LEWISTON – Sukura Muhamed doesn’t sleep when she knows her sister is coming in the morning with a phone card.
She makes the night pass by watching infomercials and reruns of “Judge Joe Brown.” The noise from the television makes her feel less lonely, even though she can’t understand what anyone is saying.
At 3:30 a.m., the time of her first daily prayer, she lowers her head, crosses her arms and recites pages from the Koran.
Then she raises her arms in front of her, cups her hands and asks Allah to help her find her family, or at least someone in Kenya who knows them, who has seen them, who can assure her they are OK.
The 35-year-old mother believes her husband and seven children are still living in Kenya. They fled to a refugee camp there more than four years ago to hide from the Ethiopian government and its militant supporters.
Sukura’s sister, Nimo, keeps a list of people who may live close to the camp, names and numbers collected from other African immigrants in Lewiston.
She and Sukura try to reach them whenever they have enough money to buy a calling card. They usually cannot get a line into the country.
When they do get through, they quickly try to explain what they need: someone to go to the refugee camp where Sukura believes her family is living, find her husband and help him get in touch with her.
But something always goes wrong.
They get disconnected in the middle of the conversation. The minutes on the calling card run out. Or the person simply cannot help.
“My sister, she cries and cries. It’s the only time I see her cry. I tell her it’s going to be OK. I tell her that one day they’ll come,” Nimo said.
Confined
Sukura knows that bringing her family here will not be easy.
The first step is convincing immigration officials that she deserves to be here, that going back to Ethiopia would have put her in danger of being raped again, maybe even killed.
“The fact that she has a bullet wound and is paralyzed was good proof of that,” said Robyn March, a Portland lawyer who volunteered her services to help reunite Sukura with her husband and children.
Sukura came to the United States in June 2001 on a six-month humanitarian visa. The U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia granted the temporary visa after Sukura’s friends argued that she would die without advanced medical care.
Since Sukura never learned to read or write, she understood little about what she needed to do to stay longer.
It wasn’t until after she moved from Atlanta, Ga., to Lewiston in 2003 that she got legal help and began the lengthy process of applying for asylum.
Along with her application, Sukura submitted medical records, information about the dangerous region of Ethiopia where she lived and a nine-page statement.
It took months, but the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services eventually scheduled an interview.
Once a waitress who loved to get dressed up and dance, Sukura went to Boston in December to tell an immigration officer how she ended up paralyzed from the hips down.
More than two months later, she is still waiting for a response.
Eye shadow
In Sukura’s barren apartment on Knox Street in Lewiston, dark green curtains hang from every window. Sukura keeps them drawn to trap the heat. She rarely leaves the apartment now that it is winter.
She spends entire days covered in blankets on a rickety hospital bed in the corner of her living room. When she needs to go to the bathroom, she uses a wooden board to slide herself into her wheelchair.
Neighbors and friends – mostly Somali women with young children – stop by throughout the day. They sit on Sukura’s only furniture, foam cushions and a thin mattress, and watch soap operas.
Those who speak English translate for her.
Sukura brushes her long black hair with a wet comb and puts on eye shadow every morning. Then, as Muslim tradition requires, she wraps a scarf around her head to cover everything but her face.
Her fingernails and toenails are always painted in rose polish.
“It makes me feel alive. It gives me a reason to get up,” she said, speaking through a Somali translator.
Three men
Sukura had just put moisturizing oil in her hair on that day in February 1998, when the three men showed up with guns and knives.
They dragged her husband out of the house, then locked her and her children inside. Sukura couldn’t get out until the next day when the milkman showed up and unlocked the door.
She ran outside to find her husband’s body sprawled in the front yard. The men had slashed his throat and put a bullet through his head.
They killed him because he was a translator, bilingual in Somali and the Ethiopian language of Amharic, and they believed he was involved with a rebel group fighting against the Ethiopian government to liberate Ogaden.
Located in eastern Africa, Ogaden is inhabited by mostly Somalis who have been fighting for their independence since the mid-1950s when Italy gave the region to Ethiopia.
One of the most prominent opposition groups is the Ogaden National Liberation Front. The Ethiopian government has been accused of looting, raping and killing thousands of people believed to be associated with the group.
Sukura fainted when she saw her husband’s body.
Unlike many women in Africa, whose husbands were chosen for them, Sukura fell in love with Arab Abdi Omar before she married him. They met while she was working as a waitress in her parents’ small restaurant.
He was a regular, and he went out of his way to talk to her.
“He was a nice person,” she said. “He was a calm person, not a crazy teenager.”
Sukura was 18 when she married Arab. Within eight years, they had five sons and two daughters.
“He was a good father,” she said, “a good support.”
Another knock
For more than a year after her husband was killed, Sukura cried whenever she saw a father with his children. She could see the three men who killed her husband whenever she closed her eyes. She imagined the look on his face as they ran the sharp blade across his throat.
“That was my biggest pain then,” she said. “That’s all I could think about.”
About 15 months later, the vivid images were replaced by another knock on the door. This time, the government sent four men.
They were looking for Arab Abdi Omar’s brother, who married Sukura three months after Arab’s death so that she and her children would not starve.
“You have to do what you have to do,” Sukura said. “Alone, I would have nothing for my kids.”
Sukura was stirring a pot of rice and meat, with a green-tea mask on her face, when the men arrived. Her five oldest children were still at school, and the other two were visiting a relative. Sukura wrapped a scarf around her head and hurried to the door.
The men demanded to see her husband.
Two of them forced their way inside. As Sukura tried to tell them that her husband wasn’t home, they ripped off her scarf and pushed her to the ground. She was crawling across her kitchen floor when one of the men grabbed her and pushed her down.
“I tried to get up, but I couldn’t,” she said.
One of the men raped her. Then, as she was struggling to get away, she heard, “Kill her.” A gun went off.
Sukura woke up eight hours later on the dirty floor of a hospital in Ethiopia. Her pants were soaked in blood, her head resting in vomit.
She couldn’t move her legs.
Rare occurrence’
Sukura spent several weeks in a crowded health clinic, waiting for a doctor to stitch the hole in her back. She eventually was transferred to a larger clinic, then to a hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital.
While there, she contacted a Somali family she had helped in the early 1990s. The family fled to Ethiopia at the start of the civil war in Somalia, and Sukura invited them to stay at her home until they found a place of their own.
Now it was their turn to return the favor.
Sukura lived with them for a year-and-a-half while they raised money to buy her an airplane ticket to America.
Her leg was twice its size, swollen from a infection that traveled from her back, when the family took her to the U.S. Embassy. They convinced officials to give her a special humanitarian visa reserved for the most desperate cases.
“I think it was a rare occurrence of someone in the embassy having tremendous sympathy for Sukura,” March said.
Sukura chose to go to Atlanta, because she knew that Nimo, one of her father’s 21 other children, was living there.
She boarded the airplane alone with a small bag and Nimo’s phone number. When she got to the airport, she rolled her wheelchair to a corner and waited until a Somali taxi driver approached her and asked if she needed help.
Nimo assumed her sister was dead until her phone rang on that spring day in 2001. Sukura was at the airport and needed someone to pick her up and take her to the hospital.
Refugee camp
The two sisters hadn’t seen each other for more than 20 years.
In 1977, the Soviet Union joined Ethiopia in its fight over Ogaden, and the bloody battles spread into every village.
Sukura and her family closed up their business and walked for five days through the hot jungle to a refugee camp in Somalia.
Sukura was 5 at the time. More than 30 years later, she can still feel the branches pulling at her hair and the tight grip of her mother’s hand.
“I remember very well,” she said. “You can’t forget what happened.”
Sukura spent nearly five years at the refugee camp before her parents decided to return to Ogaden and reopen their business. She went with them, leaving some of her older siblings behind.
Nimo was living in Atlanta when she heard that Sukura had been shot. She tried calling Ethiopia many times but she couldn’t get through.
“I couldn’t believe it when she called,” Nimo said. “The last time I saw her, she was a baby. She didn’t have these problems.”
Sukura spent a month at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, where doctors treated her for free. As soon as the infection in her lower back was gone, she moved to a third-floor apartment with Nimo and her family.
Dirt parking lot
In the spring of 2003, the entire family came to Lewiston after other immigrants promised it was a safe city filled with nice people.
Sukura applied for asylum shortly after arriving here, which made her eligible to receive state aid for food and health care. She moved to an apartment with her elderly step-mother – her father’s first wife and Nimo’s mother.
Their small, rundown apartment on Park Street had narrow doorways and no wheelchair ramp.
Whenever Sukura had a doctor’s appointment, her stepmother rolled her to the front door and waited for someone to walk by. It took four people to carry her down the four cement steps.
“I worried every night about a fire,” she said. “I thought, How am I going to get out, how am I going to get out?'”
Sukura occasionally asked someone to roll her to the dirt parking lot next to the apartment building. She liked to sit there with the sun on her face.
“It made me feel like a blind person who could see,” she said, closing her eyes and letting her head drop back.
After about a year on Park Street, Sukura and her stepmother moved to a building on Knox Street with a ramp and handicap showers.
Now, instead of a dirt parking lot, she has Kennedy Park.
Waiting
In the summer, she liked to watch kids run around the playground. She prayed that her own children, now between the ages of 10 and 18, were safe, having fun somewhere.
“I think about them all of the time. I dream about them, about them coming to live here,” she said.
Shortly after Sukura was shot, her new husband took the children to Kenya because he was afraid the government was still looking for them. They’ve been there since.
Sukura’s lawyer, March, has filed a petition with the U.S. Embassy in Kenya to bring Sukura’s husband and children here. But the government will not begin to process the application until Sukura is granted asylum.
March has warned Sukura that if and when she is approved for asylum, it could be another two years before she sees her family.
First, her children and husband must be found. Then, she has to prove that they belong to her. Without birth certificates, the government may require blood tests.
As Sukura continues to wait, with her portable phone always within reach, she wonders if her younger children remember her.
She worries that they are angry with her for leaving. She wants them to know she is doing all she can, including practicing her English so she is more prepared to fight for them.
It has been nearly two years since Sukura has spoken to her family. The last time she reached them, she had just moved from Atlanta to Lewiston. As she updated her husband on her whereabouts, she could hear one of her children ask, “When can she send us some money?”
Sukura started to reply.
“You are coming to me one day,” she said, before realizing that the phone had gone dead.
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