Hi everybody, I hope you are doing fine and well. It feels like ages since I’ve been here; yeah it must have been more than six months. Well, I disappeared from the scene since I’ve had some personal and social issues I’ve to deal with. I’m back and kicking hehe. The biggest surprise is, I got my permission to stay here after waiting almost a decade in Sweden; the biggest load off my shoulder. So I’ve now the magic number you know what I mean personnummer (social security number) one of the keys which open doors in many places here in this country. I don’t have to worry about the person behind the counter or the people who are sitting in the waiting room who frown their faces every time I say “Jag har ingen personnummer”. I can go to bars or discotheques and flash confidently my Swedish ID whenever I want without being worried about the bouncer’s utter dismay at the sight of my LMA ( not valid refugees’ ID card given by the Swedish migration board). Here is a bitter-sweet twist however, I can travel everywhere in the world but to my home country Ethiopia. I almost cried when I saw those notifications on my travel document. Hmm, you can take a person from Ethiopia but you will never take his/her heart from Ethiopia. For someone who has never been a refugee this may sound crazy or sadomasochistic love affair; but for millions of exiled people around the world, the attachment and the nostalgia towards our countries we fled for various reasons from are as strong as the mountains. Misery has been the soundtrack of my childhood and adult life in my home country but that doesn’t necessarily mean there are things which I miss. I love my country with all its beauty, imperfections, ugliness, kindness, cruelness , whatever.

No pain No gain

There is a price to be paid to gain something. I want to wake up every morning with birds singing, dogs barking from near and afar, roosters crowing, churches’ bells ringing, children fighting but these small things which I took them for granted are now far away dreams. I want to be woken up with mixtures of smells of a tea, kerosine, freshly baked bread but I can’t and what is worse I won’t able to enjoy these things in the near future until the regime in my country is ousted which is very unlikely. I want to attend funerals ( I lost two close family members in matter four months span last year), birthdays and graduations of my niece ( she was 7 or 8 years old when I left her), weddings of my friends and family members and I want to put wreaths on the tombs of my relatives but all these wishes are far-fetched, an unattainable. I wouldn’t have to wait six months or travel thousand miles to enjoy the sunshine; it was there 365 days a year but I wasn’t really giving a damn about it. Right now, it feels like a high school graduate who doesn’t know which way to go; back to square one. I think I complained too much, n’est pas? Well, I’ll start SFI ( Swedish Language For Immigrants) tomorrow. I’m grateful at least after I met my fellow Ethiopian the other day who shared me his worries about being deported back home after living eight years here in Sweden. Do you remember Narek, the Armenian asylum seeking painter with two kids and a wife? He e-mailed me a couple of months ago and told me that he is still waiting for the migration board’s decision if he and his young family would be allowed or not to stay in Sweden. Stories like these make me think to make a lemonade when life gives me a lemon. I hope, thousands of people like Narek will be granted the protection they deserve to lead a stable, fruitful and happy life in order to give back to their new homeland, Amen!

Theodros Arega

Exiled Ethiopian Journalist