. There was Amina’s young son, eighteen-year-old Johannes Peter, waiting in Cairo to hear whether he will be allowed to join his mother in Oulu. At eighteen, he is no longer a dependent child. Talking to Amina, an imposing matronly woman in her early forties, whose pastor husband was killed in the fighting in Sudan, and who has brought with her to Oulu five young children, I thought again of the diaspora of the Palestinians. Amina’s eldest son is still in Khartoum, having been, like Mary’s son, forcibly conscripted into the army. She has a cousin in Cairo with five small children, whose husband and three brothers are all dead, and a niece in Australia. Her uncle is in America. When interviewed by UNHCR in Cairo, Amina said that she would be grateful to be sent anywhere she would find peace and safety for her children, so that they would not be attacked and abused. And she is grateful, she says, very grateful, for she has found both. But then she added: “Help is not just running away from death. In the end, that is not enough. Life has to have many different things.” Sitting in the Lutheran church after the service, I asked Malish and Jeremiah, both of whom had talked with such passion about their education, whether there were books I could send them from England. Malish asked for Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, Jeremiah for Paul Burrell’s book about Princess Diana.
• • •
IN THE NIGHT, when he cannot sleep, Maum thinks about his brothers, still in Rumbek, and wonders whether they are alive. He dreams often, dreams that turn into nightmares, and he wakes sad. As a small boy, the youngest in his family, he accompanied his eldest brother to watch over their cattle, and when he grew old enough, his brother taught him to mold little animals out of the black soil and to color them with ashes from the fire. The two boys, sitting while the cows grazed, made flocks of goats and herds of cattle, and figures of people, carrying spears, to watch over them. They preferred to make the animals they knew best, and seldom tried their hand at wildebeests or warthogs or even the lions who, from time to time, seized a cow and dragged its carcass off into the thicket. They were less frightened of the lions, who preferred killing cattle to attacking humans, than of the snakes, which were plentiful around Rumbek. Remembering the long vigils in the bush, Maum talks about the snake he most dreaded, over a yard long and very black and shiny. Its body, he says, was as thick as the thermos flask that sits between us as we talk; he describes
the day a friend went down to the river to fish and was bitten as he moved through the long grass by the water’s edge. But he has heard, from a cousin who was able to contact him one day from Khartoum, that there are fewer wild animals around Rumbek these days: the frequent gunfire from the civil war has frightened them away. It is when Maum talks about his childhood, when he describes, in careful detail, the daily events of a life that lasted until he and his family were forced to flee Rumbek in 1984, events that he recalls with precision and tenderness, that the immensity of the journey that he has made takes shape.
Maum was born in 1961, in a small square house with a thatched roof. His family had neither water nor electricity, Rumbek’s one generator supplying just enough for the police station and the small hospital. He is not sure of the exact date of his birth, because births in Rumbek were registered casually, and it was often many months before anyone bothered to seek out the proper authorities and have them written down. His father was a farmer, with fields of wheat and cows, and the week that Maum and his sister were born, the family’s second set of twins, he was killed in a tribal skirmish near the town. The absence of a father was a defining element in Maum’s childhood. He was taught to miss him as one might miss a person one knows and loves. Because his grandfather had five wives, and his mother was one of eight brothers and sisters, Maum’s boyhood passed in the midst of an enormous clan, in households that merged one into another, among children of all ages, all related by blood.
Though Maum finished nine years of school, it is his free time that he remembers most vividly, when he wandered around the surrounding countryside, fishing in the rivers with a spear, or a net left in the river overnight, trying to catch a dink, a fish with no bones apart from its backbone, the color of brown mud, considered by his mother the most digestible and delicious of all the river fishes. The boys in the family, Maum says, were not encouraged to hunt until they were fully grown, but he accompanied his elder brothers when they went out in search of antelope, taking with them long spears with metal tips. When he thinks about his childhood, Maum thinks about the seasons, blending mildly into each other, about the cattle grazing quietly in the bush, and about the days that he was sent into the market to sell a cow and buy new clothes for the family. Maum is very thin, with a wispy beard and two long pointed front teeth. There is a large gap where Khartoum’s security forces knocked out a tooth. It was, he says, sitting on the family’s new sofa in a bare room in northern Finland, a good life, except for not knowing his father; he can think of nothing in it that was bad. He was living with an uncle, studying, dreaming of a day when he might follow his cousins into a university education in some foreign city, when fighting came to Rumbek and he was forced to go north.
Mary’s memories of her Rumbek childhood are less clear. One of eight children, she, too, helped watch her family’s cows, and when she was free, she went with her friends to swim in the river that ran not far from their home. On weekends, when there was no school, she would walk the thirty-three miles to a village called Shomek, her father’s village, where her grandparents still lived and where she helped pick olives. Mary loved her grandmother, and she was particularly fond of one of her brothers, who resembled her so closely that people took them for twins. She says little about her decision to become a dental nurse, or about her studies, or about her first husband and firstborn child and their deaths in a raid on Wau. Nor does she like to talk about the death of her much loved brother in the fighting, nor the loss of the second child, taken away by the government forces to serve as a child soldier. Of her marriage to Maum, Mary says that she chose him because he was a good boy with a good mind, and that despite the objections of his parents, who would have preferred a wife with no previous husband, they “entered into love” with each other.
When Mary and Maum and the four children reached Oulu from Cairo, changing planes in Helsinki, on March 17, 2003, there was still snow on the ground. Shinfig ran to touch it. Mary remembers the sense of shock, the way the cold made her catch her breath. In Cairo, she explains carefully, she had known cold indoors and out, on the few winter days when the evenings are cool. But there was no difference in the temperature, wherever you went, in or out. What struck her at once in Oulu was something she had not thought about: that inside the buildings it would be hot. Going from cold into heat, heat into cold, was something she had not expected.
• • •
THE FINNS ARE extremely conscious of the contradictions in which the resettled refugees live. They understand the need for work and occupation, and, in the offices in Helsinki where these things are discussed, they try to make generous provisions for language classes and further education of every kind. They worry that the refugees are not sufficiently prepared, so they give them pamphlets describing frostbite and how to deal with it; they are concerned about how Sudanese men, accustomed to being in control of their families, will adjust to a society as equal-minded and feminist as Finland. They foresee, too, future problems with resentment, when the Finns may grow angry at so much being given to people who now pay no taxes. Across the country, planners are trying to anticipate the racism now endemic in other parts of Europe, with publicity campaigns about the benefits brought by people from other cultures and societies. They worry, too, about these lives in limbo, about the way the refugees keep dreaming of what will happen next. “It is a wasted life,” they say. “If you dream too much, you forget to concentrate on living.” When, not long ago, a young Iranian, given his own apartment, living comfortably in another northern Finnish town, hanged himself, the authorities were shocked: “We thought that we had done so well.”
It is in the second generation of resettled refugees that the authorities see real hope, the children whose bilingualism will ensure that they start their working lives equal in opportunity to their Finnish classmates. These young people will reach working age just when Finland’s population tips heavily toward pensioners, the postwar boom generation grown to retirement, and jobs, particularly in the service industries, should be plentiful. In Helsinki I met Ekhias Osman, a Sudanese woman who has worked for the Finnish Refugee Council and for one of the municipalities most active in resettlement. Ekhias’s story is different, in that she is not a refugee, but the Finns who work with her point to her experiences as a hopeful message for the future.
Ekhias has lived in Finland for fourteen years. She arrived in 1990 with her husband, who had a scholarship to study forestry at Helsinki University. It was November and almost completely dark. What she remembers is her sense of surprise at finding no leaves and no green trees. When her husband’s degree was finished, he decided to stay on, to teach at the university, and Ekhias, who had brought two small children with her from Sudan, and arrived pregnant with a third, now had a fourth. There was no one for her to talk to, for she was the only Sudanese woman in the whole of Finland, and it took her five years to learn Finnish. She decided that she could cope perfectly well when the temperature was at 10 degrees below zero, but that what she really hated were the days when it sank to minus 20. There was also then nowhere to buy the spices she craved. Now, she says, everything is easy. In Helsinki at least twenty shops selling Middle Eastern and African food have opened in the last five years. She has many Finnish women friends. Her only regret is that she can find no way for her elderly mother to pay her a visit—the Finns will not grant her even a temporary tourist visa—so every two years, she takes the children and returns home to Sudan to see her. “I need to see my mother,” she says. “And the children need their grandmother.” Her husband is reluctant even to visit Sudan briefly, although he has learned no more than ten words of Finnish in his years at the university (he is able to teach in English). Not long ago, to show her new friends something of her past life, Ekhias invited two Finnish women on a visit back to Khartoum.
For her children, Ekhias has no doubts about the rightness of their decision to stay. The eldest two are fluent in Finnish, Arabic, English, Swedish, and French. Their education has been exce
llent, and if the eldest, who is a boy, is currently talking about becoming a soccer player, the three girls have their minds already set on careers. The eldest, says Ekhias, is planning to be a pediatrician, the second a heart specialist. As for the youngest, she talks of entering the army or perhaps the police force; she enjoys the idea of being the only black woman soldier in the country. The girls are, as their mother says, affectionate and family-minded. They are also Muslim, which separates them from most of the new arrivals. It is only when talking about the future that Ekhias hesitates. The girls, already nearing the end of their secondary schooling, wonder what boy they will ever meet whom they might marry, and Ekhias has already begun to plan for the day when she will have to send them home to live with her mother to find husbands. What this spells, she knows, is the very arrangement that she most dreads: her family split across the world.
• • •
AT EVERY STAGE in the journey that led her ever farther from her first home, Mary shed possessions. Like most refugees, she has almost nothing from her past. But sitting at her table in Oulu, in the neat new flat with the sauna that she uses to air the children’s outdoor clothes, I saw the photograph album that I had been shown when I first met her in Cairo. Its red-flowered plastic cover, with the inset silver heart and its photograph of a younger Mary, is a little more battered, but there inside were the portraits I remembered, of adults and children, babies and elderly men and women, in turbans and printed gowns and shawls of brilliant colors, many posed in photographers’ studios, alone and in groups, serious, unsmiling, smartly dressed—so many of them, belonging to another time and another place. Turning the pages, telling me their names and who they were, Mary paused. This man, she said, is dead; this woman has fled to Khartoum; this couple has disappeared; this family is now in Cairo. It was as if nothing could ever be right again.
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