Italian Somalia

Earlier this week, I went over to the house of a Somali guy I’d seen around and who had stopped me on the way home the day before. I’ve been trying to avoid eating at the refugees’ houses—even though it’s culturally polite to serve guests food when they come over—because they need the food more than I do, and I have no way of knowing how well it’s been prepared (a lot of refugees use water from the lake, which is green and has things crawling in it – yum!). So when he invited me over for dinner, I declined, but he made me promise to call him the next day. I figured I could at least get an interview out of it, so the next morning, I gave him a call. I quickly realized, as we were walking to his house, that his English was nowhere near good enough to do an interview, and I hoped one of his family members would speak English, or that we could make a quick visit. No such luck.

As we walked to his house, he took me to the houses of all of his relatives to say hi. When we finally arrived, I found a large Somali girl of eighteen lying on a mat with green facial cream all over her face, which lit up as she shouted, “America!! My sister!” She was so sweet and welcoming, but unfortunately, that was pretty much the entirety of her English. With no one able to translate for me, I figured I would try to make some sort of conversation for a short while, and then head out. They offered me tea, which I accepted so as not to be rude. We managed to communicate enough for me to give them my contact information, which I’m beginning to regret, and to establish that the sister was going to return to her large house in Kampala with two TVs after her interviews to be resettled in the US, and that I absolutely have to call her when I get to Kampala so that she can take me around. It took a long time for them to decide whether they would find me in Canada or the US (you would think refugees, of all people, would understand the idea of being born in one country, but living in another…), but eventually they agreed that I would pick them up at the airport in Boston when they arrive.

Kate and I have both been telling people that we have fiancés back home, in a (mostly vain) attempt to ward off marriage proposals. Naturally, the topic came up within my first twenty minutes of entering the house – are you married? It was then decided that my new Somali sister would marry one of my fiancé’s friends when she joined me in the US, and that the brother would marry one of my friends.

So that was all we talked about. In very broken, heavily accented English. For three hours.

Somehow they talked me into eating lunch. Considering that they weren’t exactly struggling to make ends meet, and the water they used to wash their dishes looked very clean, I figured I would probably be ok. Unfortunately, when they talked me into it, I didn’t realize that they hadn’t started making it yet. Or maybe it was ready sooner, but they figured that the longer they kept it away from me, the longer they could yell “America!” and “my sister!” and “you call me! Kampala! You call me!” at me.

I realize I sound very ungrateful for the way they welcomed me into their home. I’m really trying to work on being more patient with other people, but it’s a struggle. I’m so used to having alone time, or being able to go for a walk by myself and just be anonymous – something that is literally impossible here. As one of only a handful of bazungu in the entire refugee camp, I stand out. It’s such a strange feeling to have so many people want to be friends with you just because you’re white, and therefore wealthy.

On top of that, I’m just not that patient with people asking the same question over and over and over again. I think with this particular family, the issue was just language barriers, but it’s still frustrating to feel like people are taking up your time because they are hoping to take advantage of the opportunities a friendship with you could entail. I’ve also noticed that repetition is part of the slower pace of life here. The Ugandans make fun of us for always rushing everywhere, and they joke about Westerners who don’t take time to greet and chat with every single person they know when they run into them, regardless of whether or not they’re running late. Everything about life is slower here – Africa time. One of the manifestations of this fact is in the way people talk. They take a very long time to say not very much, partly through repeating things multiple times. Drives me crazy.

On an entirely different note, it’s difficult for me to feel sympathy for this particular family. The Somalis are definitely at the top of the refugee food chain. Very few of them farm at all, whereas most of the other refugees can barely afford to do anything but farm. Instead they run businesses or depend on their relatives in other countries. Their clothes, even their children’s clothes, are always clean and in good condition, but when you go out to the more rural areas of the camp, other children are half-naked, or wearing tattered, filthy rags. But the main thing that separates the Somalis from everyone else is their resettlement process.

The US has made Somali refugees a priority (the government determines a quota of people they will accept from different countries), and they are doing mass processing of the Somalis throughout the region. There is a staff of six UNHCR workers (who are the only other white people here, and they don’t even live in the camp) whose job is just to interview every Somali in Nakivale to compile their refugee claim, which will allow them to begin a lengthy interview process that ends, usually, in resettlement in the U.S. Since they’re interviewing all the Somalis, you have people like this family I was visiting who live comfortably in Kampala and only come to Nakivale to pick up some free food and do their interviews to get to the US. Personally, I don’t understand why refugees who are clearly doing alright here in Uganda are given priority over refugees of other nationalities who are bathing in and cooking with unsafe water, who are afraid of being killed in their homes by other refugees, who can’t survive on the food they are given so they have to go out and work for the Ugandan nationals – who don’t pay well, and have been known to rape refugee women, and the camp police can’t do anything about it.

But anyways, I finally told the family, as we were approaching two and a half hours since I’d arrived, that I really had to leave, lunch or no lunch, and they scrambled to bring me a heaping plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Heaven. It turns out Italy colonized part of Somalia (something I didn’t know), and passed on all of their culinary wonders. Homemade tomato sauce, garlic… the only thing they didn’t pass on is the fork. For those of you who have never eaten pasta with your fingers, I can now tell you how it is done: insert two or three fingers into the pasta like the tines of a fork, grasp a few strands of spaghetti between each finger, and rotate your entire wrist a few times, cupping your hand to twirl the spaghetti around your fingers – much like you would twirl pasta on a fork. Then stick as much of it into your mouth as possible, and if your technique is really good, lick all the tomato sauce off your fingers as you pull them out of your mouth.