Authors: Caroline Moorehead
It took me a while to find Mary and her family. Between UNHCR and the Finnish embassy in Cairo, which processed her papers, her family’s names underwent a number of changes. But the Red Cross tracing methods are impressive; eventually I was informed that Mary, Maum, and their children had arrived in Oulu, in Finland’s far north, not far from Lapland, where it is totally dark for several months each year, and where it is not unusual for the temperature to sink below minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Born in heat, color, and light, the family was to be resettled in ice and universal winter dark.
• • •
OULU WAS
ONCE
famous for its tar. It was here, among the lakes, ponds, bogs, marshes, rivers, and creeks of northern Finland, that in the seventeenth century enterprising loggers built ships to sail the world. A fire, impossible to control amid so much wood and tar, destroyed the fine old timber city in 1822, and what was left of the painted wooden houses were bombed by the Russians in World War II. Since then a new town has been laid out on a grid system, a town of square, flat-roofed, boxlike buildings, with cement and stucco facings and metal-frame windows. Oulu, windy, icy, perched on the edge of the Gulf of Bothnia facing Sweden, on a latitude with Siberia, Greenland, and Alaska, has little charm. Logging has long since given way to technology, and Nokia is Oulu’s main employer, though there is still a paper mill, and as you drive in from the airport, along a wide, flat, empty highway between the fir trees and the silver birches, you can see the smoke from its chimneys curl slowly into the still clear sky of winter. In summer, tourists come to cycle along Oulu’s paths and by the side of the water, and to sit drinking in the market square until late into a night that never grows dark. In winter, the town is quiet, empty, dark, and very cold. The sun never rises. Ice makes the pavements lethal. No one moves on the streets, and very few cars go by. Oulu has 123,000 inhabitants. Contemplating
the scarcely imaginable contradictions, the move the resettled refugees have to make, the extraordinary journey through climate and culture, Heike Estolen, area manager for the Red Cross, tried to describe what it must be like adapting to surroundings in which nothing was like anything you had ever known. If Oulu had become a world apart for him, a world of silence and difference, after a two-year posting among the refugees in Bosnia, what, he asked, might it be for people who had traveled many thousands of miles, from color into gray?
Though most of the seventy-one Sudanese sent to live in Oulu are Christians and all but a very few are from the south, among the first to arrive was a Muslim called Malish. With eight other Sudanese families, Malish reached Oulu on October 15, 2001. It was snowing. He was on his own, having left his wife and unborn daughter in Cairo, and by the time he went to bed the first night, he had been allocated a small, warm, pleasant apartment with pale wooden floors. The town office that looks after refugees—the Sudanese had been preceded by some Iraqis, Bosnians, and Somali’s—gave him a few pieces of basic furniture, and his first allowance was enough to buy warm clothes. Malish had been a teacher in Sudan, with a hankering after a degree in philosophy. He had studied for some years in an English-speaking seminary, and in Cairo, because his English is so good, and because he is ambitious and energetic, he had even managed to get a little work teaching. “I had no real idea of any kind about what I was coming to,” he says. “In junior school, I had read about Finland but it didn’t actually mean anything to me. In Cairo, the Finnish embassy told us about the weather, but how do you describe great cold? I was shocked by the dark; that is what I felt and that is what I still feel: shock. I couldn’t understand why it was all so quiet, why no one spoke in the street.”
Malish came to interpret for me with the Sudanese, who, alerted by Mary, gathered to talk in the community center. Like all the Sudanese he is finding Finnish, which they all study every day for six hours, extremely hard. It is a language with immensely long words, and no prepositions, in which pronunciation counts for everything.
Even the Swedish minority in Finland seldom speak Finnish without an accent. And as Malish described how the Sudanese in Oulu are living—the little apartments they have been allocated all around the town, the television channels they watch, the friendly distance shown them by their Finnish neighbors, the lack of spices and dried fish or okra on sale in the local shops—other Sudanese arrived to join us, slithering along the treacherous pavements, immensely tall and dark and absolutely improbable, in their woolly hats and down jackets and thick boots. A few brought babies with them: there have been seven births in the Sudanese community since 2002.
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.