Refugee boy by Benjamin Zephanian - Bloomsbury

Alem is a fourteen years old boy. He is from Africa. He was born in an area called Badme. Alem is the product of two countries : Ethiopia and Eritrea. He tried to live with his parents in both places but they always ended up having problems : persecutions by the police, violence and intimidation in school, soldiers kicking down the door of the house, threatening people by using rifles round erratically…

Then on Alem’s birthday, his father said they should have a holiday so it would make Alem happy and he would forget the problems. Both of them are travelling to England from Addis Adaba in Ethiopia. They are planning to stay for a short time. Their hotel is in Datchet, next to London. As soon as they get there, his dad constantly insists on his son speaking in English. At first, Alem feels very surprised because all he sees is so different compare to his life back home. Roads are smooth, no potholes, no wild bends. Everything seemed nice, quiet, organised. All very much under control.

Alem also feels excited about seeing those famous places that he has seen in the books. Alem is enjoying his first day in this new country : discovering central London, boarding a sightseeing bus, eating in an Italian restaurant, thinking about his plans for the future. Alem would like to be an architect, someone who would be able to bring the old and the new together.

But the next day, after a long and peaceful sleep, Alem wakes up late and notices straight away that his his dad is not there. He will soon find out that his dad left him a letter explaining his choice about leaving Alem in England, alone in the country. Will Alem be strong enough to face the situation ? Will he find organisation to help him or compassionate people who understand why people have to seek refuge from war ?

One of the first thing I did while I was starting this book was checking where Eritrea and Ethiopia are in Africa. I might sound ignorant, but I now know that these two countries are next to Djibouti in East Africa.

This book tells the story of a teenager who needs to get the political asylum status so that he can stay in the country. Alem is a brave young man who is facing the challenge of being alone in a country so that he will not die. To start with, he questions his dad’s decision, wondering whether bringing him to England was really the best thing to do ? So the writer wants us to understand what it feels like to be left alone in a country where you sort of speak the language and hope for a better future.

But it’s hard life being labelled “refugee”. The story soon gets the reader involved in the suffering and the struggles that many asylum seekers have to endure : intimidation in the children’s home, feeling miserable and lonely, humiliation by the process of screening, political climate or opposition party proposing prison ship for asylum seekers…The author is compassionate and critical in his attitude toward immigration but he’s also humorous and optimistic.

I have to say I really enjoyed Alem’s personality. He is intuitive, clever, curious and has a great sense of humour. I loved what he would say about England : the people on the bus, the food, the school moto, the first day he sat right at the back of the assembly hall listening to the headmaster speaking, his foster family, his desire to learn and improve his language skills, his concern about the bureaucracy of the system. He is a truly an inspirational and hard-working character.

The dialogues are very realistic and sometimes funny and it makes it easy to be inside the story. There are also plenty of details in that book celebrating England’s diversity.

This book was published in 2001. Unfortunately, I am not sure things have really changed since 2001 but it’s important that people read this sort of stories with a simple but powerful message.