Zola | My Site

MY LIFE STORY

My name is Zola (15) and I currently live with my mother and two of my older brothers in Cairo, and this is my life story.

My mother, my brothers and I arrived in 2016 as refugees in Egypt.

My father and mother lived in the same town where both graduated from high school in Massawa, Eritrea. Though they had few opportunities after studying, they still managed to stabilize the family. My dad used to work as a bank teller and mom was working as a translator (English, Amharic and Arabic) and as a business woman. We were living in Asmara and went to an Eritrean school there. Our life was good until military men forced my dad to join the military and later on he was demanded to serve for an unlimited period in the national service. My mom became a single mother from that time and started taking care of us while she kept struggling. Our father fled the country in 2015 and policemen kept coming to our home and asked with violence about the whereabouts of my father. We did not know where my father had gone to and we have had no contacts with him since he left. My mom didn’t want us to have the same fate as our father so she left the country in 2016, for us to have quality education, have opportunities after studying and not to face the same misfortune as our father. She knew about the route to Egypt from Eritreans in Egypt and knew that it would cost money. I was 10 at the time and my brothers were 16 and 17.

We left Eritrea in a small Toyota car and went to Sudan. We stayed in Khartoum for 10 days and were told that it would take 2 days to travel from Khartoum to Aswan. It, however, went different. We first went with a normal car from Khartoum to Atbara. Here we changed to a white Toyota pick-up car (4-wheel drive) that carried 13 people. They made us wait until midnight before we left. We reached the Egyptian border in around 1.5 days. We saw men dressed in black (Egyptian border police) and our driver turned back and waited in a cave area. He covered the car with mud and after sunset we started moving again. We were this time able to cross the border without being noticed and reached Aswan around four days after we left Khartoum. We survived through Gods help because we had ran out of water and did not get any water for twelve hours. They took us to a place full with skeletons near Aswan, both human and animals. I was afraid in the Sahara desert and when I saw the skeletons. The men used to say I may end up like the skeleton if I made any kind of noise. Here they came to pick up my mother, me and my brothers and an unknown man with a truck that was covered with cloth against the sun. The women were told to wear the hijab and the men were told to hide. These were the people that brought us to a cave near Aswan. In the cave we saw other Eritreans who had arrived. There were also men with guns who separated the people who had paid from the people who had not paid. They took us after 6.00 pm to the train station for a third class train to Cairo. The women were told to wear the hijab and we were told not to talk in that train because if Egyptians would discover that we were not Egyptian they would return us to Sudan. In Cairo a man picked us up from the train and took us to Ardelewa where my mom’s friend was waiting.

We came to Egypt thinking about the service and the support the UNHCR would give us but it was the opposite. We registered as refugee with the UNHCR. They created two files, one for my brother since he had reached the age 18 and one for my mom, my younger brother and me. My mom, younger brother and I first obtained a yellow card in three months. My brother received the yellow card days later and was told to hand in his original birth certificate from Eritrea. He never got this back until now. We later obtained the blue card in about 1.5 years. The UNHCR provided us with three months of financial support, around 600 EgP per month. After we obtained the yellow card, they stopped. They told mom your son Novel is old enough to take care of the family. He had become 18 when we were going through the Sahara.

Life was difficult in Egypt, we didn’t enter school for one year and we couldn’t move independently because of the women’s situation in the country where many women face harassment or mistreatment. My mother especially restricts me to go out because I’m a girl and I may face harassment or cunning by some men. Mom had difficulties in finding a job. My eldest brother and mom started working and their income was 3000 Egyptian pounds per month each. My brother worked as part time translator (from English to Tigrinya) for a YouTube account while my mom was working as a house maid. Later, my brother graduated from Found Africa high school (Sudanese curriculum) and couldn’t enter public university because he is an Eritrean and he had a Sudanese high school diploma so he wasn’t allowed to enter public university. A private university is too expensive for a refugee family like us with a single mother. My brothers worked for a food delivery company. This ended after three months because the company said they wanted to focus more on other countries.

My eldest brother was taking online courses with CRS teaching and my younger brother is studying senior 3 at STARS. I started studying at C.A.W.U. learning centre in order to develop and improve my education and receive a high school diploma and gradually join a college or university to follow my aspirations to become a lawyer and develop my hobbies in becoming a music producer and also learn the essence of acting.

In 2018, the “Save The Children” organization funded my mother to open a business in selling traditional clothes and other stuff but the business didn’t go well so my mother stopped the business because in this country, most of the Habesha people (Eritreans & Ethiopians) don’t have the comfort or better work opportunities to balance the earning and spending in their continuous life style. Eventually, my mother went back to her previous job as a house maid.