Nomad

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  The man in the store who took our bank card was happy. He said there had to be someone at home when the carpet was delivered, that they would remove the old floor materials and put the new carpet in. We loaded the rolls of wallpaper into the car. We spent four days with our Dutch friend peeling off the old paper and pasting up the new one in our living room, hallway, and two bedrooms. A week later our new wall-to-wall carpet was installed.

  And here is the surprise: we had 400 guilders left from the loan of 5,000. In other words, we had a carpet, wallpaper, and nothing else. No curtains, nothing to sit on, no beds, no chairs, no dishes.

  Yasmin and I were at first baffled.

  The money was worth nothing here. Was the whole loan about just a carpet? We quickly decided it was God’s will. There was no need to quarrel: Allah had willed it thus.

  The carpet had been cut to fit and glued down. We had no choice but to pay.

  The following week, Gerda, a volunteer teacher of Dutch as a second language, came to see us. As soon as she was inside she exclaimed, “Ooooh, you have a nice carpet!” Her expression, however, could not have been more different from her words. She seemed horrified.

  We urged her to come in and sit down with us on the floor. We patted our carpet.

  “How did you get this … this … carpet?” she asked.

  “They brought it,” I said.

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “The store.”

  “And who picked out the colors?” she asked. “If you want any help from me to return it, all you have to do is say so.”

  “But we want to keep it,” I said.

  Gerda’s father rang the doorbell. She had brought him so he could help us fill out forms to settle down in Ede; he was retired, she said, and would enjoy it.

  “What a cheerful carpet,” he said, when he came in. “Did you find this in the house? If you want, I can take it out. I can get a couple of young men to remove it.”

  “Oh no,” I replied. “The carpet is new, it is ours, we want it.”

  We showed her father our bookkeeping, which was in envelopes that we kept in a plastic bag. He brought out two huge files and a perforator and proceeded to show us how to make holes with it and how to file our papers. I had been to a Kenyan secretarial college, so although I had very little practical experience of filing, I did understand what he was trying to teach us.

  Next he took a look at our receipts. He saw the bill for the carpet and exclaimed, “It is your entire loan, except for four hundred guilders!” He was visibly upset. “This is wrong!” he said. “A scandal. The salespeople have taken advantage of you. I will write them a letter that this is indecent and should not have happened. We have to reverse this.”

  I was speechless. Yasmin thought she would rescue the situation by serving mountains of cookies and tea.

  “Uhmmmm,” I stammered. “Uhm uhm uhm, but we like the carpet.”

  “But now you don’t have anything else,” he said.

  “More tea?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.

  Gerda and her father spoke in rapid Dutch. Yasmin and I looked at each other helplessly. Then Gerda saved the day. “Okay,” she said, “if you really like the carpet, then keep it. We will get you some furniture. You need beds, you need chairs, and you need a table, a desk, a TV.”

  Within a week she and her father had mobilized their old but incredibly fit retired friends and relatives to help us. They brought furniture, beds, curtains, plates, forks, and knives. Because I spoke English (I did not yet speak Dutch), my role was to answer the phone and open the door. For a couple of weeks, all that came out of my mouth was “Yes, thank you. Of course we like it. Thank you very much.”

  Kind volunteers walked in carrying more chairs, side tables, little ceramic statuettes, even gnomes, and every time I opened the door I said, “Yes, yes, yes, come in, please, thank you.”

  We had four beds, three televisions, two sofa sets, two tables, and more than a dozen chairs; on one of them sat a pile of various sizes of lacy acrylic curtains. Our airy three-room apartment resembled a furniture storage room. I was sneezing from all the dust.

  One day Yasmin started crying. She hated living this way. So we took everything we hated down three flights of stairs to the basement. When Gerda or her father came by, they always called in advance, so we would spend a couple of hours bringing everything back upstairs.

  We still hadn’t put up curtains. Neither of us knew how, and we didn’t really like any of the ones we’d been given; they looked like nasty cast-offs. One day when I came home from Dutch-language class Yasmin said she’d found a perfect answer to the curtains. She had a large glossy catalogue on her lap with lots of photos in it and a great big smile on her face. “Ayaan, look, we can throw out all the rubbish!” she cried joyfully. “We can get fresh new curtains, furniture, anything we want!”

  In that catalogue were clothes, shoes, gadgets, utensils, everything you could ever wish for. “But how are we going to pay for this?” I asked.

  “You don’t have to pay for it!” cried Yasmin. “You buy and you pay later.” She told me about visiting some people she’d met at the asylum center. They had also found an apartment, but, she said, unlike us, they lived in beautiful surroundings—and they didn’t pay.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s order curtains.” So we ordered thick, beautiful curtains, gold and brown with a satin-like surface and a thick cotton lining. They arrived twenty-four hours after Yasmin ordered them, in boxes that were delivered right to the door of our apartment. That was another magical thing about the buy-now-pay-later stores: instant gratification.

  Yasmin seemed to know exactly what to do, and began fitting little pieces of bent metal into pockets in the curtains. It took us half a day to hang them all up. But when we were done they were much too long, leaving a lot of textile curled up on the floor along the wall. Yasmin said that if we had chosen the shorter measurement that was available in the catalogue the curtains would have been too short. So we left them too long, again thanking Allah and agreeing that it was his wish.

  A week later a letter informed me that I was now another 4,000 guilders in debt. Four months later, Yasmin disappeared. A short time later I received a bill from the telephone company: she had run up 2,500 guilders in phone calls.

  A number of helpful Dutch people assisted me in applying for various long-term payback plans. In the following months my friend Johanna, a lovely woman who had offered to teach me Dutch, showed me how to shop in large, cheap supermarkets and tried to teach me how to budget. In 1995, as my Dutch-language skills improved, I got a job as a translator and interpreter. I made more money this way than through other odd jobs.

  I began to avoid friendships with my fellow Somalis in Ede, although many of them would invite me over so that I could translate for them into Dutch. They continued to buy from various mailorder catalogues that gave you the option to pay in the distant future. Others borrowed money from banks and the social services, which they then sent to their relatives in Somalia or in the Somali diasporas of Africa. I translated for several people who had taken out the same 5,000-guilder loan that I had, and who had sent it all to relatives so that they could pay the entire sum to someone who would smuggle them into Europe.

  To pay back these loans, some Somalis took on occasional jobs, but they usually neglected to tell the social services that they were employed. This meant they could continue to receive an unemployment allowance as well as their salary. But it was considered fraud, a felony that could get you in a great deal of trouble. If you were discovered you had to pay back the excess money you had received, plus a fine. This meant more loans, and sank you ever deeper into debt. You might also lose your job because you now had a criminal record, so you had to go back to welfare. In such cases, the authorities would retain part of your unemployment allowance to cover your debts, paying out only enough to cover essential monthly expenses, such as rent and utilities. Many people neglected to pay those bills and became loc
ked into insurmountable debts. I heard of several people who absconded to England or Scandinavia to try to avoid paying back the debts they owed to various banks and agencies in Holland.

  Practically everyone I knew had built up overwhelming debts. They applied for credit cards, magical pieces of plastic that meant you could just sign a tiny piece of paper and walk out of any shop with whatever you wanted. They received endless stipends from the social services—for unemployment, for child support, for various medical benefits—and yet in almost every conversation they would lament the miserly amount of money they had to live on, wholly oblivious to the sacrifice of the society that was paying for it all.

  They had no idea, in other words, of the obligations of a citizen, let alone the complexities of the welfare state.

  * * *

  As an interpreter for the Immigration and Naturalization Services, I translated for men and women who pleaded desperately to be allowed to live in the Netherlands. The civil servants who interviewed them asked them the same questions that I was asked when I applied for asylum: Had they been persecuted? How did they get to Europe? Had they resided in any country other than Somalia before reaching Holland? Had they ever committed any criminal act?

  All these questions were about the past. None of the applicants was asked what he or she expected once admitted into the country. Their skills were not tested. They were not questioned about their values, customs, practices, or their knowledge of Dutch customs and laws.

  Like me, some of these applicants were granted residency. But none of us had been citizens before, in the modern sense of citizenship. We had never felt a participatory loyalty to any government. We remained loyal to our bloodline.

  In a tribal culture everyone is required to share his earnings with family members and extended family, who take happily. The obligation is also emphasized in the Quran. A poor member of the family who wants help from a well-off member will cite verses from the Quran and sayings from the Prophet to induce his relative to give him money. The tribal code of honor and shame does the rest.

  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.