�鶹Լ��

HAMID:
The streets would be full of people selling food and the food, like, will have, like, if you’re selling fruit on the street, it would have, like, flies on it. And on the buses, because it’s a really small country and there’s lots of people stuffed in it, there’s no place to sit.

And if you’re sat, even if you’re a baby, you have to get off the seat for a bigger person. And then the streets had dust in so if the wind blew [it] would go in your eyes.

I don’t know why the war started. Eritrea, a long time ago, used to be just a big country and then they split it with Ethiopia. But then since we split it from Ethiopia, we got the Red Sea and the war started because they wanted the Red Sea. So then all this war happened, lots of people had to get away and we didn’t have lots of airplanes because everybody was just moving and moving.

I remember that… that we had to leave when I was a young age. My dad couldn’t come because he knew secrets. Because the guy that’s leading us right now is very, very bad and my dad wanted to escape but he couldn’t. They said to him, if you tell people of our secrets, we will kill your wife and me so then he told us we had to run.

I remember that we just got on a plane and I slept but I really knew that it was a really long, long journey. And sometimes we took buses and I really fell asleep a lot of times. And then at the end, we arrived in England it was kind of very hard to fit in with hardly any English.

I started school, and I was like very scared because I didn’t have no friends because everybody was, like, had groups.

One day this boy, he fell out with a group, so then me and him we said ‘why don’t we be friends’. Then we joined other peoples groups and then we had, made lots of friends.

A few weeks later, I came back from school and there were lots of ladies in my house. And my mum was on the bed and I asked her ‘why was everybody crying yesterday?’ And then she said: ‘Oh, I have something to confess to you. Your dad he died there.’ Then I stared crying, and then she started crying, and then I told her stop crying, then she said I’ll stop crying if you stop crying, so we both ended up stop crying.

For a few days I stopped eating, I only drinked a little bit and I couldn’t finish my dinner at school. My mum came to me and she says ‘you don’t have to be very upset because at the end that’s why we left home, because it was dangerous.

I started feeling OK and that it’s right that we should have came here. It got really better. I made a lot of friends. We don’t talk about how our lives at home. We don’t, like, talk about this stuff. We don’t talk about sad things. We talk about good things. We don’t mention the sad things, we act like the never happened.

My friend always, when I’m feeling sad, he always comes up with a joke and cheers me up, and when he’s feeling sad I come up with a joke and cheer him up.