In Nomadland (2020), a drifter named Fern (played by Frances McDormand) works stints at Amazon warehouses while roaming the country by van. Searchlight Pictures
In the twentieth century, the factory stood at the center of American life. Entire towns sprouted around them. Thanks to union-won wages, factory workers and their families could attain middle-class security. When I was writing a book about autoworkers, I kept hearing nostalgic stories of the way things used to be: however down on your luck you were, there was always a job waiting for you at the factory.
After decades of companies offshoring manufacturing employment, the factory is no longer the institution it once was. The Amazon fulfillment center has taken its place. They’re everywhere where the online retailer ships its goods—which is everywhere in the world. A third of the country’s warehouse workers—700,000 people—work at Amazon facilities preparing the company’s goods for delivery. After her plant closes, Frances McDormand’s character in Nomadland does seasonal stints at Amazon warehouses while she roams the country by van. It’s become a cliché that Amazon is where you go if you want a job that pays more than the minimum, but that any able-bodied person can do.
That’s why it’s so troubling to read the research about how bad Amazon jobs have become. Take the findings of an academic survey released late last year, which drew from a nationally representative sample of Amazon warehouse workers. What comes across clearly is the true cost of getting your packages lightning fast. University of Illinois researchers found that four out of ten warehouse workers have been injured on the job. Half said they feel burnt out. And rather than lightening the load of its warehouse workforce, Amazon’s innovative use of technology appears to be at the root of these problems. Majorities of those reporting injuries or burnout said they felt a sense of pressure to work faster. Two-thirds said they had to take unpaid time off due to pain or exhaustion in the past month—which the study’s researchers link to the company’s algorithm-intensified pace on the floor.
When the pandemic struck in 2020 and classes went virtual, students scrambled to adjust. A twenty-two-year-old Filipina American psychology major at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) from a working-class background told us about the difficulties she faced attending her classes and getting her homework done. Her apartment’s unstable internet connection often booted her out of class, and she was stymied by the fact that she didn’t even have a desk at home. Because desks were sold out at many stores at the start of the pandemic, she built a wobbly makeshift one out of shelves she bought at a hardware store.
A year later, the challenges continued because of the condition of the small apartment she shared with a roommate. Her bedroom ceiling leaked whenever it rained. Her bed was ruined after a storm, and her landlord had yet to fix the problem (the bucket she used to catch the ceiling drips was visible during our Zoom interview). Along with the “paper-thin” walls of her apartment, these various at-home distractions made it hard to concentrate on academics, she said.
What impact did the shift to virtual learning have on the millions of college and graduate students forced to study—either partly or wholly—at home? Through research conducted at VCU in Richmond, we found that class and race shaped the realities of online learning in 2020 and 2021 in deep, sometimes unexpected ways that largely revolved around the family resources available to students.
The silver that made Potosí fabulously wealthy is now all but gone, but miners still toil in the Bolivian city’s nearby mines in search of minerals vital to global supply chains. In recent years, locals have promoted a kind of “danger tourism”—guided tours of the sprawling and still lethal Cerro Rico complex—as another employment option in a region with very few, but critics say it draws too many voyeurs and thrill-seekers.
It’s one of the most grueling, dangerous jobs on Earth. Workers at the Cerro Rico mines near Potosí, Bolivia, toil from dawn till dusk in constricted, dust-filled passages, knowing they might die at any moment and likely will never reach middle age. Now, Cerro Rico has become a leading tourist attraction—despite the risks, the plight of the miners, and the downward spiral of a community that has fallen far from past wealth and glory.
“It’s like going to the zoo, looking at animals,” said Julio Morales, an ex-miner turned mining tour operator turned activist, who believes the visits are getting out of hand. “The mines are not a game.”
Mark Dickinson Mark Dickinson has taught on three continents and traveled to more than seventy countries. Before beginning his career in the classroom eighteen years ago, he worked for almost a decade as both a television and newspaper reporter.
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Danish Rajab, a former salesman in his early twenties, was shot by a pellet gun during anti-India protests near his home in Srinagar in 2016. He lost his job after his injuries made it impossible to work. After three surgeries, he can still only see blurry images from his left eye. Photo by Sharafat Ali
The dispute over Kashmir has raged for seven decades and ignited three wars. Now the conflict has entered a new phase: violent street protests in India-controlled Kashmir, followed by brutal crackdowns by Indian security forces that have maimed a new generation of militants, protesters, and bystanders.
Umer Beigh
Hiba Nisar was eighteen months old when she became the youngest casualty of the latest phase in the deadly, decades-long conflict in Kashmir. Last November, protesters clashed with Indian security forces outside her home in Kapran, a village in the south of the Muslim-majority state controlled by India but also claimed by Pakistan. As protesters pelted them with stones, Indian police fired tear gas, which began to seep into Hiba’s home. Hiba started to choke.
Her mother, Marsala Jan, grabbed her and opened the door, intent on getting her out of the smoke. “As I sneaked out, I heard a loud bang,” Jan recalls—the security forces had fired their shotguns. A spray of lead pellets ripped through the doorway. Jan had covered her daughter’s face with her hand, but a pellet went through her hand, she says, and into Hiba’s left eye.
Hiba was partially blinded. “Fate struck a terrible blow,” Jan says. “I held my child tight, but … I failed to protect her eye.”
Since 2010, Indian security forces have used pellet guns to deal with widespread protests in Kashmir, leading to the blinding, maiming, or killing of hundreds of people, according to human rights advocates and local medical personnel. While the term “pellet gun” brings to mind a children’s toy, the pellets—also known as birdshot—are metal and spray over a wide area. Most countries do not use them for crowd-control purposes because they cannot be aimed and thus cause indiscriminate injury.
Not all millennials are this damn good-looking—and not all of them are struggling in the ways that working-class millennials generally are. Photo via Flickr.
Why can’t millennials afford their own homes? Reading much of the popular press, one is led to believe it’s their unrealistic expectations, indulgent spending, and general allergy to adulthood that have trapped them in a renter’s purgatory. Nebraska senator Ben Sasse wrote a whole book, The Vanishing American Adult, in which he argued that young people today are stuck in a Peter Pan–like state of carefree childhood, spending their time playing video games, buying stuff, and snapping selfies—even posting ironic memes about “adulting”—rather than seeking meaning in career, family, and a stable home.
It is true that millennials have been slower to reach various milestones on the way to an all-American adulthood—including buying a home—than prior generations at the same point in their lives. For example, Americans ages eighteen to thirty-four are now more likely to be living with their parents than in any other housing arrangement, according to 2014 data from the Pew Research Center (which defines millennials as those born between 1981 and 1996). That has never been the case before, according to census data going back to 1880.
A more rigorous explanation for their failure to launch is that the Great Recession stunted millennials’ economic lives at a critical age. As a result, they’re still struggling to obtain gainful employment in a more demanding labor market, or find affordable housing in a contracted mortgage market. In other words, it’s not their lousy values—it’s their lousy economic prospects.
But this line of argument, too, misses something crucial. Its focus on middle-class, if downwardly mobile, millennials obscures just how diverse a generation millennials are. Not all of them are into Snapchat and kombucha juice, that’s for sure, but what’s less appreciated is that not even a majority of them are college-educated. Barely four out of ten Americans between ages twenty-five and thirty-four—members of what will be the most academically credentialed generation ever—have a bachelor’s degree. Thanks in part to the country’s widening income gap, the picture of “how millennials are doing” is dramatically different depending on which segment of the population you happen to be looking at. And to an overlooked degree, what determines whether, when, and how members of this generation attain the traditional markers of adulthood—a house and career, marriage and kids—is one factor: class.
Women and girls march through the village of Derbesi to celebrate International Women’s Day 2016.
A few years ago, I began hearing remarkable stories about a social movement in northern Syria. Not far from the wreckage of Aleppo, a society founded on principles of direct democracy and women’s rights has taken root in the predominantly Kurdish region known as Rojava. There, in defiance of the Islamic State’s brutal patriarchy, women are leading the way in political decision-making and fighting on the frontlines in their own battalions.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
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Sub-Saharan Africans started sleeping in these concrete pipes after they were forcibly evicted from their homes in Tangier’s Boukhalef neighborhood (visible in the background of the photo). Many of them had their belongings thrown out or burned by police, according to local activists. Some were carried off to other cities in Morocco.
Before they manage to reach Spain or Italy or Greece, people fleeing poverty and war in Sub-Saharan Africa head to port cities like Tangier. There, they face the risk of beatings and repression at the hands of authorities—or dying on the crossing to Europe.
A man carries his food and water for the day back to a makeshift campsite on the outskirts of Tangier. From the film Hijra–Dead End: Morocco
“This is a picture of the forests,” Michael says, flicking through the photos on his laptop. “At night they will struggle. I mean, how can a plastic bag save you from the cold? If it’s cold, it will be cold on you. If it rains, it will rain on you. If the police come there, they will burn down all this.”
Michael, a twenty-something man from Gambia, is showing me photos that he has collected during his year and five months in Morocco: some taken by him, others by journalists that he has met and befriended, others by friends who are migrants like himself. At great personal risk, he has been documenting human rights abuses and the daily struggles that migrants undergo in Morocco. (Some of the photos from his collection are interspersed throughout this story.) The images are unsettling. Young children sleeping in the cold. Men who have been beaten half to death. Families living in squalor in the forests.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
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After the birth of his daughter Adeline, Dustin Davis became a “work-at-home dad”—picking up his design career after a layoff by doing freelance work, but making his daughter his chief priority.
Today’s stay-at-home dads have little in common with Mr. Mom. Responsible, nurturing, and home by choice, they are eager to prove that—aside from the breastfeeding—they can do whatever a woman can.
Like many of today’s loud-and-proud stay-at-home dads, R.C. Liley has no qualms about saying he is good at running a household—something he’s done since the beginning of his marriage to his wife Kelley. After their daughter Avery was born, Liley chose to put a hold on his career as an accountant in order to care for her.
“W
e’re gonna be on this airplane,” R. C. Liley says, showing his two-year-old daughter a pink, two-seater toy plane. Twenty-nine, Liley is tall and fit and towers over Avery, a toddler in a light-green T-shirt with the words “Never Mess.” “We’re gonna start from the ground, and w-o-o-o-o-sh!” he says, mimicking the sound of the jet engines as he lifts the plane higher and higher.
Liley ends his demonstration. “Okay, Avery, that’s an airplane,” he says. “We’re gonna fly on it—are we gonna be good?”
“Yes,” Avery says, a bit hesitant, her dimples sinking into her cheeks as she smiles.
Liley is a stay-at-home dad. He looks after Avery when his wife Kelley, Avery’s mother, is working at the finance department of a large corporation. Unlike some stay-at-home dads, who feel awkward about taking on a role that many people still consider feminine, Liley is open about being the primary caretaker for his child—so open, in fact, that he regularly shares his experiences on his blog.
Since 1989, the number of stay-at-home dads, or SAHDs, has nearly doubled, according to the Pew Research Center. About two million fathers in America now care for children younger than eighteen while not working outside the home. They account for 16 percent of at-home parents. Likewise, across Europe and even in more traditional cultures around the world, men who take on this role are increasingly visible.
After the birth of his daughter Adeline, Dustin Davis became a “work-at-home dad”—picking up his design career after a layoff by doing freelance work, but making his daughter his chief priority.
In the United States, many men who lost their jobs during the recession wound up staying at home with their kids, at least temporarily. For a growing number of men, however, their choice to become stay-at-home dads is actually that—a choice. Surveys support this view that fathers’ attitudes are changing. For example, just 5 percent of stay-at-home dads in 1989 said that the main reason they were home was to care for their home or family; today, 21 percent do.
These fathers have little in common with Jack Butler, the hapless stay-at-home dad played by Michael Keaton in the 1983 comedy Mr. Mom—still the cultural reference many people turn to when thinking of men at work at home. Forced to care for his kids after being sacked, Butler seemed bent on wreaking havoc in the house.
Today’s more gender-equal generation of stay-at-home dads shoulder domestic tasks more responsibly. For his part, Liley grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Texas. He studied finance and got a well-paying job as an accountant at a mutual fund. But in 2013, he decided to quit his job and care for Avery. “My wife always made more,” he says. “I was already the one doing the cooking and the rest of the household.” Staying home with Avery wasn’t something Liley felt forced into. Quite the contrary, he says—“I was counting down the days till I became a SAHD.”
But as much as attitudes about parenting have changed, stay-at-home dads still find themselves facing skepticism and derision, often subtle in form—the ways that stay-at-home moms steer clear of them at the playground, or the media portrays them as clueless and dumb, or friends and family drop hints that what they’re doing is strange.
“Being the man, it sounded crazy for me to quit my job,” says Matt Dudzinski, thirty-six, a former interior designer for an architectural firm in Detroit who now cares for his two daughters, six and three. He and his wife Aya, a trim engineer for an automotive company, had each thought—to themselves—that having Dad at home would work best for them as a couple. But they avoided talking about it. “We were both worried about being judged—her, for wanting to keep her career while being a mother, and me, for not being a breadwinning man.”
Then Dudzinski was laid off. “The arrangement we both knew we wanted, but were afraid to voice, was decided for us.”
“My daughter will get more physical growing up with me,” Liley says. “She will get more practical, more assertive.”
In certain parts of the world, men (and women) have an easier time staying at home with their kids. For more than two decades, Canada has granted paid leave to fathers who want to be the primary caretakers of their children. In Japan, a country known for its stark gender divide, the law nonetheless requires employers to give their workers—men and women—time off after the birth of a child. In Sweden, one of the most SAHD-friendly countries, both moms and dads can receive government benefits for up to 480 days if they choose to care for their kids at home.
In America and Australia, there is much less in the way of support. Stay-at-home dads have fewer role models or resources to help them, and when government policies do exist to assist families with young children, they tend to treat these men as second-class parents.
Regardless of what their governments do, however, broad economic and cultural shifts seem to be pushing new dads in all these countries to consider what their own fathers would not.
In the United States, the number of stay-at-home dads peaked at 2.2 million in 2010, but then fell slightly once the economy picked up. Clearly, household decisions about who does what have much to do with the state of a family’s finances: in an uncertain economy, men who wouldn’t otherwise stay home are willing to do so when it seems practical. The massive unemployment of the economic downturn is only part of this story, though. Years after the official end of the recession, the typical American household makes less income, adjusted for inflation, than it did in 2007. Having a parent stay at home sometimes makes more sense than paying for a nanny or daycare—and now that women often make more than their partners, the sensible choice in some cases is for the dad, not the mom, to stay home.
Changing values may also be drawing men out of the workplace and into the home. Today, parenting is seen as both the cause and solution to a wide variety of social ills, says writer and sociologist Tiffany Jenkins, while “work is not as important as it used to be for one’s identity and purpose.” As work inside the home becomes, as Jenkins puts it, “professionalized,” more men may think of it a worthy life calling.
In turn, some of today’s new fathers may be reacting to what they think their own dads got wrong. GenXers and millennials, who grew up at a time when dual-income families were the norm, are already more comfortable with the idea of a woman breadwinner. Like every generation before them, they are finding their own ways to rebel—and in the case of the stay-at-home dads among them, this may involve rejecting their fathers’ workaholic schedules, which left little time for children. “I think a lot of people from my generation grew up without dads, or without good dads, and we are trying to change that—showing that we can be great dads,” says Josh Hardt, twenty-eight, a stay-at-home dad in Durham, North Carolina.
For his part, Hardt never felt close to his biological father, he says. After he moved away from home, he did find a fatherly role model in his stepdad, who was a more hands-on parent. Now that he’s a father himself, Hardt works on a freelance basis as a filmmaker but focuses on caring for his two-year-old daughter. His wife works as a retail store manager and provides most of the family’s income.
Hardt enjoys his role at home. The idea of a woman supporting a man financially isn’t that far a cultural leap for someone young like him, but Hardt knows that others—especially the older generation—think otherwise. “They come from a different time, so I understand why it’s hard to understand,” he says.
Stay-at-home dad Paul Schwartz with his wife Amy Wilson and son Malcolm. “I felt like a social movement of my own when I quit my lawyer’s job to stay at home with my son,” he says. Photo by Catherine O’Hara
If capable stay-at-home dads like Hardt are growing in numbers, though, you wouldn’t know it by watching TV. From Fred Flintstone to Homer Simpson, from Al Bundy to Alan Harper, the most popular on-screen dads of the past several decades have been roundly portrayed as doofuses. And the stay-at-home dads among them have not been spared the low expectations that both men and women have concerning male parenting skills. Even when TV dads are praised for being practically minded problem solvers in the home, the compliments are woefully backhanded—in a controversial 2011 detergent commercial, for instance, the savvy stay-at-home dad has to qualify his competence by calling himself a “dad-mom.”
Paul Schwartz knows the stereotype of the bumbling dad well: he was asked to play one on TV. Schwartz, a forty-two-year-old former labor lawyer, has gained a large following on his blog, which chronicles his adventures as a stay-at-home dad in Paris. A few months ago, a cable channel asked him if he wanted to be in a reality show they were developing about stay-at-home dads. The idea was interesting, but in the end Schwartz backed out. “They insisted that we act like morons,” he says.
Perhaps the negative portrayals of stay-at-home dads in the media aren’t so surprising, though, given how prevalent these stereotypes are in the public at large. It needs to be stressed that perceptions of stay-at-home dads tend to be much more hostile outside of America and Europe: in China, SAHDs often hide their status, fearing humiliation, and in many Muslim nations, such a role for men is considered religiously subversive. Nevertheless, large numbers of people in rich Western countries continue to have a lopsided view of who should be taking care of the kids. In a 2013 Pew survey, for instance, 51 percent of Americans said that children are better off if their mothers are home, while only 8 percent said the same of fathers.
Stay-at-home dads are regularly reminded that other people see them as, at best, an oddity. “I usually get one of two responses when people ask what I do for a living,” Dudzinski, the stay-at-home dad from Detroit, writes in an email. “‘Oh, that’s great’ (with a straight face, changes subject and stops talking to me). Or: ‘That’s awesome! If I didn’t have to work, I’d totally stay home all day!’ (assuming I watch TV and order pizza every day).”
Schwartz has stayed at home with his son Malcolm for a decade, but he still gets his share of clueless and patronizing questions from people he meets—inquiries along the lines of, “How does it work? Do you do laundry, too?” “Most are a bit shocked to learn that I have been a stay-at-home parent for all of Malcolm’s life,” Schwartz says. At PTA events, parent gatherings, and playdates, Schwartz is still frequently the only man in the room. “I don’t have a problem with it, although it occasionally means that my sense of humor doesn’t go over well.”
Liley with his wife Kelley and daughter Avery. “My wife always made more,” says Liley. “I was already the one doing the cooking and the rest of the household.” But staying home with Avery wasn’t something Liley felt forced into. Quite the contrary, he says—“I was counting down the days till I became a SAHD.”
Schwartz and his family used to live in San Francisco. After Malcolm was born, he quit his job as a lawyer to take care of him. Then, in 2013, an international software company offered his wife Amy an executive position in Paris. She decided to take the job, and the family relocated overseas. Once in Paris, Schwartz immediately set to work establishing a new support network for Malcolm. He reached out to a local moms’ group about joining—only to learn that he, as a man, wasn’t invited.
When he did meet other stay-at-home parents, their interactions were “a bit weird,” he says. At a coffee for parents new to Paris, the group talked for half an hour about breast feeding, vaginal births versus C-sections, and similar topics. “You’d think that sitting around with a bunch of women talking about their intimate body parts would be terribly exciting, but to tell you the truth, I was bored.” To find more parents he could relate to, Schwartz eventually turned to the SAHD networks that have sprouted up around the globe in recent years. The people he’s met in this virtually connected community have been an important source of support, he says.
There is some irony to the fact that stay-at-home-moms can be some of the least understanding people whom SAHDs encounter. One obvious reason for the distance these women keep is apprehensiveness about sexual tensions—fears, for instance, that SAHDs must get lonely and want to hit on them. “Women are afraid they are forming a relationship that’s more [than] a friendship, so they don’t want any part of that,’” says Michelle P. Maidenberg, president and clinical director of Westchester Group Works, a community center in New York focused on group therapy.
The awkwardness, however, may have to do with more than just unwanted sexual attention. Women may see stay-at-home dads as threats—interlopers in a domestic sphere they thought was theirs alone, Maidenberg says. Or, they may see the SAHD as a sign of their own inferiority. The modern woman faces a daunting work-life balancing act: the need to juggle a thriving career and a thriving family. Meeting a stay-at-home dad, then, might raise some unsettling questions about how others have succeeded where she has failed—questions like, “Who is the high-powered female married to this man? How incredibly successful and rich is she that she has her husband at home?”
There is a joke going around his circles, Schwartz says. “The new status symbols for women are driving a hybrid car, and having a stay-at-home-dad for a spouse.”
During the day, Davis cares for Adeline in their St. Louis home while his wife Jessica works as a designer at a marketing agency.
Among other things, skepticism about stay-at-home dads is rooted in the widespread view that women are just more caring and empathetic than men, and thus better suited to be caregivers. Science backs that view up—though the degree to which it does, and the degree to which any gender difference is due to nature or nurture, are hotly contested.
Women tend to have higher levels of activity in their mirror neurons, brain cells linked to the workings of empathy. But scientists disagree whether empathy is determined by mirror neurons alone. Furthermore, research finds that these mirrors neurons can be altered through simple and brief training tasks. This suggests that empathy is not impervious to the power of culture, and that the gender differences we see may be due, at least in part, to the way children are socialized, not their innate traits. Indeed, studies of infant boys and girls find that boys are equally sensitive and attentive to other people at this early stage in their development.
What happens, then, when men care for their kids at home? Not surprisingly, studies find that it is a good idea for fathers to get involved, generally speaking, in their children’s lives. For example, one British study gathered a sample of 11,000 adults and asked their mothers how often the children’s fathers had read to them, gone out with them, and otherwise spent time with them during their childhoods. The researchers found that, on average, adults whose fathers had been more involved when they were growing up had higher IQs, were more sociable, and enjoyed a healthier sense of self. Perhaps being raised by the most involved kind of father—a stay-at-home dad—can lead to even more benefits for children’s sense of self-worth.
That is a hypothesis that researchers are evaluating, says Dr. Michael B. Donner, president of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Another is that men who care for their kids have personality traits that distinguish them from other men. For instance, there is anecdotal evidence that stay-at-home dads are more connected to, and comfortable with, their feminine side, Donner says. (For their part, many stay-at-home dads delight in the idea they are different: they want to show other people—especially their own children—that masculinity is also about compassion and nurturing, they told me.)
As interesting as this research can be, Donner is quick to add that the debate over gender differences can obscure the larger point: children just need supportive parents. “It’s not about gender or testosterone levels, or who nurtures or challenges. It is about feeling safe and secure in your parents’ hands, and these properties have no gender.” The bottom line is that children raised in nurturing environments exude confidence when they become adults, he says. “Two can play at that game, moms or dads.”
Don’t worry, she’s not actually driving the car.
Dustin Davis has spent the last few years proving just how nurturing a dad can be. In 2013, Davis was laid off from his job as a designer. When his daughter Adeline was born two years ago, he decided he would use the opportunity to become—as he puts it on his personal blog—a “work-from-home dad.” During the day, his wife Jessica works as a designer at a marketing agency, while Davis cares for Adeline in their St. Louis home.
Davis, thirty-three, is as manly as you can get, as evidenced by his impressive ZZ Top beard. But like any stay-at-home parent, he revels in the milestones he’s been able to see first-hand—the other day, it was the five steps Adeline took, in a moment of particularly good coordination. Like many stay-at-home dads (and for that matter, like many stay-at-home moms), he has a career he continues to pursue. But now he is a freelancer working part-time from home, and his chief priority, he says, is Adeline.
“While I cannot breastfeed a child, I can do everything else a woman does. I can be nurturing and loving. I can raise a child.”
Stav Dimitrοpoulos Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since.
Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav
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Best of In The Fray 2015. As they head into what should be their golden years, many older immigrants still work low-wage jobs and remain undocumented. Unable to save up or receive benefits for the elderly, they can do little but hope they stay healthy and employable. Part two of a two-part series.
“Nursing homes are sad places. People are abandoned there,” says Gloria Murray, sixty-six, a Jamaican immigrant who worked for more than two decades as a health aide at a nursing home. Over the course of her career, Murray became close to many of her clients. It was important to her that they be shown kindness and respect. In Jamaica, she says, “we take care of our old.”
Yet as Murray grew old herself, she quickly learned that no one was going to take care of her. In 2010, a fire destroyed her home in New York. Homeless for two years, she struggled to navigate the city’s shelter system. Life there was unbearable, she says: “It was drugs, pimps, the whole lot. I never knew it would come to this.”
Dana Ullman Dana Ullman is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. Her photography is focused on social engagement: chronicling everyday epics, investigating subjects crossculturally, and humanizing faceless statistics through storytelling. Site: ullmanphoto.com
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Best of In The Fray 2015. Embracing the last stage of life is a challenge for all, but especially so for those growing old outside their homeland. Part one of a two-part series.
Tucked away in Staten Island’s Clifton neighborhood is a fourth-floor apartment painted in drowsy greens and browns. A blend of savory aromas—fish gravies, okra, fufu, stewed bitterballs—fills the air as brightly dressed women chat over bowls of chicken stew with rice.
Monah Smith, a small, wizened woman with a quiet smile, has been cooking for them. Smith sells home-cooked meals from her apartment in Park Hill, a low-income housing complex. The place never seems to be empty. Staten Island is home to the largest Liberian community outside of Africa, and many of Smith’s fellow immigrants drop by—at almost any hour of day—for the traditional, slow-cooked dishes she makes.
Dana Ullman Dana Ullman is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. Her photography is focused on social engagement: chronicling everyday epics, investigating subjects crossculturally, and humanizing faceless statistics through storytelling. Site: ullmanphoto.com
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Daniel Okator lives on the streets of Athens. Fearful of Boko Haram, he left Nigeria in 2013 and crossed the Mediterranean on a rickety boat. Two of his fellow migrants drowned when the boat capsized.
In recent months, hundreds of migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean and slip into Europe. Even Greece, a country locked in a worsening financial crisis, is now drawing record numbers of desperate travelers from Africa and elsewhere. Once their journey is over, what happens next?
Daniel Okator lives on the streets of Athens. Fearful of Boko Haram, he left Nigeria in 2013 and crossed the Mediterranean on a rickety boat. Two of his fellow migrants drowned when the boat capsized.
Me? No, I have papers!” the man yells when I ask him his name.
He is young, tall, and stout, dressed in a worn black bomber jacket and a pair of baggy corduroys, his hands covered by the scruffy grey gloves he uses to root through garbage bags.
I have run into him in Plato’s Academy, the vicinity of the philosopher’s storied school, now an Athens district filled with working-class flats and African migrants pushing carts full of trash. Probing his pockets to find papers he does not eventually produce, the man tells me only his first name: Blaise. Forty-three, he is an immigrant from Côte d’Ivoire—an illegal immigrant, it seems, given how he protests too much. “Me, Christian! Samaris good! I love Greece! Samaris good!”
I was talking to Blaise right before Greek prime minister Antonis Samaras was booted out of office in January. The national elections brought to power a leftist government, which immediately began demanding a new deal for Greece in repaying its international loans. Since the global financial crisis struck in 2008, Greece has been beset with double-digit unemployment and shriveling industry, a downturn deepened by tough loan terms that have required painful and abrupt economic reforms. The drama has heightened in recent weeks: Greece is currently negotiating with the International Monetary Fund and European creditors over the payment arrangements for its loans, which the new government claims needs to be relaxed in order for Greece to avoid defaulting on those loans and abandoning the Euro for its old drachma currency—an increasingly likely scenario. If this were to happen, rampant inflation and a banking crisis would ensue, experts say.
Throughout the ongoing financial turmoil, however, migrants have continued to come to Greece. Indeed, the EU’s border management agency says that Europe-bound migrants are increasingly choosing to go through Turkey and Greece rather than embarking from various northern African nations, which nowadays are seen as riskier launching points. According to the United Nations, so far this year 48,000 refugees and migrants have entered Greece—almost half of those who have come to Europe—a running total that already far outstrips the national figure for the entire previous year. Over the past several months, record numbers have landed on the shores of the country’s Aegean islands in rubber dinghies and wooden boats: half of the six hundred migrants who now arrive in Greece every day come to the island of Lesvos alone.
While the bulk of Greece’s immigrants in the nineties and aughts came from the Balkans, today they increasingly hail from countries outside Europe. A fifth now come from Africa, and more than half from Asia—mainly from war zones like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. These latest waves of new arrivals have stoked xenophobic attitudes among native Greeks already anxious about the economy. Meanwhile, those migrants lucky to survive the often treacherous overseas journey to Greece find themselves struggling once here. African migrants like Blaise—whose continent is associated with poverty, war, and disease in the minds of many Greeks—encounter an economy and society that continually tells them it doesn’t much care for them.
Compared to some other countries in Europe—for example, Denmark, Switzerland, and Slovakia—Greece is less strict in accepting immigrants and asylum seekers from overseas. But clearly the supply of legal opportunities to move to Europe cannot match the demand, because every year an estimated 55,000 African migrants are smuggled in. Transnational criminal syndicates often get them here, shipping human beings across borders just like they do weapons and drugs.
Smuggling Africans is big business—estimated at $150 million a year—and poor immigrants seeking better economic opportunities or escaping violence or repression at home are willing to pay a great deal for a one-way ticket to Europe. For Blaise, the trip from his Ivorian hometown of Duékoué to Athens cost him 7,000 euros. In his case, the smugglers upheld their end of the bargain; other would-be immigrants wind up as sexual slaves or forced laborers, stealthily shunted through the same global networks by profit-hungry human traffickers.
The journey poses great risks, too. According to a report by the International Organization for Migration, over 22,000 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean since 2000. Last year set a record for the number of deaths, which exceeded 3,000. This year’s tally will handily surpass it: in just the first four months of 2015, an estimated 1,770 migrants died. In April, at least five boats carrying migrants sank during the Mediterranean crossing, killing 1,200. The shocking death toll prompted a European Union summit later that month, where the continent’s leaders resolved to increase the number of ships patrolling the sea, ramp up law-enforcement efforts to quash human trafficking, and assist developing countries in tightening their borders.
As great as the risks are, the pressures pushing African migrants to cross over to Europe appear to be greater. While countries like China and India build a vibrant new middle class, almost half of Africans continue to live on less than a $1.25 a day, the World Bank’s threshold for extreme poverty. Although the continent possesses a wealth of oil, minerals, and other natural resources, corrupt government officials and unchecked multinational corporations have hoarded that wealth and left the populations of many African countries unemployed and desperate. And even as economic forecasts predict continued economic growth in Africa as a whole in the years ahead, water and food shortages, infectious diseases, climate change, and violent extremism pose existential threats to numerous communities.
Fearful of deportation, Blaise, an immigrant from Côte d’Ivoire, hides his face from a camera.
I ask Blaise about what brought him to Greece. Blaise can’t speak much Greek, so we chat in French, and eventually I persuade him to offer up some details about his personal background. Visibly nervous, he tells me he left behind his fourteen-year-old daughter in Côte d’Ivoire. He feels he had no choice. A disputed presidential election in his country sparked a civil war in 2010 pitting the soldiers of Alassane Ouattara, the election’s internationally recognized victor, against those of Laurent Gbagbo, the incumbent president. During the conflict, military forces on both sides allegedly killed and raped hundreds of civilians. When we start talking about the violence that brought him to Greece, Blaise becomes increasingly agitated. “Ouattara killed my father and mother!” he finally blurts out, raising his gloved hands to the sky.
The war ended just a year later—with Gbagbo defeated, captured, and brought before the Hague’s International Criminal Court to stand trial for crimes against humanity—but Blaise remains in Greece, hustling to survive on the streets. Like other African migrants, he sells the tin and plastic he picks out of trash cans to scrapyards. He eats at Catholic soup kitchens during the day, sleeping in parks or vacant buildings at night. And he watches, ever vigilantly, for the police. When I pull out a camera to snap his picture, Blaise lowers his cap and poses from behind—no face, please. He can’t take any chances.
Many African migrants are smuggled into Greece from Turkey, crossing the Mediterranean by boat. The thousands of tiny islands sprinkled throughout the waters near the Greek mainland make it easy for smugglers to evade authorities. Their efforts to sneak migrants in by boat greatly intensified in the 1990s. Nowadays, Turkish organized crime runs a brisk business shuttling people across the sea.
Daniel Okator, a twenty-five-year-old Nigerian migrant, made this crossing to Greece in 2013. Tall and gregarious, he chats to me after parking a cart chock full of scrap on the curb. He earns two or three euros a day, he says, scavenging steel from whatever discarded items he can find—TV sets, tables, sewing needles, metal roofing. His line of work has become big business in Greece: a recent documentary reports that half of the country’s annual steel production comes from these sorts of salvaged materials. Scrapyard operators pay scavengers like Daniel for their metal harvest and then drive it to the foundries to be melted down again.
At a nearby chapel, about twenty Catholic nuns—themselves transplants from Switzerland, Rwanda, India, and elsewhere—give the migrants clothes and serve them breakfast and lunch. Daniel typically spends half his day there, helping the nuns with their chores. The nuns have chosen him and several other migrants to serve as guards at the chapel, providing security whenever an occasional fist or knife fight breaks out among the migrants. At midday, however, the chapel closes, and Daniel is left to roam central Athens by himself, pushing his cart down the street in search of scrap metal—or, in the winter, riding buses to keep warm.
Daniel used to be a music student in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, but then Boko Haram struck the city. (Over the last several years, the jihadist group has killed and kidnapped thousands in its drive to establish an Islamic state within Nigeria, whose population is split almost evenly between Muslims and Christians.) In 2011, a suicide bomber drove a car rigged with explosives into a United Nations building in Abuja, killing twenty-three people. Boko Haram claimed responsibility. That brazen attack convinced Daniel—a Muslim himself—to leave the country.
Daniel got in touch with a member of a smuggling network. His connection was a “recruiter,” what law enforcement calls a network’s low-level operatives, who answer to its manager, or “coordinator.” Recruiters usually come from the same country as the people they seek to recruit. They talk up life in Europe to potential migrants, sign them up, and then collect the fees. In Daniel’s case, the price of a one-way covert trip to Greece was 1,800 euros.
The recruiter obtained a visa for Daniel from the local Turkish consulate. (In some African countries, it is easy to find corrupt public officials—border police, immigration officials, consulate employees—who will issue visas in exchange for bribes.) Daniel’s ultimate destination was Greece, but first he flew to Istanbul. He continued by land to Izmir, where he and twenty other migrants boarded a rust-covered boat. The voyage was short, only an hour, but the sea was rough and the boat engines rattled. Near the shores of the Greek island of Chios, the boat tipped over. Most of the passengers managed to swim to the shore. Two did not. “Swim!” the smuggler yelled at the group. No one went back to help the man and woman left behind.
Years later, Daniel still thinks about them. He will picture them in his mind, two human beings drowning slowly in the roiling waters, groping desperately for someone to latch onto.
For the most part, Greece has not welcomed the African masses that have come to its shores, yearning to breathe free. More than half of Africans migrants questioned in a 2013 survey conducted by Harokopio University said that there is widespread racism in Greek society. (Only a third of them, however, said that there is widespread racism within their own neighborhoods.) Stereotypes about immigrants abound here, as in many countries, and African migrants from poor or war-torn lands endure much of the more invidious prejudices. Recent fears about the spread of Ebola—crudely identified with the continent—have not helped matters. But the lousy economy seems to be a key driver of the nativist rage directed at this group. Anti-immigrant parties like Golden Dawn have been doing better at the polls ever since the economic crisis struck.
Landry Mbida is a thirty-six-year-old migrant from Cameroon. He has been in Greece a little over a year. Even though Landry, like most Cameroonians, is a Christian, he feels intensely isolated from Greek society. “When I get on the bus, people turn the other way round,” he says. “Some hold their noses, others change seats.”
Landry is a big man with dreadlocked hair, a broad nose, and a slightly protruding jaw—someone whose fierce facial features might easily intimidate—and it’s not always clear what role his race plays in the way he’s treated from day to day. That said, it is abundantly clear to him that he’s not welcome, for whatever reason, wherever he goes. When he left his home country, he first went to Istanbul. He quickly learned that Turkey was not the country for him. “They wouldn’t give me a job once they learned I am Christian,” he says. So Landry took a boat to Greece. When he reached the shores of the island of Chios, he was arrested and put in a detention center. After a month, he was transferred to another camp in Komotini, where he spent three more months.
Greece’s detention centers are notorious. Migrants are routinely crammed into shipping containers, living among rats and receiving scant medical care while they wait—sometimes for more than a year—to be deported. “I fell sick every day there,” Landry says. “They only gave us bread, lots of bread.” The lack of nourishment gave Landry chronic stomach cramps, and he had to be rushed to an outside hospital three times. “I asked for medicine, but they wouldn’t give it to me.”
Syriza, the left-wing Greek political party that won power in the January election, has started emptying the detention centers. It has promised to speed up the process for deciding asylum requests. And it has called for a new framework for granting legal status to migrants. Even if Syriza is successful in reforming the nation’s immigration policy, however, global problems of poverty and war will continue to lead desperate African migrants to Greece’s shores. And there is little in the way of a plan to deal with those who have been evacuated from the government’s detention centers. (Asked where the released migrants go, Tasia Christodoulopoulou, Syriza’s minister of immigration policy, said nonchalantly that they head to other European countries.)
For his part, Landry applied for asylum six months ago. He dreams of the day he will be able to share a house again with the wife and two young kids he left behind in Cameroon. Right now, he lives in a two-room shack inhabited by ten men. “No, six now,” he says, correcting himself. “Four left for Northern Europe on foot.” They are now in Serbia.
“But I really want a chance here!” Landry exclaims, suddenly perking up. “Not with this …” He points at the pile of scrap he has collected. “This isn’t a job.” At the end of the day he will cart the bounty to his Lebanese buyer, who pays just eighteen cents for a kilo of tin. “Eighteen cents! Eighteen cents!” he says, practically shouting.
The anger passes. Landry glances at his clothes: scruffy jeans and muddy athletic shoes, treasures from a dustbin and handouts from a charity.
“I want to be clean,” he says, smiling sheepishly.
Kevin came to Greece with the hope he could start a business and send money back to his wife and children in Nigeria. Instead, he barely survives on his own, living in a garage and rummaging through trash bins for metal to sell at scrapyards.
A homeless man has to have a code. On the streets, African migrants take turns rummaging through the same garbage cans. Blaise knows the rules. He steps away from his bin when he spots another migrant approaching with a cart. Recognizing the man, Blaise beckons him over.
Kevin—who refuses to give his full name for fear of deportation—is a Nigerian migrant in his early forties. Short and compact, he has a warm smile and, unlike Blaise, an apparent affinity for cameras. In the winter chill, he wears a flimsy beige jacket over a bright blue T-shirt, along with a pair of woolen gloves. They are gifts, he says, from “my Catholic sisters”—the nuns at the nearby chapel.
Three years ago, when he was living in Nigeria, Kevin came up with a business idea: buy clothes at a low price in Europe and resell them in his home country. The overseas venture meant that Kevin had to leave behind his wife and two children. Nevertheless, his father gave Kevin his blessing to go. The family needed money.
Soon after he made it to Europe, Kevin’s dream fell apart. He had hoped to get to Italy, where he has relatives, but his recruiter sent him to Greece. (Recruiters will often not tell migrants the route that they will take, or the country where they will land.) Today, Kevin lives in a dilapidated garage. He makes his living not by reselling clothes, but by scavenging for scrap. It’s a tough way to survive, and yet some native Greeks, he says, won’t even give him credit for his hard work.
“Why do Nigerians sell drugs?” a police officer once asked him.
“I don’t sell drugs,” Kevin replied, offended. “All fingers are not the same.”
It is usually the older Greeks who will insult migrants on the street; according to Kevin, the young tend to be more “relaxed.” (That said, Kevin’s fellow scavenger Daniel claims to have received five stitches to his leg after a gang of young men—interestingly, second-generation Albanian immigrants—harassed him and then set their dog on him.)
Kevin holds up a picture of one of the nuns at the nearby chapel, one of the few sources of assistance the migrants trust.
From Kevin’s point of view, the only people who actually go out of their way to help migrants like him are the nuns. When there isn’t enough scrap to fill their carts, he and his fellow scavengers turn to the nuns for food, water, clothes, and even cell-phone charging (on the street, finding an electrical outlet they can use is a special challenge). “If it weren’t for the Catholic sisters, we would have died,” says Kevin, a Catholic. Government-run food banks will offer them food, and hospitals will treat them for emergencies, but the migrants I spoke to felt closest to the nuns, who knew them personally.
The mother superior, who will only identify herself as “Sister Maria,” is a native of Switzerland. She is devoted to her work in the community, to the point that she becomes anxious when migrants (Algerian drug addicts, in one case) go without socks. People in Europe cannot understand what these people have been through, she says. She cringes when she describes the overcrowded conditions at the Amygdaleza detention center, which she and the other nuns visit every week. (Under the new government’s orders, Amygdaleza was recently evacuated.) The nuns bring the migrants not only food and sweets but also markers and notebooks. Some of them are so depressed by their confinement, she says, that they need a chance to work with their hands and find a creative outlet for their stress.
Of all his countrymen and women who have left their homeland in recent years, Kevin is one of the lucky ones. Hundreds have died at sea, but he survived. Many have traded poverty in Africa for poverty elsewhere, but he made it to Europe, a land of peace and prosperity. Nonetheless, things have not gone the way Kevin once hoped they would. These days, his bitterness threatens to overwhelm his good nature.
“Stay where you are,” he says when asked to give a word of advice to his fellow Africans on the other end of the ocean. “You don’t know what you’re getting into. You’re going to suffer.”
Postscript: A few months later, I learned that Kevin had been arrested and taken to the Petrou Ralli detention center. The nuns have visited him several times. As of April, he was still there.
Stav Dimitrοpoulos Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since.
Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav
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Best of In The Fray 2015. We had come to the Syrian border to help refugees from Kobani, a Kurdish city besieged by the Islamic State. In this corner of the country's unending civil war, another kind of conflict was being waged—for a city, a people, and a young democratic movement.
A camp in Suruç for refugees fleeing Kobani, a nearby Kurdish city under assault from the Islamic State.
We stand on an empty highway in South Turkey, twenty kilometers from the Syrian border. The dusty road leads to the city of Suruç. My husband and I are hitchhiking into a war zone, or at least the fringes of one. My heart thumps in my chest.
A yellow truck appears like a mirage in the distance. I stick out my thumb and the driver stops abruptly, kicking up a cloud of grey dust.
“Suruç?” he asks.
“Evet—yes,” I agree.
“Yardım?—to help?”
“Evet.”
The driver hands me his business card. He is none other than Suruç’s mayor, driving aid and supplies into the city himself. This is the first of many clues: everyone here is involved in the war effort.
It’s December 26, Boxing Day. Activists and volunteers have descended on Suruç to support Kurdish forces across the border in their fight against the Islamic State, a Sunni extremist group also known as ISIS. In the parts of Syria and Iraq that it now controls, ISIS has persecuted and displaced minorities. The victims of its highly publicized atrocities—rapes, forced marriages, beheadings, crucifixions—have included the Yezidis, a Kurdish religious group.
Through the truck window, a compound with rows of identical green-grey semicircle tents comes into view. “Çadır kent—tent city,” the Mayor tells me, pointing. We pass a second camp shortly afterward. A sign announces our arrival: “Suruç: Population 101,000.”
The population is now more than twice what it says on the sign. An estimated 150,000 people—mostly Kurds—have fled to Suruç from Kobani, another Kurdish city that is inside Syria. ISIS has taken over part of Kobani, trapping those civilians who remain between its militants and the closed Turkish border.
The Mayor asks where we want to go. I have scribbled instructions from a friend of a friend I met in Diyarbakir. It says we should report to Suruç’s city hall.
In the aftermath of World War I, the French and British divvied up a large swath of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, splitting up the Kurdish people across the region’s redrawn national boundaries. Since then, the Kurds have found themselves unwelcome throughout the Middle East, the targets of massacres, chemical attacks, and state-perpetrated “disappearances,” along with political repression and discrimination.
The ongoing rebellion against the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, however, has loosened the hold that Damascus had on the country’s Kurdish minority. In 2012, the Kurdish inhabitants of northern Syria took advantage of Assad’s retreating forces, declaring their region autonomous and naming it Rojava—Kurdish for “western.” (Rojava is the western part of what many Kurds consider to be Kurdistan, a culturally defined region that also includes large parts of southeastern Turkey, western Iran, and northern Iraq.)
The war has also brought the Kurds unprecedented news coverage. After the Islamic State began its siege of Kobani, the media called attention to not only the waves of Kurdish refugees but also the strength of Kurdish fighters—especially the women fighters—and the progressive stances that Kurdish political parties have taken on issues such as feminism and minority rights.
A few of the more astute commentators also mentioned the innovative system of governance—democratic self-management—being tested in Rojava. Equal rights are enshrined in the Rojava system. There are three official languages. Every canton is administered by three leaders—in theory, a Kurd, an Arab, and a Christian—with at least one of the three a woman. In practice, of course, most of these ideas have not filtered all the way down. Many Kurds still fight for a country of their own. But many others just want to coexist peacefully with other Syrians.
It strikes me how very normal Suruç looks, despite the war being only ten kilometers away. Shops, restaurants, and teahouses are open. People bustle about the streets. Men wearing red and white kaffiyeh on their heads loiter around the main square, chatting, smoking, and haggling with the merchants.
We saunter into the city hall shouldering our huge backpacks, tired and smelly after days spent hitchhiking around the frozen edges of Anatolia. The few men who stroll past us in the narrow corridors greet us formally despite our disheveled appearance.
I explain to one of them that we have come to help. Some of our friends have been here before, and they advised us to come to the city hall when we arrived, I say.
A man with a characteristically Turkish mustache points to some benches in the hallway. We sit. Soon tea arrives. Another man ushers us into a small office, where I repeat the same halting explanation to yet another man behind a desk. He nods politely, thanks us for coming, and directs us to the city’s cultural center, now a base of operations for the constant stream of activists and volunteers coming through the town. There, a girl who speaks good English points us to the distribution center down the road. She says they need help there now.
The distribution center is a converted wedding salon, filled with stacks of aid packages from around the globe. Groups of volunteers scoop the contents of big sacks into small clear bags, which are then flung onto growing mountains of red lentils, rice, sugar, and chickpeas.
At Suruç’s distribution center, volunteers prepare packages of food for the Kobani refugees.
We are warmly greeted by people who speak to us in Turkish, English, and German. Someone hands me a melting plastic cup of tea. “Parti mi?” a girl asks in Turkish. She wants to know if I’m here with a “party,” meaning any of the Kurdish political parties. “No,” I tell her, “just with my husband. You?”
“Evet, parti,” she nods, smiling. She demonstrates how one of us should hold the bags open while the other shovels lentils from the big sack into the smaller one—“not too much, like this, see?”—and then ties it and tosses it onto the stack.
This food, I am told, will go to refugees from Kobane who are living in residential buildings around the city.
The activity here is both methodical and chaotic. Nothing seems to run on a timetable, and people work when they feel like it. Nobody is visibly keeping track of who’s doing what or when. But somehow, everything just gets done.
Every ten minutes, someone asks if I want tea. One man in particular seems very concerned that I drink enough of it. He brings a steaming thermos and small stack of plastic cups around regularly.
Around 7 p.m. a bell rings. We follow the people wandering outside to a van that has just arrived. Two men in the back scoop lentil stew from an enormous metal pot onto flimsy plastic plates.
That night we drive out to Mahser, the last village before the Syrian border—and the raging war beyond it.
A sign says “Çaykara.” The village’s local name is Mahser, but officially it is Çaykara—like all Kurdish settlements in Turkey, it had its name changed during the previous century as part of the government-enforced Turkification process.
We are now a mere kilometer from Syria. In the village, I spot a friend. She is perched on a block of concrete where someone has painted the word “Kobani” in the Kurdish colors of green, red, and yellow. My friend, like myself, is something of a nomad. She has a long-held interest in Kurdistan and the wider Middle East, and has been writing a blog about the region for some years under the pseudonym “Iris.”
Iris is watching the Kobani skyline, just visible in the distance. “We always meet in interesting places,” I tell her, just as a fiery mushroom cloud sprouts from the horizon, accompanied by a mighty boom. My heart drops through the floor.
When they hear us speaking English, a crowd of men gather and begin firing questions. Iris speaks Turkish more or less fluently and has a working knowledge of Kurdish. I let her do the talking.
We’re invited to drink tea by some of the men. We follow them through the village and enter a small room where about fifteen men sit on the floor. They each stand to greet us, and motion for us to sit.
“Parti mi?” Iris asks.
All the men around us nod slowly. Iris points to a sign on the wall advertising the HDP—the Peoples’ Democratic Party, a Kurdish left-wing political party in Turkey. “HDP?”
The man closest to us looks at her. “Actually, we are all PKK,” he says.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, is a notorious Kurdish political organization. From 1984 to 1999, the party fought an armed struggle to establish an independent Kurdistan within Turkish territory. Since the capture of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999, and his subsequent shift in political views, the organization has moved away from its Marxist-Leninist roots and recast itself as a nonhierarchical social movement working on behalf of autonomy and rights for all minorities. Despite its more moderate approach in recent years, the PKK remains on the Turkish, EU, and US terrorist lists.
Iris decides this is a fantastic time to quiz the men about Ocalan, who is still the party’s leader—and still inside a Turkish island prison somewhere in the Sea of Marmara. In recent years Ocalan has come out in favor of environmental protection, gender equality, and rights for LGBT and ethnic minorities. So what explains the discrepancy, Iris asks, between those progressive views and what she’s seeing on the ground—nonrecyclable plastic dishes, women doing most of the housework, entrenched patriarchal views?
The man nearest us nods slowly, politely considering this criticism. “You know,” he says, “these things take time.”
It’s 10 a.m. sharp. Men, women, and children gather by the line of red tape that separates the village from a field—the only thing between them and the Kalashnikov fire echoing in the distance.
A semicircle forms and quickly expands. This is the daily demonstration, a show of solidarity with the PKK and YPG (Syrian Kurdish militia) forces fighting right across the border. “Freedom to Kurdistan! Freedom to Kobani!” the crowd shouts in unison. “We are PKK, PKK is us! We are YPG, YPG is us!”
In Mahser, a crowd gathers near Turkey’s border with Syria, rallying in support of Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State a short distance away.
The crowd goes on to recite a string of other well-rehearsed slogans that I can neither understand nor follow. After they’ve run out of chants, they extend their well-wishes to the fighters and, at the very end, to Apo—their affectionate nickname for Ocalan.
I hear gunfire ricochet through the streets beyond the field. What can it be like over there? I’ve heard that around 7,000 civilians chose to stay in the city when the Islamic State began its assault.
I meet a woman just before leaving Mahser. She’s from Kobani and doesn’t speak Turkish, but somehow we’re able to communicate through basic words and gestures. The woman tells me she has three sons fighting in Kobani. Her eyes remain fixed on the hazy outline of the city, as if she hopes to catch sight of them.
While I watched the war from across the field, Italian journalist Francesca Borri was trying to escape it.
Several days earlier, Francesca had been smuggled over the Syrian border into Kobani. She had left after coming under mortar fire from the Islamic State. “The point is not getting in, as usual,” Francesca tells me when we meet up in Suruç. “The point is getting out.” She says she was refused reentry into Turkey by Turkish border guards, who told her, “No, no, you went to Kobani. You have Kurdish friends, stay with them!”
I ask her about the civilians inside the city she just left. So far, they’re doing alright, she says: the Kurdish fighters look after them, and they are staying in their own homes on one side of the city. Around half are children. “I mean, of course, it’s a war,” Francesca says. “Kobani isn’t Paris. But I would say that compared to other wars, it’s a good situation for civilians.”
Francesca describes three levels of fighting inside Kobani—Kalashnikov fire exchanged on the frontline, heavy artillery shells lobbed into the city by the Peshmerga (Kurdish Iraqi forces who have entered Syria to assist in the fight against the Islamic State), and aerial bombardment by the US-led coalition. “The battle is mortar fire and rocket fire from one extreme to the other of the city, so you just stay in the middle—and if you’re lucky, nothing is dropped on your head.”
Francesca is a seasoned war correspondent, having spent much of the last two and a half years reporting on Syria. To her, the war raging in Kobani is “a war within a war”—a war for the future Kurdistan wedged into the sprawling and endless conflict in Syria.
In Mahser, the sound of gunfire was constant. Back in Suruç, I feel safe and far from the fighting. Inside the cultural center, people sit in small groups and converse in a mélange of languages: Kurmanji, Turkish, Arabic, Italian, English. Many are Kurds from other parts of Turkey. Some are members of the diaspora who grew up in European countries such as Germany or Switzerland.
Then there is Darlene. Originally from Ireland, Darlene O’Carroll is currently studying in Copenhagen. She has come to Suruç for her Christmas holiday.
Darlene tells me she decided to make the trip after watching news footage of the devastation in Kobani. “When I should have been working, I was looking at all the images. There were a few that just kind of pulled at my heartstrings.”
On Darlene’s first day in the city, a Kurdish man from Iran showed her around. “This was my first shock,” she says. “He’s Mormon. His family were executed by the Iranian government. His uncle sent him to India to study IT, and when he came back, he worked for a cable company, and he had his own store….” Darlene pauses for a moment. “His plan is to finish up here … and then go to Kobani to fight. I asked him, ‘How long are you staying?’ And he just said, ‘Until I die.’ It was like … ‘Until I finish this cup of tea …’” Darlene shakes her head. “It probably won’t hit me fully until I go back to Denmark.”
Since she arrived, Darlene has been helping with wiring electricity in the camps. She also works with a Kurdish theater group from Istanbul that gives refugee children here a creative outlet to express themselves through improvisation and roleplaying.
Today, Darlene has been invited to join a daf workshop in a camp at the edge of the city. (A daf is a large frame drum, popular throughout the Middle East.) I tag along.
A group of children, mostly young teenage and preteen girls, fill one of the tents. The walls are decorated with pictures of Kurdish musicians, drawings of animals, and the word “Kobani” drawn neatly in pastel colors.
One of the youngest girls can say a few words of English. When we answer her questions, the other children’s eyes grow wide. They prod her to ask us more.
Initially camera shy, the children slowly get used to our presence. One of the two boys is a master daf player and models for my camera. Before long, some of the younger girls are posing too and taking pictures of each other.
A daf drum workshop at a refugee camp in Suruç.
Later, I will read that there are 1.7 million Syrian refugees and asylum-seekers in Turkey—half of them children.
Later that night, Iris and I are walking the dark and dusty streets of Suruç when we hear the murmurs of a thumping rhythm carried on the wind. Iris knows exactly what it is—”A wedding!”
We follow the beat, which soon becomes a cacophony of drums and whoops. We turn a corner and find a hundred people dancing in a winding circle across the street. Young boys dash between legs. A man fires a shotgun repeatedly into the air, while another holds fireworks in his bare hands and shoots them into the sky. A small circle within the larger circle of dancers carries a man aloft on a chair. It is the groom. His shirt is in disarray, his face smeared with paint. He wears an exhausted grin—Kurdish weddings last three days and nights.
We stand and watch the spectacle until we are noticed. A man who speaks English brings two chairs and sits down to chat with us. A woman serves us tea. Some of the young girls shyly sneak glances at the two foreigners.
I tell Darlene about our adventure later that night. She smiles. “They love seeing people from other countries here—I can really feel that. In the camps, they invite you in for dinner, and they say to you in the shops, ‘You know, if you don’t have a bed to sleep in tonight, you can stay here with us.’ There’s always somebody handing you food, there’s always someone handing you a cup of tea. At nighttime, if you’re cold, they’re always pulling blankets up over you. They really try and look after you.”
It’s our final night in Suruç. My husband and I lie in our tent in a small garden behind the cultural center. It’s the weekend, and dozens of new volunteers have arrived. Both of the center’s visitor rooms and the two heated tents behind us are full, and a group of young Kurdish men are sleeping in the main room.
The ground shakes every so often throughout the night, as the US-led coalition forces drop bombs on Islamic State targets in Kobani. The blasts are not so loud from here, and they would be indistinguishable from the growl of truck motors on the road outside were it not for the quaking earth.
A rumor, reportedly from one of the YPG fighters, says Kobani will be freed in the next two or three days. The prediction turns out to be wrong—about the date, that is. A few weeks later, a man I met in the distribution center sends me pictures of the liberation of Kobani. They show a Kurdish red, green, and yellow flag being raised over a hill overlooking the city, replacing the black Islamic State flag that previously flew there.
Today, the residents of Kobani are slowly beginning to return to their homes. Much of the city remains uninhabitable after months of fighting and destruction. The long rebuilding process is now underway.
Meanwhile, Kurdish forces continue to fight in neighboring areas. Many other communities across Syria and Iraq are still occupied by ISIS.
But Kobani is free. When I saw the photos of its liberation, I imagined the celebrations in the cultural center, and the wild all-night dancing around fires in Mahser. I wish I could have stayed to see it, and I wonder what the future will bring.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
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