Nomad (28 page)

The pressure felt by most immigrants, even second- and third-generation immigrants, to share their earned income with family members living in their country of origin is admired by some development economists and aid workers, but it is part of what keeps people poor. They never save enough money for themselves or for their offspring.

To my fellow Somali refugees, admission into Holland meant, above all, material gain. Some of it—money, clothes, and other luxury items—could be shared with relatives back home or flaunted in front of other Somalis to distinguish oneself from lower clans. My motivation to become a refugee was slightly different: I did not want to be married to a man I did not choose. But none of us was driven by a motivation to become Dutch citizens. Our arrivals were random, an accident or coincidence, depending on one’s perspective.

Imagine you are a Somali who escaped the civil war and you are now in Nairobi. Kenya is considered by most Somali refugees a port of transition to the rich West. So you go to see a smuggler of people,
whose business is making fake passports, visas, and other immigration documents. The smuggler, like any other businessman, will show you his wares: entry to the United States costs (say) $20,000; Canada, $15,000; Germany, $10,000; Scandinavia, anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000. Switzerland is really expensive. If you can raise enough money, usually with the help of your relatives already in one of these countries, then you belong to the lucky few who will have access to a life without hunger and with free health care and housing and the opportunity to smuggle in more of your relatives now in refugee camps or some other limbo land.

Most people in this situation never get out of limbo. They court and marry and have children and survive as best they can. Some go back to Somalia and then back to Kenya; some give up in defeat. Those who can afford the smuggler will get a choice of all the countries they can ask for asylum. Some smugglers will provide more than just papers, if you pay for the extra service; they will give you an entire fictitious life story based on the questions that various immigration and naturalization bureaucrats will ask you.

Very often, of course, the scam doesn’t work. Some who pay a smuggler to deliver them to the United States are detained in a European port. Some are deported straight back. Yet many manage to linger on by following the instructions given to them by the smuggler: “Tear up all documents that you have on you with any personal information on them if you are caught anywhere at a transit point. Flush them down the toilet. Upon landing as you approach passport control, put your hands up and ask for asylum.” In this way, as European airports are pressured by the United States to more closely control travelers transiting from Africa and the Middle East, more and more would-be migrants end up in destinations they have not chosen, often in Europe.

A long process follows after they ask for asylum. A lucky few, like me, are allowed in and eventually become citizens through naturalization. But they ask for asylum, which means they apply to the state to be recognized as refugees. Refugee status, if given at all, is given to those who can convince the state that they would be persecuted if returned to their home country. In return, the host country demands that they never go back to their country of origin. If they do go back, their refugee status is nullified, as they no longer meet the condition
for protection. People who come to Europe this way end up settling in Europe, not because they desire or even understand what it means to be a citizen but purely for the sake of convenience or because they genuinely do need protection from persecution. These people are therefore not the slightest bit motivated to adopt the values and customs of the countries they flee to.

None of us was remotely prepared to adopt new values. Nearly all of us got in trouble in the society of milk and honey to which we had serendipitously been admitted. And of all the challenges we faced, the biggest was money.

Once in a while I socialized with my colleagues who were translators in Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Berber, Turkish, and other languages, and we would share our experience with the clients from our respective countries. Money was the number one problem. Refugees borrowed too much, were unable to pay back loans, abused credit cards, didn’t pay their taxes, and sent money abroad to relatives rather than caring for their own financial well-being. Our clients all seemed trapped in a cycle of poverty, overwhelmed in a swamp of debt so deep that, even if they acted responsibly for the rest of their lives, it would take almost a generation to work their way out of it.

None of us was prepared to grasp the very sensible and frugal Dutch mantra
Earn, save, invest, and reinvest
. All of us lived beyond our means. In later years, as I began studying public policy, I came to see that this pattern of debt was clearly related to the enduring poverty of immigrants as a class. Debt perpetuates poverty. When I looked into the causes of debt among Moroccans and Turks—who, unlike refugees from Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, had come to Holland to work—I found that their attitude toward money (borrowing it, failing to save, remitting large amounts of money back home, spending to show off, buying from catalogues, overusing their credit cards) was roughly the same as mine, Yasmin’s, and other Somalis’.

All of us came from countries that were broken-down or corrupt, with a massive gap between the rich and the poor. If you were wealthy, you lived lavishly, owned cars and homes and had expensive jewelry and other rich man’s accessories. Others lived off their wealthy relatives. Then there were the poor: those who lived as servants, beggars, or thieves.

*    *    *

As a child I learned Arabic, Amharic, and English with no pain, no stress; I have no memory of ever working hard to learn them. One day I didn’t speak them, and the next day I did. Learning Dutch was different. I remember every single effort: the irregular verbs, the exceptions in rules, the verbs at the ends of sentences. I remember working at memorizing the vocabulary.

Clearly, even if you have a knack for it, learning a language as an adult is more arduous than imbibing it as a child. And so it is with regulating your personal finances. I simply didn’t learn how to do it. It sounds pathetic, but nobody ever taught me the difference between ten cents and twenty-five cents, the denominations of coins. I was amazed to find out that Dutch
children
receive pocket money, not as a gift to spend on whatever they want, but as a deliberate method to teach them how to budget and deal with finances.

Late in life I discovered that money matters. If you don’t deal with it, it will hurt you. It involves choice and planning. Tearing myself away from my father and the man he chose for me had opened up a huge world of freedom, but it also forced me to think about new kinds of limitations to freedom: health insurance, taxes, rent or mortgage payments. I had to have priorities: how much to spend on what. I was bewildered, insecure, confused.

In 1997 I moved in with my Dutch boyfriend, Marco. He was appalled to find that I, a woman who appeared to be independent and relatively prosperous, was in fact a financial child. He would find damp little wads of guilders (notes of ten guilders, or twenty-five or fifty or even a hundred) in the pockets of my shirts or jeans after washing them. After months of explaining that the cloth wasn’t worth the money that it had been washed with, he tried to explain why it was important to carry a separate accessory just for money. So he bought me one exactly like his. Unaware that what Marco called a
portefeuille
had a male and a female version, I found myself carrying a man’s wallet, and I was constantly surprised by the number of tiny women’s purses (which I later learned were simply women’s wallets) I was given as gifts.

I still struggle to manage even everyday transactions of money.
Because I have been brought up to say yes, I cannot say no to salesgirls. All my life I have signed things, and sometimes bought things, just to please a merchant. I lie to get out of conflict situations rather than tell the truth. If a real estate agent shows me a rental, I’m embarrassed beyond words to say I don’t like it; I invent ridiculous stories to explain my way out of this rather routine and obvious situation, then take the agent to an expensive lunch to apologize.

In a very slow and painful process I stumbled forth and discovered the intricacies of financial responsibility. What I did not know, I learned. Based on that experience, I believe it would be prudent to teach refugees a few basic skills
before
giving them loans and presenting them with credit cards and furniture catalogues,
before
they get sucked into a subculture of borrowing and fraud.

In a modern, Western society, citizens’ financial ethics, like their sexual ethics, are based on individual responsibility. Within the tribe, ethics are about obedience to clan values, and because of the obligation to assist impecunious family members, those who are irresponsible with their money get away with it. Loyalty to members of the tribe in faraway countries requires borrowing money to send to them. This makes it hard to see the country of your new citizenship as “home;” it has a cost too in terms of your own prosperity. At face value, it may seem very generous to share your money with your extended family, but when this involves taking out loans it has a serious long-term cost.

Skills of earning, budgeting, and saving are indispensable for citizens. But we are not born with them. Muslim girls and women, in particular, are not trained to have such skills. Their ignorance of all things money-related affects them personally, of course, but it also perpetuates the poverty of their families. These girls become mothers too soon, and as mothers they fail to teach their children what it is to be financially responsible. They fall prey to easy credit and fantasy spending. This breeds dependence on welfare states that are already overstretched.

There is growing disaffection in Europe with immigration, a feeling that many immigrants do not deserve the help they receive from generous welfare states. It is said that immigrants disproportionately abuse the system, behaving like parasites. It is important to take this
disaffection seriously as the demographic share of people from a tribal background grows.

My proposal is not to kick out the immigrants and their children, as some populist politicians suggest, or to recommend that Western societies shut their borders or stop welfare altogether. But my own financial learning process and knowledge of the struggles of clients for whom I translated, as well as the many studies of poverty and debt of immigrants I read as a member of Parliament, suggest that many people who share a background with me are not familiar with the prevailing morality of money in the countries they have adopted. Rather than respecting their culture, Westerners who feel compassion for the poverty of immigrants need to encourage them to learn new attitudes that will enable them leave that poverty behind.

I don’t remember my first day in Quran school in Mogadishu. I was probably three or four. The room had a thatched roof and a sand floor covered with papyrus mats. It was surrounded by a wall made of twigs and woven dried grass. Most of the children were my age; some were a little older. There were both boys and girls. A teacher with a long thin stick in his hand herded us into the room. He shouted, “In the name of Allah, most Gracious, most Merciful,” and we shouted after him. He shouted verses from the opening chapter of the Quran and urged us to repeat them in chorus. We recited the text in Arabic, a language that we did not speak. The imam probably also did not speak much Arabic. He was teaching us to recite a text whose meaning was unknown to us all. And no one explained why.

We were to learn to recite four or five verses by heart and then write them down on a wooden board. It was in that madrassa that I learned how to make ink from charcoal, water, and milk. We were given little sticks, just like the ones we used to clean our teeth. We chewed on the stick until the tip was soft like a brush. If the brush became too long as we chewed on it, then cut the extra bit with our teeth and spit it out on the floor. Then we dipped the stick into a large inkpot. I learned to write
alif
, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet.

Everything we wrote down on our wooden boards, we were told, was holy. We washed the boards with special water that had been blessed; it was a sin to put the boards on the floor.

In the middle of the madrassa was a large book on a wooden lectern:
the Holy Quran. It was open, but it was so sacred that we were not allowed to touch it; only the older children, advanced in learning, were allowed even to approach the book. Not only the content of the Quran but the physical book itself was holy. The older children knew what it meant to purify themselves and make their ablutions. They knew how to recite many verses by heart. We younger ones were ignorant of purity, so we were not allowed anywhere near the book. Learning the Quran at that time meant growing up to be old enough to perform your ablutions, learn many suras (chapters) by heart, learn the Arabic alphabet, and write down the Quran.

After many hours of such learning we were released to go home. We had lunch, we were put to bed for a nap, and when we woke up we sat under the talal tree in front of our house and prayed for my father to be released from prison. If during those supplications I managed to recite some of the quranic verses that I had learned, I was praised.

The Quran was used for other purposes. My auntie Hawo was sick with breast cancer. Once in a while my mother hired a number of Quran scholars. They would sit around my auntie in a circle and recite the Holy Quran and after a few verses would lightly spit on her. The Quran was medicine: it could cure.

The Quran was also used as punishment. At the entrance of the madrassa hung a hammock, tight between two poles. I was told, “If you are naughty, if you misbehave, if you are disobedient, you will get the
Itha Shamsu
treatment.” I had no idea what that was until one day I saw our teacher lift one of the little boys into the hammock. It was strung so high that if he fell out he would certainly hurt himself on the hard ground. The teacher then instructed the older boys and girls to each pick up a long, thin stick from a stack in the corner and to stand around the hammock and, to the cadence of a chapter in the Quran that we call
Itha Shamsu Kuwirat
, to flog the child. I have never been so terrified.