By Leo Hornak
Abdi Nor Iftin fled Somalia only to land in one of Kenya’s worst slums. When he won the US green card lottery his problems seemed to be solved – but it turned out to be the start of a whole new struggle.
In Somali slang, there is a special word for the daydream of starting a new life in a far-off land: it’s known as a bofis. And for millions of refugees across Africa, there is one bofis that obsesses people above all – the idea of moving to the West, and in particular to the US.
For most, it remains an impossible dream. But there is one legal way in which even those without wealth or connections can do it – getting a lucky break in the US Diversity Visa Program, better known as the green card lottery. In 2013, nearly eight million people applied for just 50,000 winning tickets, which means that for every 1,000 applicants only six won the chance of a new life.
For the past year, I’ve followed the story of one of the winners – a young Somali refugee called Abdi Nor Iftin, living in the Eastleigh district of the Kenyan capital Nairobi. Known as Little Mogadishu, it’s one of the country’s toughest slums. And one thing I discovered is that becoming an American is not easy, even for those who do have a winning ticket.
There is no denying that there is something a little strange about the Diversity Visa Program. At a time when immigration to most Western countries is becoming ever more restricted, the US government still gives away 50,000 permanent resident visas each year to people chosen at random from across the world. Entries from most developing countries are permitted, and only a high school education, or a few years of work experience, are required. The stuff of a true bofis.
When I first contacted Abdi he had been living in Little Mogadishu for some time. He and all his friends had applied for the lottery together as a group, at a local internet cafe, but Abdi was the only one to be picked by the lottery computer. “We all cheered! We picked him up!” remembers Yunus, one of Abdi’s best friends. “Everybody was holding him, we were shouting, ‘You won it, you won it! You are going to America!'”
A remarkable stroke of good fortune? No, says Abdi, it was his fate.
“This was not just luck. My whole life I have been in love with America – the best country in the world, the dreamland, the land of opportunity,” he says. “Ask anyone what they called me when I was a kid in Mogadishu and they will tell you. My nickname then was ‘Mr America’, or ‘Abdi America’. Everyone used to joke about it.”
Abdi spent most of his childhood in Mogadishu.
He dodged the bullets of Somalia’s civil war, and survived famines. He coped with the suffering around him by watching Hollywood films, and using them to teach himself fluent English. “I was crazy about movies – watching Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis,” Abdi remembers. “I liked the way they sounded; the way they talked. I wasn’t learning how to speak English like that, with that American accent, from my school.”
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Source: BBC News