HH: I was sous chef. I didn’t know I was a little chef in the making, okay? But I had already been a sous chef with my mom and my brother, and so this was just a different version of it. But after those first two years passed and I realized no one was coming, honey, I was eating hot dogs, Doritos, pizza, gas station food was my survival tool.
LA: When you say survival tool, what do you mean?
HH: It was what fueled me. I would have me a little something in the morning before school and then after school I would walk right over to Mr. Henry’s gas station. I would go right over there and he knew Hawa wants a hot link. Don’t make Hawa’s bread too thick, cut the crust off for her.
LA: Remind me where in the US you were.
HH: I grew up in Seattle, Washington.
LA: Was there a Somalian community there? Where you were aware of one?
HH: So when I arrived in Seattle, it wasn’t only my arrival, it was the Cambodians, it was the Russians, it was the Vietnamese, the Eritreans, the Ethiopians, the Sudanese, and Somalis. My elementary school was so diverse. I’ve always had, whether it be the Somalis or others, there’s always been a diversity around me just because of the time that I came to the U.S.
LA: Did your family that was in Oslo and your mother, did they have the same or…
HH: Yeah, well, kind of and not. When they migrated to Norway, they were some of the very first immigrants, and so there wasn’t a huge Somali population. And I don’t know why this happens. When migration happens, oftentimes governments place you in the middle of the center, in the city center, and so my family grew up in an area called Gronland, which is downtown Oslo. But downtown Oslo, if you just walk, it’s full of Somalis now. Yeah, so they now have a very healthy community.
LA: It sounds like for your family, Oslo is a haven of sorts, or at least feels like home.
HH: Totally. Yeah, totally. I mean, my siblings, they’re Norwegian kids. They fight in Norwegian. They have grown up there. Some of them were born there. They’ve been schooled there. Some of them are married to Norwegians.
The last time I was in Somalia was 1991. My father still lives there, and my older brother goes every year. My little sister goes. She’s taking her kids to go see him. But there were a few of us that hadn’t seen him since I left Kenya, and so I took everybody to Turkey, to Istanbul because it was the only place that my father can get, we can get him to get a visa.
LA: Which is interesting because there are other people I know who have family. I’m thinking of a friend whose family in Iran and Istanbul is the meetings point.
