Imagine you’re at home.
Imagine your home, your job, your wife, your hope is brutally taken from you.
Imagine you’re set adrift in a sea of refugees.
Imagine you end up in a country you’ve never heard of, with no home, no wife, no job, no hope.
Imagine how you would feel.
Imagine someone helps you.
That was the premise with which I began writing my book ‘This Is Where I Am’. My husband Dougie had been volunteering with Scottish Refugee Council, and also been working as a refugee mentor in a scheme called ‘Time Together’, run by the Glasgow Volunteer Centre and Scottish Refugee Council.
He was coming home with stories which, quite frankly, made me angry. People who had suffered terrible trauma and indignities, just to get to Scotland. People who’d been granted refuge, then got lost in the system – slipping through the net with housing, education, not knowing who to ask for help, and being given wrong information when they did. People that had been seeking asylum here for several years suddenly being whisked out of their communities and sent back ‘home’. People made destitute while their appeals were heard.
As a writer though, you can’t use a book as a soapbox. The challenge was to write a novel that gave voice to all these desperate situations, in a way that wasn’t overwhelming, that entertained as well as revealed, and that had light as well as shade. So I picked two characters to tell my story – Abdi, a Somali man who has been granted refugee status, and Debs, a middle-aged woman who befriends him.
Set in Glasgow (which meant I could inject plenty of Glasgow humour!), the book takes place over one year, as the two characters meet each month in a different part of the city, and we learn why Abdi came to Glasgow and why Debs has become a mentor. Some scenes are set around Scottish Refugee Council, which gave me the chance to highlight the plight of various asylum seekers, while still focusing on Abdi.
Sadly, UK Border Agency funding for ‘Time Together’ has been withdrawn, and the scheme no longer operates. But the good work of Scottish Refugee Council continues every day. All the time I was writing, I kept thinking ‘what if this was me?’ Obviously, I’m not – and never will be – a Somali man. But most of us have been abroad. We know how it feels when you’re not sure of your surroundings; when you can’t communicate in your native tongue – you feel small; stupid; confused. That is not the person you are, but it’s the person you’re made to feel.
We all know how it feels to be alone.
This Is Where I Am is published by Bloomsbury.
Read an extract of This Is Where I Am.
Learn more about refugee destitution and sign the petition at stopdestituton.org.uk.
