Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece by Helen Benedict

Author:Helen Benedict
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Footnote Press

4

EVANS

‘A lot of people here, when they see me, they shout haram. It means forbidden in Arabic.’

EVANS IN NIGERIA

‘I DON’T LIKE TO REMEMBER.’

Helen:

Evans first fell in love when he was fifteen.

‘His name was Nosa. We lived in the same room at boarding school. He was average height, a little plump, playful. There was something special between us we could both feel. We became so close. Nosa was my first relationship, my first love. I was addicted to him.

‘We were together for two years, until we got caught at the end-of-school party. We were in the broom closet in a classroom. A teacher found us and beat us with a stick. Then he called the rest of the staff. They came with the parents. My mother was there. They hit us with pieces of wood and beat us with their feet. The manager of the school said that, because I was seventeen, they wouldn’t send me to jail, but I was expelled to save the reputation of the school and not to affect the other children. Nosa was expelled also. I never heard about him again.

‘Because my mother was present that day, she felt ashamed. For her, I had done an unforgivable forbidden act. After the beatings at school, when we got home, she had two men tie me up. I don’t know who they were. One man was holding my legs and the other was holding my hands and I was on the floor. They were older than me and bigger, so I couldn’t resist. There, she hit me and left a mark on my stomach with a razor blade. She took a stick and broke it on me, and she kicked me. Now I have scars on my stomach. My mom did that. She put a knife in the fire and burned my stomach. I was screaming. She kept doing it. After that, she said I should get out, I’m not her son anymore. She doesn’t want to see me, have anything to do with me, she is no longer my mother. I almost died.’

Evans is a tall young man with a strikingly beautiful face; a deep, melodious voice; and the lanky but muscular build of the dancer he once was. He likes to dress in jeans and crisply clean white or turquoise T-shirts, is deeply earnest and unfailingly polite, very religious, and also a fanatic devotee of exercise. Working out, music and Christianity are clearly what keep him sane.

He grew up in a Christian Pentecostal family in the city of Benin, Nigeria, his father a doctor who held a position at Benin City’s university teaching hospital, his mother the proprietor of a small restaurant. Born on July 28, 1998, Evans was only twenty-one when he fled – young for someone who has to build a new life from nothing but his own resilience. Now he is a refugee, and when he and I first began to talk in November 2020, he was, like so many others in this book, trapped in the camp on Samos.

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