Human Cargo (48 page)

Though Maum finished nine years of school, it is his free time that he remembers most vividly, when he wandered around the surrounding countryside, fishing in the rivers with a spear, or a net left in the river overnight, trying to catch a dink, a fish with no bones
apart from its backbone, the color of brown mud, considered by his mother the most digestible and delicious of all the river fishes. The boys in the family, Maum says, were not encouraged to hunt until they were fully grown, but he accompanied his elder brothers when they went out in search of antelope, taking with them long spears with metal tips. When he thinks about his childhood, Maum thinks about the seasons, blending mildly into each other, about the cattle grazing quietly in the bush, and about the days that he was sent into the market to sell a cow and buy new clothes for the family. Maum is very thin, with a wispy beard and two long pointed front teeth. There is a large gap where Khartoum’s security forces knocked out a tooth. It was, he says, sitting on the family’s new sofa in a bare room in northern Finland, a good life, except for not knowing his father; he can think of nothing in it that was bad. He was living with an uncle, studying, dreaming of a day when he might follow his cousins into a university education in some foreign city, when fighting came to Rumbek and he was forced to go north.

Mary’s memories of her Rumbek childhood are less clear. One of eight children, she, too, helped watch her family’s cows, and when she was free, she went with her friends to swim in the river that ran not far from their home. On weekends, when there was no school, she would walk the thirty-three miles to a village called Shomek, her father’s village, where her grandparents still lived and where she helped pick olives. Mary loved her grandmother, and she was particularly fond of one of her brothers, who resembled her so closely that people took them for twins. She says little about her decision to become a dental nurse, or about her studies, or about her first husband and firstborn child and their deaths in a raid on Wau. Nor does she like to talk about the death of her much loved brother in the fighting, nor the loss of the second child, taken away by the government forces to serve as a child soldier. Of her marriage to Maum, Mary says that she chose him because he was a good boy with a good mind, and that despite the objections of his parents, who would have preferred a wife with no previous husband, they “entered into love” with each other.

When Mary and Maum and the four children reached Oulu from Cairo, changing planes in Helsinki, on March 17, 2003, there was still snow on the ground. Shinfig ran to touch it. Mary remembers the sense of shock, the way the cold made her catch her breath. In Cairo, she explains carefully, she had known cold indoors and out, on the few winter days when the evenings are cool. But there was no difference in the temperature, wherever you went, in or out. What struck her at once in Oulu was something she had not thought about: that inside the buildings it would be hot. Going from cold into heat, heat into cold, was something she had not expected.

•   •   •

THE FINNS ARE
extremely conscious of the contradictions in which the resettled refugees live. They understand the need for work and occupation, and, in the offices in Helsinki where these things are discussed, they try to make generous provisions for language classes and further education of every kind. They worry that the refugees are not sufficiently prepared, so they give them pamphlets describing frostbite and how to deal with it; they are concerned about how Sudanese men, accustomed to being in control of their families, will adjust to a society as equal-minded and feminist as Finland. They foresee, too, future problems with resentment, when the Finns may grow angry at so much being given to people who now pay no taxes. Across the country, planners are trying to anticipate the racism now endemic in other parts of Europe, with publicity campaigns about the benefits brought by people from other cultures and societies. They worry, too, about these lives in limbo, about the way the refugees keep dreaming of what will happen next. “It is a wasted life,” they say. “If you dream too much, you forget to concentrate on living.” When, not long ago, a young Iranian, given his own apartment, living comfortably in another northern Finnish town, hanged himself, the authorities were shocked: “We thought that we had done so well.”

It is in the second generation of resettled refugees that the authorities
see real hope, the children whose bilingualism will ensure that they start their working lives equal in opportunity to their Finnish classmates. These young people will reach working age just when Finland’s population tips heavily toward pensioners, the postwar boom generation grown to retirement, and jobs, particularly in the service industries, should be plentiful. In Helsinki I met Ekhias Osman, a Sudanese woman who has worked for the Finnish Refugee Council and for one of the municipalities most active in resettlement. Ekhias’s story is different, in that she is not a refugee, but the Finns who work with her point to her experiences as a hopeful message for the future.

Ekhias has lived in Finland for fourteen years. She arrived in 1990 with her husband, who had a scholarship to study forestry at Helsinki University. It was November and almost completely dark. What she remembers is her sense of surprise at finding no leaves and no green trees. When her husband’s degree was finished, he decided to stay on, to teach at the university, and Ekhias, who had brought two small children with her from Sudan, and arrived pregnant with a third, now had a fourth. There was no one for her to talk to, for she was the only Sudanese woman in the whole of Finland, and it took her five years to learn Finnish. She decided that she could cope perfectly well when the temperature was at 10 degrees below zero, but that what she really hated were the days when it sank to minus 20. There was also then nowhere to buy the spices she craved. Now, she says, everything is easy. In Helsinki at least twenty shops selling Middle Eastern and African food have opened in the last five years. She has many Finnish women friends. Her only regret is that she can find no way for her elderly mother to pay her a visit—the Finns will not grant her even a temporary tourist visa—so every two years, she takes the children and returns home to Sudan to see her. “I need to see my mother,” she says. “And the children need their grandmother.” Her husband is reluctant even to visit Sudan briefly, although he has learned no more than ten words of Finnish in his years at the university (he is able to teach in
English). Not long ago, to show her new friends something of her past life, Ekhias invited two Finnish women on a visit back to Khartoum.

For her children, Ekhias has no doubts about the rightness of their decision to stay. The eldest two are fluent in Finnish, Arabic, English, Swedish, and French. Their education has been excellent, and if the eldest, who is a boy, is currently talking about becoming a soccer player, the three girls have their minds already set on careers. The eldest, says Ekhias, is planning to be a pediatrician, the second a heart specialist. As for the youngest, she talks of entering the army or perhaps the police force; she enjoys the idea of being the only black woman soldier in the country. The girls are, as their mother says, affectionate and family-minded. They are also Muslim, which separates them from most of the new arrivals. It is only when talking about the future that Ekhias hesitates. The girls, already nearing the end of their secondary schooling, wonder what boy they will ever meet whom they might marry, and Ekhias has already begun to plan for the day when she will have to send them home to live with her mother to find husbands. What this spells, she knows, is the very arrangement that she most dreads: her family split across the world.

•   •   •

AT EVERY STAGE
in the journey that led her ever farther from her first home, Mary shed possessions. Like most refugees, she has almost nothing from her past. But sitting at her table in Oulu, in the neat new flat with the sauna that she uses to air the children’s outdoor clothes, I saw the photograph album that I had been shown when I first met her in Cairo. Its red-flowered plastic cover, with the inset silver heart and its photograph of a younger Mary, is a little more battered, but there inside were the portraits I remembered, of adults and children, babies and elderly men and women, in turbans and printed gowns and shawls of brilliant colors, many posed in photographers’ studios, alone and in groups, serious, unsmiling, smartly dressed—so many of them, belonging to another time and
another place. Turning the pages, telling me their names and who they were, Mary paused. This man, she said, is dead; this woman has fled to Khartoum; this couple has disappeared; this family is now in Cairo. It was as if nothing could ever be right again.

But Mary is not unhappy. She has accepted that it is unlikely that her Finnish will ever be good enough for her to work again as a dental nurse, because that would involve first the language, then seven years’ retraining. She is in her forties and does not feel she has the time. But learning each day how to cope with new devices and contraptions, how to catch a bus to her Finnish lessons and make her way around the supermarkets, has brought her pleasure and laughter. She gives one of her long exclamations of disbelief and humor as she describes herself trying to work out the identity of electrical gadgets she has never seen and the contents of packets of food that look utterly foreign. She likes the way her children can bicycle along the bridle paths while she can be sure that they will come home safe. She is touched by the generosity and warmth of a Finnish family who have befriended them and who not long ago came to collect them in a car and drove them out to a farmhouse in the country, sending them home with a present of a Christmas tree and decorations to hang on its branches. Before that, she had only ever seen Christmas trees in pictures and wondered what they could be. And she talks with pride about the sports that the children have been learning at their schools and the delight they take in being taught to ski. Both she and Maum talk often to the children about Rumbek, about the house and land that they have never seen and the relations they have never met. Anwen, the only girl, is more curious than her brothers; she wants to know what it was really like. But Rumbek is a long way in the past now, and Mary does not dwell on those days; Shinfig’s future, the safety of her daughter and her two small sons, are what concern her now.

Mary had brought doughnuts and large plates of cake for us to eat while the children watch a toboggan race on television. I find her quiet, almost subdued, though her smile is always affectionate. It is
as if she has undergone a journey of a kind that can barely be comprehended, that has tested the very nature of adaptability. In the heat of the flat, with the dark and the cold of Oulu in winter kept out by heavy white curtains, the children go barefoot.

——————

W
hen Jeff Crisp joined UNHCR in 1987, “migration” was a dirty word. It was certainly not something that anyone was allowed to confuse with the legitimate claims of refugees forced to flee persecution. But at the beginning of the 1990s, he thinks, all this began to change. The end of the Cold War drove people abroad in search of work and better lives, and, almost overnight, international migration became a key topic in world politics. Commentators began to warn of uncontrollable floods of migrants, and the threat to national identity that all these culturally different and impoverished people might pose. As Crisp remembers it, it was at the Cairo Conference on Population and Development, in 1992, that UNHCR first presented papers about migration as a global issue that involved all
people on the move, from asylum seekers to those in search of better lives. And it was in 1995 that the phrase “managed migration” found its way into the second edition of the
State of the World’s Refugees
, and along with it the assumption that it was no longer right or possible to ignore migration as the crucial debate of the age, within which asylum occupied a particular corner. The pity, as Crisp and others like him see it, is that all this was not understood and addressed long ago. For managed migration may prove a large part of the solution to the problems that lie ahead.

Like internally displaced people, like refugees, there have always been migrants. Around the sixteenth century, people began to move, work, explore, and travel to find better lives. What no one quite anticipated was the emergence of new multicultural societies, nor the new patterns that migration has taken. The history of migration since World War II is one of unforeseen developments and unplanned consequences. No one, for instance, would have predicted that the remittances migrants send home would reach around $92 billion in 2003—virtually double what is spent on the entire global overseas development aid budget.
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Globalization has produced not simply flows of goods, services, and capital, but a parallel flow of people and ideas.

According to UN statistics, only 175 million people—around 3 percent of the world population—are actually outside the countries of their birth at any one time, considerably more of them from the developed than from the developing world. What is more, the West needs them. The picture, say demographers, is now becoming clear. The populations of the developed world are aging, and fertility rates in some Western countries have fallen to as low as 1.2 children per woman. In the UK, for instance, though the so-called demographic deficit between the aging population and declining numbers of workers will not actually have an effect until 2020—later than its European neighbors—yet there are already labor shortages; the National
Health Service would collapse without overseas staff. The West needs migrant workers.