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Transcript of Oral History Interview with Nimo Farah

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Transcript of Oral History Interview with Nimo Farah Nimo Farah Narrator Safy-Hallan Farah Interviewer August 20, 2015 Minneapolis, Minnesota Nimo Farah - NF Safy-Hallan Farah - SF SF: My name is Safy-Hallan Farah, and it’s August 20, 2015. I’m speaking with Nimo Farah in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for the Minnesota Historical Society Somali Oral History Project. Hello, Nimo. NF: Hi. SF: Where were you born, and when were you born? NF: I was born in Mogadishu in 1985. SF: How long did you live in Mogadishu? NF: Until the age of six. SF: What’s your family background like? NF: We lived, actually, in a suburb of Mogadishu. It’s a city called Huriwa. It was sort a new suburb. We were kind of a middle class type of family. Two parents, lots of siblings, lots of relatives that lived with us that came from the countryside, this big villa, amazing neighbors. My mom was sort of like an urban farmer, too, in a very modest way. She just had a huge garden and big trees of all sorts and little goats and chickens. SF: What are some of your memories from that time? NF: My earliest memories were, I probably would say from like the age of three or something, I was put in dugsi [Quran school]. I was really young because I wanted to go to school and I wasn’t school age, and I would run after my siblings whenever they were leaving in the morning. So my mom thought just to put me in a dugsi. I had the wooden tablet that you write with. The first language I learned to read and write was Arabic. I just liked to climb trees and watch kids in all their uniforms walk by after they got out of school or on their way to school. Yeah. 1 Another thing I remember is listening to the radio early in the morning where all these songs that were kind of like inspirational Somali songs come on. It’s encouraging everyone to get their life, go to school, go to work, that type of thing. [chuckles] My mom never really liked TV, even in America, so we were always a radio family. SF: When and why did you leave Somalia? NF: Same as many people. It was the civil war. Actually, we were stuck in the country for a year after everyone left because my mom thought that things were going to get better. So we left Huriwa and went to a place called Jowhar [Jowhaar] and stayed there for a while thinking that we’d go back to our house, but that never happened. We ended up going to a cousin’s house. My mom put us in dugsi again. We were kind of in the midst of… SF: Dugsi, just to clarify, is the… NF: The Islamic school, yeah. Regardless of where we went. We took probably the longest route fleeing the war. We were what’s called la heeysto [held captive]—as in we were hostages inside of Mogadishu for like a year right before the US came, I think. And so we heard and saw a lot of violence. We eventually ended up sneaking out in the middle of the night and went through Ethiopia to get to Kenya. SF: Then did you guys go to a refugee camp? NF: Yeah. We went to several small refugee camps and eventually ended up in a refugee camp called Utange [Utanga] that was off the coast of Kenya near Mombasa. It was one of the first refugee camps that was in Kenya. SF: What was it like living in the refugee camp? NF: I would say compared to refugee camps today… Because this was early on, right after the war, and so many resources were coming to that refugee camp, it wasn’t that bad, I would say. I felt very free as a child, just running around, going to dugsi again. I was homeschooled, my mom being a teacher. But I experienced a lot of freedom there. One of my favorite activities there was this communal water faucet where everyone would get their water and then there were shared bathrooms. So my two favorite things to do were to walk to the bathroom, and on my way there play with kids. And then, also there was a huge scarcity of water, and we would sometimes wait the whole day for water. So that waiting period was also a lot of fun, because you’d get to guard your spot in the line waiting for water. [chuckles] We’d invent all these games and just like have community outside. I can’t imagine what it was like for my mother, but for a child, for me, it was fun. SF: What was your education like outside of homeschooling with your mom? NF: My education outside of homeschooling was mainly just dugsi. I learned how to read and write in Somali like at the age of four. I learned it with my last name, actually. Nimo Hussein 2 Farah Ali Mohamud. That’s why I would never forget to trace my lineage, because that was how I practiced it when I was learning at like the age of four. My math was pretty good. By the time we came to America, I was already at grade level with my math. SF: Just with your mom? NF: Yeah. We didn’t have a lot of science, but yeah, I knew how to read and write. I had, like, my alphabets. There were a lot of all these weird advertisement magazines that would make their way to the refugee camp. [chuckles] I just was working on this poem that has the lines in there, “I don’t want freedom or liberty. Just give me a dishwasher.” Because that was like my thing when I came to America. I hated washing dishes when I was in the refugee camp, and I came here, and for me, my biggest wish was to never ever wash dishes again with my hands. There were these magazines with like dishwashers and all these random convenient things that would make it to the refugee camp. I don’t know if we were being sold the American Dream or not. Anyway, when I got here, there was no dishwasher. We were really, really poor and like, you know, refugees. So I was like, “Where’s my dishwasher?” [chuckles] My education was just kind of… I think my life education was much more intact than my academic education. SF: What was the immigration process like when you guys decided to leave Kenya? NF: We left Utange, and then we went to Nairobi. As a child, I wasn’t really paying attention to that. I remember just walking a lot, though. The lady who interviewed us, her name was “Mambelmo” or something like that. People used to call her “Bambeelmo” [grapefruit], which in English means grapefruit. [both chuckle] So she had this nickname around the refugee camp. What would happen is when a family got sponsored and they went through the process and were on their way, this paper would be posted at the gate of the refugee camp. Everybody would go there. At that time, in the 1990s, [President Bill] Clinton was in office, and America was the spot to be. People were going crazy. There was this thing called buufis [craziness/paranoia] in the refugee camp where if people didn’t make it… SF: What does buufis mean? NF: Buufis is when someone goes crazy. Young people were dying, committing suicide because they didn’t make it. Their names didn’t make it to the list. So it was a really intense time. When we were leaving the refugee camp—oh, I just get butterflies thinking about it. All of our friends—because I have a lot of brothers, I have seven brothers and three sisters—were chasing the car that we were leaving in and waving goodbye to us. And I cried. I was already missing them. I had a lot of really good friends that I spent so much time with in the dugsi, by the water faucet. It was just like a really freeing experience. I think most people talk about refugee camps in such a… For some people, it was maybe violent. But for me, it wasn’t. So in leaving the refugee camp, everybody was greeting us farewell and just walked us all the way to the gate. Yeah. SF: Where did you guys settle? 3 NF: When we first came, we settled in Virginia. Both my parents traveled to America in the 1980s and had lots of friends in Virginia and in the DC [District of Columbia] area. So when we came, we settled there. But we were separated from my dad also. My dad didn’t join us until three years later. So my mom traveled with us by herself. Throughout the whole war, she was a single mother. When the civil war imploded in Mogadishu, my dad had to flee early with some of my older brothers as well. So my mom took the younger kids by herself and went through that whole experience, with the help of her friends and some relatives. But she went through that whole journey on her own. When we came to Virginia, we were greeted by some relatives. We didn’t have any money, actually, so they could only host us for so long. What happened was we already had family here in Minnesota, so we took this van. I used to get carsick and any kind of motion sick, so I threw up in any car all the way from Somalia and coming to America.
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