Beyond the Sand and Sea: One Family's Quest for a Country to Call Home by Ty McCormick

Author:Ty McCormick [McCormick, Ty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Social Activists, Social Science, Refugees, Emigration & Immigration, political science, human rights
ISBN: 9781250240613
Google: UdLtDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-30T00:02:08.711523+00:00

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They spent the night in Buaale, rising at dawn with the call to prayer. All of the other passengers had gotten off in town, so it was just Bekar and Asad on top of the sacks when the truck pulled back onto the road. In the cab down below were the driver, Adan, and two men in his employ. As soon as they left the river basin, the landscape grew arid and dusty again. There were still pockets of trees and scrub, but the ground was sandy and parched. Here and there gravelly washes had swallowed whole chunks of the road, the work of long-forgotten floods. No one maintained the roads in al-Shabab country, so they had a way of sprouting new arteries around fallen trees or other obstacles. Sometimes Bekar wasn’t sure they were on a road at all. Maybe they were simply following the tire tracks of trucks that had carved their own paths through the wilderness.

Bekar had his own reasons for returning to Somalia. After Asad had left Dadaab to finish high school in Kiisi, he had toiled on in Room 101 for another six months. When regular classes at Ifo Secondary still hadn’t resumed, he took a bus to Garissa and talked his way into a boarding school there, convincing the headmaster to waive the fees. Soon after, his family decided to return to Somalia. His grandmother, who had stayed behind in Mogadishu when the rest of the family fled, had fallen ill, and his mother felt she needed to care for her. Bekar remained alone in Kenya to finish high school, scoring a B+ on the national exam in 2014 that he thought would qualify him for the WUSC. But his application was rejected that year and the next; the competition for the scholarship had grown stiffer over the years, and a high grade was no longer a guarantee of a place. Finally, he applied for the same Albert Einstein German Academic Refugee Initiative that Asad had sought unsuccessfully. The scholarship covered tuition at Kenyan universities and was regarded as a kind of consolation prize. It wasn’t a ticket to a new life in Canada, or even a path to gainful employment in Kenya, but it was something to do for the next four years.

Bekar won the scholarship and enrolled in a health sciences program at Moi University in Eldoret, a highland city of wide avenues and towering evergreens in the heart of the Rift Valley. By then it had been three years since he had seen his family, and Raaliyo, his late father’s second wife, had passed away. Without a passport, the only way to visit them was to make the perilous weeklong journey through al-Shabab territory. As a child, he had lived under the Islamic Courts Union, whose militant youth wing later morphed into al-Shabab. But what he saw in the southern Somali villages he passed through was something else entirely. He was shocked by the discipline of the insurgents, and by the degree to which they had subdued the local population.

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