Ty McCormick - Beyond the Sand and Sea: One Familys Quest for a Country to Call Home

New York, July 2017

As he stood in line for immigration at John F. Kennedy International Airport, Asad Hussein tried to recall the final stanza of a poem by William Ernest Henley. In front of him, over the heads of a dozen disheveled travelers, stood a row of glass cubicles marking the border of the United States. Unremarkable as it must have seemed to the other travelers that day, the sterile, fluorescent-lit gateway to America felt surreal to him. Years before, in a desert refugee camp in East Africa, he had scrawled the poem on a slab of sheet metal he used to keep the sand from blowing into his tent. Henleys words had famously sustained Nelson Mandela during his long imprisonment on Robben Island, and Asad had sought in them a similar source of inspiration. He had hoped they would strengthen his resolve to one day reach the United States.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

How many times had he read those lines, growing up a citizen of nowhere in the worlds largest refugee camp? A sea of sand and thorn scrub and makeshift tarpaulin dwellings in the dry badlands of northeast Kenya, the camp had been home to more than 500,000 people at one pointa city the size of Kansas City or Atlanta, except without electricity or running water. There were no paved roads, no two-story buildings, no permanent structures of any kind. Most of the refugees had fled the war in neighboring Somalia, but a growing number, like Asad, had been born in the camp and never seen their home country. Members of this new generation had spent their entire lives in limbo. Everything from food rations that kept them alive to the arcane resettlement process that offered the only hope of a better future hinged on the whimsy of distant powers.

In Dadaab refugee camp, no one is master of his fate.

Yet somehow, after twenty-two years of waiting, Asad had made it here. In his back pocket was a UN-issued travel document that contained a student visa. Tucked inside the documents light blue jacket was a form stating the impossible: He had been admitted to Princeton University and awarded a scholarship worth $70,000 a year. It was more than his entire family, perhaps his entire block in Dadaab, had ever seen in their lives, and so improbable that he hadnt allowed himself to fully process what it meant. He didnt dare. Too many times he had been on the cusp of breaking free from Dadaab only to have it re-ensnare him at the last moment.

There was the promise from the UN Refugee Agency of resettlement in the United States that had gone unfulfilled for thirteen years, the prestigious Canadian scholarship he had devoted his entire childhood to winning only to fall short of the grade, and the desperate attempt to smuggle himself out of the camp that had ended with him behind bars. Then came an executive order by President Donald Trump that shook Dadaab like an exploding mortar shell. Just days before his parents were scheduled for an interview at the U.S. Embassy in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, the final step in the arduous vetting process for green cards, the United States suspended all refugee admissions and banned travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Somalia.

Now as the customs line inched forward, he felt sure someone would snatch this opportunity from him as well. The Trump travel ban wasnt supposed to apply to him, since he had been born in Kenya and granted a student visa. But he knew the agents at the border had the final say on who entered the United States, and there were plenty of reasons they might turn away a twenty-two-year-old ethnic Somali man. Already, a mysterious American official had intercepted him on his layover in the Frankfurt airport. She had peppered him with questions, some of them surprisingly blunt: Have you ever been a member of an extremist organization? Do you know anyone who is a member of an extremist organization?

With each shuffle forward, Asads anxiety grew. By the time he reached the front of the line and a young Latino agent with a crew cut beckoned with a pair of raised fingers, he could feel himself freezing up, the hint of a childhood stammer creeping back into his voice. Just answer the questions the way you practiced, he told himself. Look the agent in the eye. Smile.

The first few questions were pro forma: What did he plan to study? Was this his first time to the United States? The agent swiveled in his chair to face his computer screen. His sullen expression gave no hint as to what he was reading, but as the minutes dragged on Asad was overcome with a feeling of dread. Then, without warning, a light above him began to blink red. Would you come this way, please? the agent said, stepping out from behind his desk and gesturing to a dimly lit hallway at the end of the row of cubicles. Wed just like to ask you a few more questions.

I first met Asad about a year and a half earlier, a day or two after Trump announced his travel ban. At the time, I was the Africa editor of Foreign Policy, a small American magazine owned by the former Washington Post Company. My job was to rove the continent in search of stories, and to commission articles from other correspondents whenever news broke and I couldnt cover it myself. I had recently visited Dadaab to write about Kenyas threats to close the camp and expel its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. I had also read an article in the New York Times Magazine by a young man who had grown up in Dadaab. Detailed and emotionally wrenching, it told the story of his sisters first trip home to the camp after eleven years in the United States. Because it was so well written, I assumed the author had been one of the lucky few to receive a scholarship to study abroad. It didnt occur to me that he might still be stranded in the camp. When Trump announced the travel ban, I reached out to the young man on Twitter to see if he would be willing to write something about families that were affected, not thinking that his would be one of those families. This is such sad news for me personally, Asad replied. It somehow seems the world is working against us.

It was only after he agreed to write the article and we met in person to discuss it that I discovered he had never been to college. He had traveled to Nairobi expecting to see his parents off to America, so we met on the ground floor of a gleaming, modern shopping center at a caf popular with the Somali diaspora. Over steaming lattes near a glass elevator bank mobbed by hurried shoppers, he told me about his childhood in the camp, where there are no elevators, no lattes, and nowhere to rush to or from. He told me about how the resettlement process had disrupted his education multiple times, and about how for years he had sneaked into the library at night to teach himself what he had missed in the classroom. He read Tolstoy, Dickens, and Garca Mrquez, designing a kind of Great Books education for himself from the dog-eared volumes donated by American charities. Whenever he encountered a word he didnt know, he looked it up in a battered copy of the Oxford English Dictionary.