693: Abdi the American

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

Ira Glass

In a big hall on a pier in Portland, Maine, walls of windows looking out on the water, Abdi Nor, wearing a royal blue three-piece suit, American flag tie, American flag pin on his lapel.

Ira Glass

This was recorded three weeks ago. Abdi and 45 others from 25 countries were becoming US citizens. And just before the ceremony started, Abdi was told that he will be leading the entire group at the end in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Ira Glass

It's been a long journey to this moment for Abdi, starting in 2013. We did a whole episode of our show years ago, built around recordings that Abdi made during that difficult journey to America. And today, to commemorate his new status as our fellow citizen, we thought we would replay that story with some updates at the end.

His odyssey began when he won something called the Diversity Visa Lottery, or the DV Lottery. If you've never heard of this, it sounds like the kind of thing that can't be real. But it's been around since the '90s, run by the United States government every year. The original idea of it was to get a more varied group of immigrants from a diversity of countries into our country.

The Trump administration has cut some of the eligible countries from the list, but the lottery is still operating. Over 14 million people applied for the 2020 lottery, with over 80,000 winners. Back in 2013, Abdi found out he won in a cyber cafe in Kenya.

Abdi was a Somali refugee back then, living in Kenya. His next tape I'm going to play you was from those days, so you'll hear Abdi's American accent is not as good as it is now. He remembers the moment that he won this way. He sat down on his computer.

Ira Glass

Everybody went nuts, lifted him up in the air in his chair. But Abdi didn't believe it. He asked his friends to put him down and started entering his information into the computer again and again.

Ira Glass

Moving to America seemed like a done deal. But he didn't know the half of it. Winning the lottery was especially a big deal for Abdi because really more than anybody he knew, Abdi had been obsessed with America since he was little. As a kid growing up in Mogadishu, Somalia, he'd go to the movies, which, in Mogadishu, just meant a TV perched on a table in a shack. And he would bring a pen and paper to watch American films so he could write down any words he didn't know and learn the language better.

He became known to people as the guy who could translate the movie for you. Stuff would happen on screen and everybody would turn to Abdi, who would shout out, "He says he's about to kill that guy." He pronounced his English like an American. That's why his accent is so amazing when you hear him, which led to his nickname that all his friends called him.

Ira Glass

And as he got older, he devoted himself to the goal of getting to America, not only studying English, but also teaching it. He did some radio stories in English. And you can totally understand why he'd want to leave his country, right? He grew up in Somalia. For years, there was no functioning government. It was rival warlords, and militias, and just anarchy, dangerous and violent. There were bombings and attacks from the terrorist group, Al-Shabaab, which is affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

Abdi says, for him, or really for any man in his 20s in Somalia, it's hard to stay out of the fight. You can't just be neutral and go about your life. He tells stories of Al-Shabaab members threatening him to join them, or else. At one checkpoint on the way to his mom's, they told him basically, next time you come through here, you better be one of us.

So it was that, or join the government forces who were fighting Al-Shabaab. Or he could flee the country. You know those boats full of people trying to cross the Mediterranean to get to Europe, and sometimes they sink, and hundreds of people drown? Abdi knows people who've gone on those boats and on boats like them to escape to Yemen.

Ira Glass

Several times, Abdi planned to take one of those boats. But he had trouble getting the money together. And eventually, his mom talked him out of it. So instead, he escaped across the border to Kenya. Somalia and Kenya are next to each other.

Abdi moved to Nairobi, enrolled in a university, tried twice for a student visa to America, was denied both times. And if he hadn't gotten lucky that day in the cyber cafe, he said he would be looking again in getting on a boat.

Ira Glass

The thing about the lottery, though, what Abdi learned is that it does not guarantee you a life in America. And in fact, it's just the first step. After you win, you have to wait more than a year. Then you show up at an American embassy for an interview.

And you have to gather all kinds of paperwork to bring with you-- medical documents and school transcripts and a criminal background check. Everything has to be perfect, every I dotted. The tiniest mistake means that you can be denied for good. In fact, most years, over half the people who win the lottery never get their visas. They don't make it to America.

And right away after winning the lottery, Abdi got a bad break. The police in Nairobi, Kenya, where he lived, started raiding houses, looking to round up all the Somalis like him and kick them out of the country. We have a very unusual, day by day record of what happened to Abdi, because a BBC reporter named Leo Hornak wanted to document this process and started calling Abdi every night. This is one of their very first recordings.

Ira Glass

By there, he means a place called Kasarani, a giant soccer stadium that Kenyan authorities and police were using as a makeshift jail to hold hundreds of refugees.

Ira Glass

This call happened on April 17, 2014. Abdi had 96 days to go before his interview at the US embassy, which would be scheduled for July 22nd. Leo started calling him every day. He was worried for him. Like I say, over half the people who win this lottery never make it to the United States. Would Abdi succeed?

Over the next three months, he faced a horrifying obstacle course. It's just like one seemingly impossible task after another. At several points, he's afraid for his life. And his story is the story of so many people around the world who are desperately trying to make it to America, to become one of us.

Ira Glass

OK, so you remember where we are. Abdi is about to be taken into custody by the police. Here's Leo Hornak.

Leo Hornak

So here's why the police were raiding Abdi's neighborhood in Nairobi. Al-Shabaab, the very group Abdi moved to Kenya to escape, had been ramping up terrorist attacks inside Kenya. You may remember one of the biggest ones.

Leo Hornak

In September 2013, Al-Shabaab gunmen trapped hundreds of people in a mall for days and killed 67. And the way the Kenyan government responded to these terrorist attacks was the way governments often do in these situations-- with a huge crackdown on the community they held responsible. Al-Shabaab is from Somalia, so they go after Somali refugees living in Kenya.

The government is trying to clear them out of Kenya's cities and move them to camps in the country, or deport them back to Somalia. And in Nairobi, the neighborhood they target is Abdi's neighborhood. It's called Eastleigh. It's a dense neighborhood where many poor Somalis live and where there's some Al-Shabaab support.

Eastleigh's been there for decades. It's known as "Little Mogadishu". Abdi lives there with his older brother, Hassan, in a small room with one bed and a single bathroom for the whole building. So back to that phone call on April 17th. The police show up and grab Abdi by the shirt.

Leo Hornak

It's 96 days until Abdi's interview. And Abdi's worried they're going to throw him and his brother into a truck and take them into detention, before he can ever get his papers together and leave for America.

Leo Hornak

Abdi pulls out his refugee ID. Officially, that should protect Abdi. It's from the United Nations. Unofficially--

Leo Hornak

So that's when the real business starts.

Leo Hornak

AKA, the bribes. Abdi, his brother, and the neighbors start pooling their cash.

Leo Hornak

Talking to Abdi every day, what I realized was how relentless it is. Every night's another excuse for a crackdown. And the Somalis are sitting ducks, trapped in this one neighborhood.

Leo Hornak

April 25th, 88 days to Abdi's interview, and counting. It's a Friday, which normally would be a busy day in Eastleigh because it's a Muslim holy day. People take off from work, go shopping, go out to eat, and meet at the mosque for prayers. But not today. Abdi says last week, the police showed up at a nearby mosque, grabbed people as they left prayers, and drove them away in trucks.

Leo Hornak

Soon, Abdi stops leaving his apartment for anything. He and his brother, Hassan, essentially go into hiding, locked down in their building. They stopped going to school.

As the days go by, food begins to run short. Abdi and Hassan pool their supplies with another Somali family on the ground floor of their building-- two women, one a single mother with two small boys. But it's not much. Soon, they're down to just tea and sugar and a loaf of bread they're able to get each day from a Kenyan guy who delivers it on his bike. That's what they were living on-- tea and bread.

Leo Hornak

Abdi and Hassan are paying for the tea and bread with money they get from overseas. Years ago, Abdi did some reports for an American public radio show called The Story, and a listener reached out wanting to help. She sends them money, not too different from lots of Somali refugees who have family members abroad supporting them. But obviously, that kind of help only goes so far.

Leo Hornak

This is Abdi's older brother, Hassan. He tells me they aren't sleeping. He and Abdi sound the same, by the way. Apparently, even their father can't tell them apart on the phone.

Leo Hornak

The kind of police abuses Abdi told me about are well documented by human rights groups and journalists-- arbitrary arrests, extortion, beatings, forcible deportation, family members separated. It's illegal under international law to send refugees back to a country where their lives could be in danger.

The spokesman for Kenya's Ministry of Interior, which oversaw the police raids in Eastleigh, told me they were justified to make the city safe from Al-Shabaab. But he confirmed that the kind of police corruption Abdi told me about has been a problem for a long time in Kenya. That is a fact, he said. We're not denying that.

Abdi and Hassan tell me Eastleigh's come up with a warning system. The first person to spot the police from his window fires a group text to his friends to say, they're coming your way, so you've got time to hide. Then you pass the message on to your friends, and so on. You can tell a raid started, Hassan says, when you hear all the phones going off.

With just three months left til his interview, Abdi still needs to get all the documents required by the US embassy, documents from the police, his school, his doctors. But he can't do any of that, because he can't even leave his building. The clock's ticking.

Leo Hornak

April 28th, T minus 85 days to his interview. Instead of hiding from the police, people are now surrendering. From his window, Abdi sees entire families sitting on the sidewalk with their belongings.

Leo Hornak

I'm done. They don't have any more money to pay off the police. And rather than end up at the football stadium, they'll just go back to Somalia. Even the family on the ground floor, the two women with the young boys, are packing up.

Leo Hornak

One night on the phone, Abdi asked me if I'm familiar with the migration of the wildebeest. Abdi wants to be clear he doesn't know about this, because he's African. He's a city kid. He's just seen it on Discovery Channel clips like everyone else.

Anyway, each year thousands and thousands of wildebeest trek to a river that they have to cross in order to graze on the other side. The river's infested with crocodiles, and not every wildebeest makes it. But they all have to try. Abdi says he knows how they feel. Somalis are prey, he says. They're being hunted.

Each evening when I phoned Abdi, I was always concerned that one night, no one would answer, that he would have finally taken the advice of his neighbors, or been hauled off to the holding pens in Kasarani. But when he did pick up, often he wanted to talk about things that weren't related to the Kenyan police or Al-Shabaab. We talked about his favorite movies, Rambo, that movie, The Rock with Nicolas Cage, anything Schwarzenegger. We talked about his friends in the good old days in Eastleigh when you could sit in a cafe and sip tea with camel milk.

One thing I asked Abdi about, when people win the regular lottery, you always hear stories about how, all of a sudden, family members are really nice to them, how cousins they haven't spoken to in years start calling to say hi, asking for favors. I wondered if this was the case with Abdi. Here he was sitting in a slum with all these refugees who were in the same terrible situation, and now he had a ticket out. Did people start treating him differently?

Leo Hornak

Abdi's a practicing Muslim, and so are the women he hangs out with. So normally before, you could only visit them in a kind of formal courtship visit at their home-- no having girls over to his place, no hanging out in public.

Leo Hornak

He's talking about before the police raids started, when life was relatively normal in Eastleigh.

Leo Hornak

May 1st, 82 days and counting. Abdi cautiously ventures out of the apartment building for the first time in weeks. He heads downtown to central Nairobi where life is continuing as normal. It's a stressful journey, but he's able to buy a couple of gallons of clean water and some cans of beans to bring home. He says it's amazing how good these taste to him and Hassan. He tells me he's getting more and more worried about the paperwork he still has to get together for his interview-- his medical records and transcripts from his university. And there's one piece of paper that terrifies him.

Leo Hornak

What this basically is is proof from Kenyan law enforcement that Abdi isn't a criminal. Abdi doesn't have a record, so this shouldn't be a big deal, except for the place he has to go to get the official certificate-- the headquarters of the Kenyan police.

Leo Hornak

For weeks, Abdi had been talking to me about this, telling me how worried he was about having to go into the belly of the beast. Finally, on a Tuesday morning in May, 77 days before his interview, he gets up early, gets together every ID he has to prove he's a legal refugee, says goodbye to Hassan, and takes a bus to police headquarters. He walks in, waits for his name to be called, and walks up to the window where he faces a Kenyan police officer. And what he encounters is not brutal police tactics, but bureaucracy.

Leo Hornak

Five months-- way too long for Abdi to have it in time for his interview on July 22nd.

Leo Hornak

It's going to be a doom, Abdi says. And I felt that, too. Up to this point, it seemed like if Abdi could just hold on long enough to get to his embassy interview, he'd make it to America. Now, all bets were off. Now, unless this changed, there was no way.

Ira Glass

Leo Hornak. Abdi decides to keep going back to police headquarters every few weeks, despite the risk, despite how frightening it is, to see if one time maybe he gets a different answer. What happens next in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, we're replaying the story of Abdi Nor, just three weeks after the ceremony where he finally became a US citizen. Abdi's a Somali refugee, who escaped to Kenya. And then he won what amounts to a golden ticket to move to the United States and become an American, but only if he's able to make it to an interview at the US embassy, with all the right paperwork, all done perfectly, so he can cash in that golden ticket.

The United Nations has reported that the number of people around the world displaced from their homes because of conflict and persecution is at an all time high. It's over 70 million people, the largest number the UN has ever recorded. Abdi, of course, is one of those people. He's Muslim, from a country with a proven history of terrorism.

The story all happened back in 2013, but today, under President Trump's travel ban, a Somali like Abdi would not be allowed a visa to immigrate into the United States. Anyway, Leo Hornak continues our story.

Leo Hornak

May 12th, T minus 71 days to Abdi's embassy interview. Abdi gets on a bus home from school and, this time, runs into another danger-- not the police, not Al-Shabaab themselves, but the fear of Al-Shabaab.

Leo Hornak

Abdi looks around and realizes he's the only Somali. People can tell. Somalis look different. And a Somali with a backpack on, on a public bus? He knows what people are thinking.

Leo Hornak

In Kenya, because people don't trust the police, mobs will take justice into their own hands. For example, if a shopkeeper yells "thief" on the street, strangers might grab the person and beat them. And it's not unheard of for people to die this way. A man in the back of the bus chimes in. Why is he there? He shouts, kick him out.

Leo Hornak

This is the police station Somali terrorists bombed two weeks earlier.

Leo Hornak

Four days later, May 16th, 67 days to the interview, Al-Shabaab blows up two buses. It's a big deal. They were in a Central Market-- at least 12 dead, more than 70 injured. Abdi is sure the police will be out in force, and he hunkers down at home for a while.

Leo Hornak

I tried to confirm this with his girlfriend, but she didn't want to talk to me about it. Abdi says the police took her roommates that night, but left her behind.

Leo Hornak

Days go by. Abdi and Hassan do their best to keep their spirits up and entertain themselves. They read books. They watch Lost and Walking Dead. It's one of the weird quirks of Eastleigh that, even if food runs short, you can still have good broadband internet. They even build makeshift barbells out of old milk cans they've filled with sand and stones and start working out.

Leo Hornak

And they do one of Abdi's favorite things.

Leo Hornak

Listen to music.

[MUSIC - "CARELESS WHISPER" BY GEORGE MICHAEL]

Back in Somalia, if Al-Shabaab caught you with MP3s on your phone, they would flog you. Or they could even kill you for it. They believe most music is sinful. But Abdi always took a risk. He kept his music collection on a secret SIM card hidden under the mattress.

Leo Hornak

During all this, Abdi did leave the house sometimes, but only for a very specific reason-- either to go to an important class he couldn't miss, or to go to the police headquarters and try his luck again getting the certificate he needs for his interview. Then on May 29th, with 54 days and counting, Abdi sends me this recording.

Leo Hornak

At this point, Abdi's a shoo-in. It's almost hard to believe after all the obstacles. But he calls up the embassy, talks through all the paperwork, and they tell him he's good to go. And they'll see him on the 22nd. And his tune on our nightly phone calls totally changes, from this--

Leo Hornak

--to this.

Leo Hornak

And America is an opportunity not just for Abdi, but his whole family.

Leo Hornak

Abdi hasn't seen his mother in more than three years. She lives in a tiny, rundown shack made of corrugated tin. And she doesn't always have access to enough food or clean water. If Abdi gets to America, he hopes he can make some money. And even if he can't protect her from violence, he can at least help her to get a better place with clean water and three meals a day.

Leo Hornak

Abdi's older brother, Hassan, has also applied for the visa lottery. Like Abdi, he's worked for years on his English. He came to Kenya years before Abdi. Now he's getting ready to live alone again.

Leo Hornak

June 4th, 48 days and counting. Abdi goes into the stairwell to use the bathroom and finds a police officer standing there, who calls for backup. The officer doesn't ask for a bribe. He lets Abdi go. Abdi has no idea why.

June 8th, 44 days to go. Abdi tells me, apparently the police have started raiding during the day, which is a change. He avoided them because he was at class.

June 15th, 37 days to go. Abdi hears on the radio that dozens of masked Al-Shabaab gunmen bombed the police station, stole its weapons, and went on a rampage in a town on the coast, killing at least 48 people. Abdi and Hassan brace for more police raids. July 7th, 15 days to go.

Leo Hornak

When Abdi and I speak, he's shaken up. He says he just tried to visit the mosque for the first time in weeks. It's right down the block.

Leo Hornak

The mob was a bunch of Kenyans attacking Somalis at random on the streets.

Leo Hornak

July 17th, five days to go. The woman sending him money from America wires cash for his interview fee-- $320. And then finally, July 21st, one day to go.

Leo Hornak

10 hours and 53 minutes, to be precise. It's at 7:30 tomorrow morning.

Leo Hornak

OK, so while I was brushing my teeth this morning, I got a text message, and it was from Abdi. Hi, very bad news. They gave me a red paper that said visa rejected. And yeah, we text messaged backwards and forwards. And the last message he sent to me, which was a few hours ago, was, this is my worst day on Earth.

I couldn't get hold of Abdi for a day. When I finally did talk to him, he walked me through what happened. Abdi arrived hours early. The waiting room was filled with other lottery winners. One by one, they were called in, and one by one, Abdi says, they came out grinning. Then Abdi's number was called. This was it, window 9.

Leo Hornak

Abdi did, and he answered a few simple questions.

Leo Hornak

Where did you go to college, she asked. And he told her his university in Nairobi.

Leo Hornak

One of his school transcripts didn't have a signature. She took out a pink piece of paper and on the bottom, wrote two words-- "Missing Transcript." She handed it to Abdi and said, sorry, I can't give you the visa. I was looking into her eyes, like, please, come back to me and say, hey, I've changed my mind. Please, please, God. I need your help. I need luck today.

But the lady didn't change her mind. She picked up her microphone and called the next number. Dazed, Abdi walked outside and sat alone under a tree outside the embassy.

Leo Hornak

The embassy told him he could send them a signed transcript, if he wanted. But they told him not to come back to the embassy. They'd be in touch, maybe. Abdi sent the transcript, even though he was sure he'd missed his chance.

Leo Hornak

There was one thing about the approval of Abdi's visa that made us wonder. The day Abdi's visa was issued, before he heard the news, I had actually called the US embassy in Nairobi. I said I was a reporter doing a story about Abdi and that I was curious about how long their decision would take, because of my deadline. The woman I spoke to said she didn't know. For nine days, Abdi hadn't heard anything. Two hours after my call, he got the good news.

We asked the State Department if my phone call influenced their decision about Abdi's visa, and they told us, quote, "The journalist's call played no role in the timing of the visa issuance. Any visa process coinciding with a press inquiry is merely a coincidence." I can't prove anything, but that is at odds with what the woman on the phone told me back when I initially called the embassy. She said that now that they knew I was doing a story about Abdi, they would try and expedite the process, even though I told her that wasn't why I was calling and that I was only asking for information.

We spoke with eight immigration lawyers, all experienced with the Diversity Visa Lottery, and they all said my call probably bumped Abdi's application to the top of the pile that day. And with the lottery, because they give out a finite number of visas by a hard deadline, that can be the difference between making it to the US, or not.

Ira Glass

Leo Hornak, he's now at The Times of London, where he's the executive producer of the paper's new daily news podcast called, Stories of Our Times. The show launches next month.

On August 11th, 2014, Hassan took Abdi to Nairobi airport, and Abdi flew to America to live in a small town in Maine. The woman who had been supporting Abdi put him up with her family. He looked for work for a while, finally found a job installing installation. Lived in an apartment with three other Somali guys, mattresses on the floor. He wrote a book about his life, Call Me American. And then, three weeks ago--

Ira Glass

Abdi and 45 others in a sunshine-filled room in Maine raised their right hands. Abdi had tears in his eyes.

Ira Glass

OK, jumping ahead here.

Ira Glass

Jumping ahead again. It all takes less than two minutes.

Ira Glass

There's also brief remarks from Senator Angus King.

Ira Glass

A choir sings.

Ira Glass

Abdi leads everybody in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Ira Glass

And afterwards, I get a chance to talk to him.

Ira Glass

Able to vote, able to do anything any citizen can do, able to bring his mother over from Somalia. He's no longer worried that he'd be banned coming in and out of the country, or that the Trump administration will start to deport green card holders like him somehow. Finally, he said, his childhood nickname, Abdi the American, is matched by his nationality. It feels good.

Ira Glass

One of the things I was so curious to ask Abdi about was, he had idealized America so much before he got here, in Kenya he used to say he loved America, so what was it like for him to actually live here? It seemed like no place could possibly live up to the way he'd felt about the United States. And he said, yeah, for all the safety, and opportunity, and freedom to speak and protest that he appreciates here, there were things about America that he was not prepared for.

At his first job here installing insulation, guys on the crew stole his hardhat, and his tools, and his winter coat, treated him like an outsider. And in a bigger way, the America that he liked seeing on television when he was growing up, an idealistic, united America, that's what he had expected to find.

Ira Glass

Things are going well for him, though. He got certification as an interpreter, and that's his job nowadays. His brother, Hassan, has made it to Toronto with his wife and kids. And Abdi is attending college part time, studying politics. He doesn't just want to use his right to vote now that he's a citizen, he wants to run for office someday.

[MUSIC - "BETTER" BY K'NAAN]

Ira Glass

Well, the program was produced today by Brian Reed, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Stephanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, Julie Snyder, and Nancy Updike. And editing help for today's show from Joel Lovell. Production help from Noor Gill, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney.

Thanks to BBC Radio current affairs, Hugh Levinson and Brigitte Harney, BBC's Crossing Continents radio show, where a version of Leo's story first aired. Special thanks to Esther Sung at the National Immigration Law Center, also to PRI's The World, where Leo was a producer.

Our website, ThisAmericanLife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he was giving me a ride home last night. And I reached out to the radio, which, of course, was playing our station. And before I could even touch the tuner, Torey is so hardcore Public Radio, he screeches the car over to the curve and tells me--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - "BETTER" BY K'NAAN]