Aicha's two worlds, northern Spain and the Western Sahara.
Aozotorp
25 September 2003
El Pais - English Edition
Aicha Embarek may have been born in the desert of Western Sahara, but she grew
up in the mountains of northern Spain, and the difference between the two
landscapes have been a constant feature in the life of this 21-year-old. Life
in the desert is horizontal, where everything is open to the eye, and change
is subtle, at times imperceptible, while, on the other hand, in the mountains
of Leon, change is constant and omniscient. In the refugee camps of the
Saharans, where Aicha grew up, the Koran provides the basis to the law. But up
in Ponferrada, Spaniards' get on with life in their own way.
Aicha arrived at the home of Julia Taladrid and Javier Barrios at the age of
12, for a short-term stay in Leon, Spain, organized by the Holidays in Peace
program. That was in 1995. The young girl fitted in immediately, and when the
holidays came to an end, she asked to stay on in Spain to continue her
education. Her parents agreed, and Julia and Javier were happy to have her
live with them. Six years went by, until, when she was nineteen, she returned
to the desert to look after her ailing mother. But to her dismay, when she
attempted to return to Spain, she was forbidden to leave. Until August 16,
this year.
Aicha has become the first Saharan woman to be granted the permission to
return to Spain to continue with her university education. On August 16 she
walked through the arrivals lounge at Madrid's Barajas airport, and in a
tearful reunion, told her adopted family, "I can't believe it, I'm here." The
change for the young woman has been profound.
She spent the first night with Julia and Javier, the second at the swimming
pool, and the third, with her friends. Two years away from the place that has
become home, from her friends, and from water, is a long time. "You haven't
changed a bit," her best friend Julia Alvarez told her, after waiting two
years to see her companion again.
Aicha arranges a rendezvous with her old friends and the group decides to have
a drink at the local bar. She wants to tell them her story but she doesn't
know where to begin. Indeed, nobody knows where to start. They discuss the
village gossip, and the problems of life in the desert. Every few minutes a
passerby interrupts their banter. It seems like everyone in the village wants
to welcome Aicha home. In Vega de Espinareda, home to an estimated 2,000
inhabitants, everybody knows everybody else. And everybody knows Aicha's story
too. "That girl is amazing," says one of the teachers at the local school.
"People here could have done a lot more for her," says one woman. "I don't
really care that much about it," adds another.
Once the greetings are over, the chatter resumes. It is as if she had never
been away, and that the bar in this mining region is the same as the
afternoons she spent before going away. The only difference now is the
constant traffic of messages flying between the cell phones of her friends.
Aicha doesn't have a cell phone, nor does she have an email address to her
name. "The change has been so rapid," she laughs. She wonders if buying a
phone and adding an @ symbol after her name will bring her up to date, and
fill in those missing years in her Spanish life.
It was the first day of September, a day that marked an enormous turning point
in Aicha's life. She was sitting by the swimming pool, at Julia and Javier's
house outside the village, when her father called to tell her that her mother
was ill, and that she must return home. "My father said I had to return to the
camp at Smara," she says, her face falling as she remembers that day. She went
back to the tent, to her mother, and to her six brothers. She says she was not
afraid. "I knew that nothing was going to stop me coming back. University was
beginning in October, I was due to start." She was 19 years of age then, and
all her papers were in order. Like thousands more young women, Aicha was due
to begin her undergraduate studies. As she was packing her bags, she threw in
her photo album, filled with snaps of her life here: practicing karate, with
her idols from Real Madrid soccer club, with her sister eating paella in
Barcelona, and of course with her temporary parents. She took few clothes with
her, not expecting to be gone that long. Ten days later, Julia and Javier
recorded this message: "I am Aicha Embarek, I want to leave here to back to
study. They won't let me. Do something quickly. They will not let me leave.
They won't let me see anybody. Please help me. I am Aicha Embarek."
Aicha had changed, and life in the desert now seemed strange to her. She
fought against her family and her people, because they kept her in the camp,
saying that she had lost her roots. "I was in a mess, I was confused. Things
didn't make sense there. My parents didn't feel like my parents. It was as if
I had landed on another planet." She had become westernized, and was no longer
able to accept why women should cover their faces, or why they could not leave
the tent whenever they wished to. "I realized that there, men make all the
decisions, and that religion was the only thing that mattered."
Aicha wanted to return to Spain to study, to make a life for herself. She
doesn't like henna, nor tea, nor the desert stars at night. She did everything
possible to persuade her family to let her leave. She did not eat during the
first month, and when she became aware that it was a ploy that was proved
futile, she tried to escape with some friends of Julia and Javier, Miguel
Garcia and Yuma. Yuma had arrived at the camp in January 2002, and gave her
names, contacts, routes, and an airline ticket from Nouakchott, the capital of
Mauritania, to Spain. But the escape plan went horribly wrong. She was
abandoned in the desert in her Toyota jeep. "I drove the 900 kilometers
between Smara and Zourate, in Mauritania, in three days." But a few hours
before her plane was due to leave, her father caught up with her and took her
back.
After the failed escape, she was dubbed "the Spanish delinquent." Many women
would not allow their daughters to talk to her. She distanced herself from her
family and the community. "I only talked to people who had studied abroad.
They knew the world, they understood me." She even listened to Julio Iglesias
to remind her of the home she had lost. It has taken her until now to see the
humor in that.
A year passed, and her parents, Embarek and Um Sad, finally began to realize
that they were losing their daughter's love. This was the last thing they
wanted, and so eventually, they gave her their permission to return to Spain.
"One day, my father came to me and said, 'Aicha, go and have your photograph
taken, we are going to get your papers sorted out.'" From then on, it was only
a question of waiting for the bureaucrats to do their part.
Aicha recognized an immediate change in herself and in her attitude and she
began to understand her family and her people better. Now, she says, she no
longer looks on that period in the dessert as a time she was held hostage or
kidnapped. "They just wanted me to remain in contact with my culture, not to
lose it," she accepts.
Meanwhile, Julia and Javier kept up the fight on Aicha's behalf from Spain,
looking for support in the media, and even taking the case to the Senate. The
senator for Leon, Alfredo Prada, took up the case and contacted the
representative of the Polisario - the government in exile of the Saharan
people - in Spain, Brahim Ghali. A way out for Aicha was finally found.
Her return to Spain this time marked a change in her future career plans.
Aicha has decided that she would like to study dentistry. "I want to help my
people, and to overcome their exile," she says.
Julia and Javier say that Aicha is more mature now, a young woman who has a
much clearer idea of what she wants. But what hurt them most, say the couple
who has spent in excess of -
15,000 and all of their free time pursuing her case, "is that nobody came to
see us from her family, or any other representative, to explain what was going
on. We feel that we have been deceived." They sympathize with the plight of
the Saharans: Javier worked in the camps in 1972; Julia set up a regional
support organization. Yet despite all that has happened in the past couple of
years, the pair remains committed to the cause. "It is only right. Those
people must have their lands returned to them, so that other young people do
not have to leave and work abroad to find a future for themselves."
There was initial media interest in Aicha's case after she first return to
Sahara, but then life returned to normality in the village. One day, in the
cafe, Javier reminded Aicha of a promise she had made to him: that if he got
her out of the camp, she would make tea for him everyday. Aicha reminds him
that there are three kinds of tea: "the first is bitter, like life, the second
is sweet, like love, and the third is smooth, like death."
Javier enjoys the tea she now prepares, but for Aicha, perhaps the memory and
associations are too close. She eats little, and has lost a lot of weight. She
now weighs less than when she was 12 years of age.
With the family gathered around the table, the chatter once again turns to
Aicha's future. Two years ago, she took her university entrance exams, but her
marks were not high enough to study dentistry. "I don't know what to do,
whether to stay here, or head to Madrid." Julia and Javier say they are
prepared to do anything they can to help her. But they are also afraid that
her first year at university will be too much for her. "Two years in a tent
without reading a book is a long time," says Julia. Aicha has promised to keep
up her studies. She reminds Julia and Javier that when she arrived in the
village, she was two years behind the other children of her age, but that
within a month she had caught up. She wants to return to the camp next summer.
"I want to go for a walk with my father, and show everybody who said I would
not come back that they were wrong. My family has been through a bad time as
well," she says. But she wants to be able to return and leave a free agent,
and is still scared that she will be kept there once again.
Jose Manuel Taboada, the representative of the Associations of Friends of the
Saharan People in Spain insists that Aicha's case is simply a dispute between
two families. He believes that these bitter incidents could be avoided if the
families who take in Saharan children were less inclined to consider them
their own, "because they are not. The desert has its own culture, customs and
beliefs. And as those laws are theirs, they apply them as they have been
taught how to, and although it may be difficult for us to understand that here
in the West, that's the way it is. We have to see things the other way round.
How would a Spanish family feel about a child that spent some months in the
Sahara and wanted to stay? They would oblige the child to return home."
He says that the Aicha case was exceptional. Holidays in Peace brings some
9,000 children to Spain every summer and that summer program has been running
since 1987, and it is clear that it works very well. If we were having these
kinds of problems all the time, then we would have to stop," he argues. The
program helps the Saharan cause, because the children act as ambassadors for
their people, and the families that go to visit children in the camps take
gifts and food, as well as medicines. In the camps of Tindouf in Algeria,
diseases that disappeared long ago in Europe are still rampant. Similarly,
infant malnutrition is around 35 percent, according to the United Nations High
Commission for Refugees.
The Polisario representative in Spain, Brahim Ghali, was reluctant to discuss
Aicha's case. But the Union of Saharan Women in Spain was not. "She is a clear
example for our women, because she wants to be independent, and find ways to
help our people and her family," says Zahra Ramdan. She refers to the
referendum on self-rule that the 155,000 Saharans, more than half of whom are
minors, and who live in the camps of Ayun, Ismara, Auserd, and Dajila in the
Algerian desert, have been waiting for since Morocco invaded and annexed their
homeland in 1975.
It is in her bedroom where Aicha's two worlds come together. There are dozens
of cuddly toys, birthday cards, school books, and Saharan souvenirs all
displayed together under the one roof. Time stood still in this room while
Aicha was back home in Sahara. Julia and Javier did not want to alter it in
any way, to the point where the radio is covered in cobwebs. Even the piggy
bank is useless as it is brimming with the out-of-date pesetas. Aicha takes a
toy from the shelf on the wall, a white tiger. "I love this one because he has
a narrow waist and wide shoulders." She pauses. She is about to make a
confession. "I like boys like that." She sighs. "But I know that I couldn't
fall in love with a Christian, that would be too much of a break with my
culture."
Aicha understands that she is Saharan, and that her story, her history, is
that of her people. Both want to return to the land they believe is theirs,
and to reinvent their future. At least in the case of Aicha, the story has had
a happy ending.
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Forwarded by:
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Norwegian Support Committee for Western Sahara
wsa...@online.no
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