Too Foreign For Home

by Maryam Dualeh (Canada)

I didn't expect to find Somalia

It was the summer of 2017 and it has been almost twenty years since I was last in Somaliland. I touched down in Hargeisa morning time, I was flooded with mixed emotions, excitement, nervousness, I was so curious to see how the city has changed in the past two decades. The last time I was in Hargeisa, I was there from the ages of 2-7. My time there mostly consisted of playing outside with the neighbourhood kids and jumping from the hills onto soft sand, my childhood there was blissful. My family and I left Hargeisa in the spring of 1999 and retuned back to Canada where I remained until my return in 2017. As soon as I touched down, I was immediately greeted by the bright blue sky and the smell of dust from the ground. My sister and cousin who got there a week before me picked me up from the airport. As we loaded up the back of the trunk with my luggage, I noticed a few locals gathered around staring at us. I turned to my sister and asked why they were staring. She tells me get used to it, theres a lot of that that goes on. I was a bit confused as to why the reason being. During the car ride, I noticed endless sheep's and goats and camels roaming the streets, I'd forgotten how this was the norm, every corner had street vendors selling fruits, meat , mechanical parts, and clothes. The city was filled with busy locals all going about their day, I rolled down the windows, at this point the brightness of the sun and the bumpy uneven roads we were driving on was starting to make me feel sick, the wind whipped my face and the sun scorched my skin. I asked if we could stop somewhere for food as I was starting to feel dazed and dehydrated from the sun beaming down on us. We stopped by a cafe, a decent size place decorated with goat skin, on the chairs, on the walls and even had it draped in the entry way to get into the back kitchen. I was welcomed by the aromatic fragrance of somali tea, that consists of variety of spices such as, cardamon, cloves, chai, and black peppercorns. The woman who owns the cafe Faiza, greeted us flashing a toothy grin, she was a small lady that had a limp when she walked, she handed us the menu and as I looked on the menu, I could also feel Faiza's eyes on me staring intently. She stood there for a few moments waiting for us to order. We made our order to her then she disappeared in the back. She came back minutes later with our food, my sister who is way more fluent in somali chatted her up as my cousin and I sat drinking our tea and eating laaxoox (somali pancake). It felt nice to be back after all these years and I was excited to explore the city I spent my early childhood in. What was excitement soon turned into letdown. My entire 2 week trip consisted of being stared at everywhere I went, you would think being Somali myself, speaking the language, and knowing all the customs, I would be able to blend in no problem, but I was mistaken. On my fourth day a man walked up to me asking for money since I was a foreigner and I must have a lot of it. I was dumbstruck, how could I be a foreigner when I look like you and speak the same language as you. It didn't make any sense to me, I was starting to feel like a zoo animal especially walking around the market in lower town constantly being watched, no matter how hard I tried to blend in with my clothes, the locals could tell. Growing up in Canada, especially in the suburbs, I was used to sometimes being the only different one, the one that didn't look like everybody else, but here in my own home country I expected to fit in and belong without any doubt, it was disheartening to find out I was too foreign for home.