Human Cargo (50 page)

The refugees I had no news of were those I had twice visited in Afghanistan, Jawad Wafa, the studious and solemn Hazaras teacher in Bamiyan, and the raisin farmers in the Shomali plain, Haji Kamal and Amir Jan. Afghanistan, largely forgotten by the West, without the money or the security promised by its allies, was again on the verge of anarchy. Poppies were now being cultivated in all thirty-four provinces, and opium production was said to account for over half of Afghanistan’s GDP. The Taliban and the warlords were back in control of huge areas of the country.

As for the camps of West Africa, there were new reports of young women refugees resorting to prostitution in return for food and shelter. In Liberia, Charles Taylor, the president whose soldiers had driven the young Liberians into exile, had gone, but the country remains lawless. Of Fatima and her five surviving children, I could discover nothing. In the Mediterranean, rough seas continue to take the lives of asylum seekers who put out in leaky boats from the coasts of North Africa, hoping to find work and safety in Europe. And Madina, the young Russian woman geologist I had met in 2003 in Newcastle, had been sent to Italy, as she had feared, because it had been her first port of call on leaving Russia. After a year in Sezze Scalo, a cheerless railway town in Latina built by the fascists in the 1920s, on land reclaimed by Mussolini from the malarial Pontine marshes, where Horace once complained that he was kept awake at night by the croaking of innumerable frogs, her application for asylum was turned down on the grounds that it lacked credibility. She has filed an appeal, and been told that it may be more than a year before it is heard. The last time she saw her son Kolya, he was in a children’s ward in a hospital in St. Petersburg, recovering from frostbite to his face and hands. When I went to Sezze Scalo to see Madina
early in 2005, she was wearing an enormous, handsome, and very mothy mink coat, brought with her during her flight from Russia, and clung to on her many moves, to keep out the bitter winds that sweep down from the mountains across the plains.

In the spring of 2003, many of the young Liberians who had stayed in Cairo suddenly heard that they had been accepted for resettlement in the West. Their years of waiting, their powers of survival, their absolute determination not to give up had paid off. Their lives could now be split in two—the past, before Cairo, when they had lost everything and everyone once familiar and safe to them; and the future, when they would find an education and work and make families of their own. Cairo, a long, unhappy interlude, was the marking line. Canada offered a humanitarian visa to Kono, the thickset boy with the gap between his front teeth who had seen his mother raped and murdered, his father bayoneted, and the uncle and aunt who took him in killed while he was still a small boy; though Christian, Kono had tried to pass himself off as a Muslim at Al Azhar in return for somewhere to sleep. Hiding in different parts of the city since his escape, Kono had been growing ever more desperate; an Italian psychiatrist visiting Cairo found his level of depression was so acute that she was uncertain whether he would be able to pull out of it. Now, from Canada, came e-mails that made me think of the early Christian travelers. “Great thanks and appreciation to bro. Daniel,” Kono wrote, soon after his arrival in Toronto. “He welcomed me like a motherly brother.” Over the phone he told me about his own induction to the Canadian way of life. At the Canadian Embassy in Cairo, when he went for his second interview, not knowing whether they would accept him and hunched and mumbling as was his custom, an official had said to him: “When you are in Canada, you must stand up straight, pull your shoulders back, look people in the eye, and speak out loudly.” She paused, then went on: “Welcome to Canada.” Kono, used to making himself as inconspicuous as possible in a city in which to be black invited endless attacks, recalled the conversation with delight. “I suddenly understood,” he said, “that I had possibilities again.”

The other Liberians, one by one, were called for interviews at UNHCR and went off to new lives in different parts of America. “Hi. This is Mohamed, from Texas, sending you greetings,” wrote the moon-faced young man who had watched his godmother’s head kicked about like a soccer ball and who was now working as a garage mechanic in Austin. Abdularam, whose lack of back teeth had made his English so impenetrable, was sent to Maryland, where he was offered work as a caretaker in a laboratory working on animal experiments by day, and classes in accountancy and computer studies by night. “I haven’t been engage in any social life,” read his first e-mail, in the English particular to the Liberians. “As I have no friends. 2 days ago I met a Sierra Leonean guy in school and a Zambian guy. They are going to be my first friends.” Abdula went to Iowa, to a factory making spare parts for cars; Bility, the good-looking boy in the brown woolly hat, who called all foreign women “ma’am,” to Dallas; and Abudu, the tall, self-assured young man, who coped with the years of poverty and uncertainty by pretending they weren’t happening, went to start his American life in Texas, but soon moved to Seattle, which he said he found more to his taste. Amadu had an American accent even before he got to America. Over the phone, their voices sounded light, buoyant.

At first anxious about being so far from one another, after the years of enforced and sometimes claustrophobic proximity, the Liberians kept in touch, obsessively, by mobile phone, ringing around the group two or three times every week. They still never talked about the past, nor did they talk about the present, beyond saying that they had a job and that life was easy—”life is not easy” was a sentence that each repeated again and again while in Cairo. What they talked about, between Dallas, Ohio, and Seattle, was the future. Across the huge distances that now separated them, talking often late into the night, they discussed night school and college entrance, law degrees and openings in business and management. It was as if their horizons had become so immense that there was nothing, now, that might not be possible. “All of us,” Kono said to me with pride, “have a plan.”

•   •   •

MARYLAND HAS A
long tradition of resettling Liberians, many of whose ancestors today made the first journeys as freed slaves to colonize the new Liberia, land of the free, founded with U.S. help in 1822. Some four thousand Liberians live in the Baltimore area alone, and forty-six, resettled here from their places of flight and exile all over the world, arrived in 2004. Among these was Omar and his wife Maikan.

Omar was one of the eldest of the young men in Cairo. A contained, solemn figure, he worried about the others, helping those who did not get enough to eat, keeping an eye out for trouble and despair. He had been a teacher briefly before being imprisoned by Charles Taylor’s soldiers in a warehouse in Monrovia and kept for a week without food or water, and he had fled to Cairo only after learning that he was to be detained again and this time probably executed. In Taylor’s Liberia, there did not have to be a reason for the killings. When he first presented his case to UNHCR in Egypt, he was turned down, in the way that many asylum seekers are turned down, on grounds of insufficient evidence. It was only when his wife Maikan turned up in Cairo, having herself fled Monrovia after being raped by armed security men in front of her children, that their case was reconsidered jointly and then accepted. Unable to take the children with her as she fled from Liberia, Maikan had left them with her sister.

The couple arrived in Baltimore on a snowy afternoon in November 2003; just over a year later, on another snowy afternoon, I went to see them. Neither one of them had ever seen snow before reaching the United States. When they talked about that first moment of arrival, they stretched out their arms and showed how the snow settled on their hands, touched it, and felt it dissolve.

Maikan soon found work in a hotel, making more than $400 a week in wages and tips; Omar was given a job with a mail-sorting office. They have applied for their son and their daughter to join them; Omar has not seen his children for more than six years. When they talk to them on the telephone, the children often cry,
such is their longing to reach the country that in their minds has come to represent not only reunion with their parents but the consumer goods—the bicycles, mobile phones, computer games—that have become symbols of the stability they have never known. In their gleaming flat, on an attractive housing estate on the outskirts of Baltimore, with its fitted white carpet and enormous fridge, there is a new television and video set and a computer, proof that life has again, after so many years of poverty, become predictable and prosperous.

Soon after they arrived, they were told about their rights: rights to education and medical care, to food stamps and an allowance until they found work, to green cards and eventually to citizenship, and above all rights to have their children join them. Entitlement is heady to people who have lived for so long with no rights at all, on the casual charity of others, and the sense of being worth something again is what all the resettled refugees talk about. Maikan, who never spoke in Cairo, now cannot stop exclaiming over the new horizons in her life. “Being given things, just given them,” she says. “I still find it impossible to believe. With our first food stamps I went into a supermarket and bought all the food that I had never seen and never eaten.” Not that the threads that tie them to their childhoods are quite broken: Omar has long suffered from some kind of neuralgia in his jaw. It started when he was caring for the Liberians in Cairo, and it continues to mystify the American medical profession, who have sent him to see many specialists. Walking along in the snow, near his modern estate, Omar said, with an air of slight defiance, that he personally believed it was black magic, and that one of the young Liberians, in the edgy days in Cairo, when each watched the others for signs that they might be getting a better deal, had put a spell on him.

By some act of serendipity, for such neat pairings are not planned by the computer-driven process of selection and allocation, while homely Omar and Maikan were sent to orderly, slow-moving Baltimore, Ansu, the most canny and streetwise of the group, the young man whose step was almost jaunty even when in despair, was directed
to New York. To understand Ansu’s joy in his new surroundings, to comprehend the enormous luck and randomness of resettlement, one has to know something more of his past.

In the 1980s, Ansu’s father, Siaka, owned a large coffee and cocoa, farm near the town of Bahn in Liberia’s Nimba County, though he spent most of his time in Monrovia, where he was employed by the Ministry of the Interior. Ansu lived with his mother and six brothers and sisters in Bahn. They were Mandingos. The civil war reached Nimba in March 1990, when he was twelve. Charles Taylor’s rebel forces, letting it be known that they intended to kill all Mandingos, the ethnic group with the largest number of educated and successful people, began rounding up and questioning everyone they could catch. Ansu escaped and hid in the bush, but was soon caught by the rebels and taken to a camp with other able-bodied boys and young men. Every day, the captives, tied to each other with rope, were led off to a diamond mine in a nearby swamp, and there, up to their waists in water, they dug for the diamonds with which the soldiers paid for their weapons. Boiled cassava leaves formed the basis of the prisoners’ diet, and the boys often felt faint from hunger.

Because Ansu had grown up speaking not only Mandingo and English, but Gio, Jula, and Bambara as well, he was useful to the soldiers as an interpreter. After four months, he was taken one day deep into the forest to forage for food. Nonchalantly inching away from the others, he managed to untie the rope and escape, though he was shot in the leg as he ran off. Lame and in some pain, he reached Monrovia, where to his immense relief he found that his entire family had survived. Once his wound had healed he returned to school and completed his education, and though university was not available in Liberia, still in a state of prolonged civil war, he went to work in his father’s office.

By now, Samuel Doe, the president favored by the United States was dead, and Charles Taylor had officially come to power, promising that there would be no further discrimination or witch hunts against Mandingos. Just the same, one morning in the late spring of 1998, after saying good-bye to his mother in the kitchen
and driving with his father to work, Ansu was arrested by the security services and taken to the prison at Salt Beach. His father was arrested with him. Their arms were bound tightly behind their backs and they were tortured by men in black hoods. Ansu’s feet were held over lit coals and burned. First, Siaka’s fingers were slashed with a razor blade and then his head was plunged into a cauldron of hot melted rubber. When 1 went to see him in New York, seven years after this took place, Ansu described the scene: “When my father’s head was pulled out of the cauldron, he couldn’t see anything. He seemed to have gone blind. I begged the men to stop torturing him. One of them said: ‘He has lost his eyesight? Okay. Now he will lose his soul.’ Then he shot my father in the back of the head, and when he didn’t die, but lay on the floor screaming with pain, they took a chainsaw and cut off his hands and feet,” When the guards turned their attentions to Ansu, he fainted.

When he came to, his father’s body had been taken away, and all that was left was a pool of blood. Eventually, helped by a guard who was a Mandingo himself, Ansu escaped. Hearing that his mother, as well as his brothers and sisters, had all been arrested, and had since disappeared, he accepted a friend’s offer of a lift in a lorry to Guinea, and from there, in 1999, he accompanied another family friend, met in a refugee camp, to Cairo, to act as his driver in Alexandria. He was certain his family was now all dead. Left alone in 2001 when the friend died suddenly of a heart attack, Ansu joined the small band of Liberians in Cairo in search of refugee status and resettlement. A clever, good-looking boy, he appeared as a solitary, wary figure, who went to great lengths to avoid all talk of the past; to keep questions and concern at bay, he laughed, told jokes in the American voice that he had picked up from tourists in Alexandria. Sometimes he vanished for weeks on end; when he returned to the group, he brought back more jokes. In New York, looking back at that time when we met, he said: “I was thinking of committing suicide. No one could have stopped me. No one at all.” Even then, his long passage of persecution and bad luck had not ended. Learning one day
that one of his brothers was in fact alive and living in the United States he learned a week later that he had been killed in a car crash.