Time to leave

By this point we had left our house; almost everything from our home was on its way by ship to South Africa, and we had moved into someone’s flat for a while. I was initially positive. Yet the whole building was eerily silent until the children were around, when for some mysterious reason it then became incredibly noisy. One woman spent a happy half-hour of her life banging on her window and wagging her finger at the children to be quiet as they played happily outside in the communal gardens. The children do not seem to be ready for this kind of community living yet, or perhaps the neighbours were just not ready for them!

We had already said goodbye to some people but as that had happened a good few weeks before we were leaving, it didn’t ‘count’ so we had to say goodbye again – and again – as the time to leave drew nearer. This is clearly inefficient but relationships aren’t always logical! Some friends had organised a farewell party, but even then we all still felt we had not said goodbye, as the party was like the Muslim get-togethers we associate with such times as Eid: lots of home-cooked food, loads of children and a very happy informal atmosphere. Our children had a great time, despite occasional injury on the rented bouncy castle, but were none the wiser about leaving their community of friends and family.

A few days before we left, the mother and toddler group at the local church threw a goodbye party for Asim (4) and Amaani (3) and a few other pre-school children who were also leaving - they missed quite a lot of it as I had to take them to do lots of last-minute errands like sorting out the dry-cleaning, cleaning the house carpets and paying the last ever newspaper bill etc, all of which fortunately seemed interesting to them as they had no idea they could have been somewhere else far more fun. I managed to get them there in time for the picnic and ice-cream though, so the consensus amongst Asim and Amaani was that the party was a good one!

One of the most poignant ‘goodbye’s was to the people at fITRA, our local muslim after-school club. It happened to coincide with fITRA’s annual charity fundraising event, so everyone was covered in chocolate cake and glitter and NSPCC stickers and generally happy. There was a brief talk about how special fITRA was, and how so many adults and children of different nationalities and backgrounds could come together to teach and to learn about being muslim. The children were asked if they could say where they came from: to my surprise, Amaani was the first to put her hand up. ‘Africa’ was her reply; either hopelessly confused or getting into migration mode early. Safiyya and Asim came up at the end to make their own public yet personal dua’s (supplications) to God. Safiyya prayed for more children to come to fITRA, much to the concern of some teachers who knew that most of next year’s classes were already full. Asim’s dua was concise: ‘Thank you Allah for fITRA. Goodbye Umar’, clearly feeling that his little friend Umar deserved a special mention during his first ever public speaking experience.

On the penultimate day, we had the last of 7 (yes, 7) visits to the doctor’s surgery, or practice, for the final vaccinations. Safiyya suddenly noticed the badge on the nurse’s uniform: ‘practice nurse’. ‘Is she practising on us?’, she whispered to me, even more panic-stricken than usual.

Safiyya (7) was particularly tearful when she had to say goodbye to her school friends on our last day in our home-town. It was amazing to watch all these 7 year olds exchanging e-mail addresses, even though I am fairly sure most of them (including Safiyya) barely know how to access them. She received an incredible array of presents both from the class and from individual school-mates which left me with a logistical problem: I had 2 suitcases to carry everything we owned and now Safiyya’s presents along with the all important gym kit and multitude of school books that she had also brought home on the last day seemed to be taking up most of the space. Fortunately my husband is slightly more spatially aware and he stepped in when he realized the packing had come to a rather abrupt halt. (Amaani and Asim had received one card each so they were not nearly so much of a problem!)

I had thought that preparing to leave England was perhaps a little like preparing for death: you want to leave all your relationships on a positive note, and everything you are involved in to be completed and sorted out as much as you can. This is why the children and I had spent many hours returning library books, sorting out cupboards, donating school uniform, dealing with or jumping on paperwork (well, I was dealing with it, the children were doing the jumping), fixing all the broken things in the house, as well as other equally important matters like inviting school friends round to play with the spare empty packing boxes. My husband pointed out that in fact it is more like birth – you spend all your time preparing for the occasion itself and don’t have a clue what will happen afterwards. He is right – we don’t have a clue! But insha’Allah, God willing, as I tell the children, it will all be fine.
But before we could go, my husband’s brother had independently decided the timing would be perfect for his wedding. The children were to be flowergirls and boys. After a suitable amount of stressing, and apologies to the bride-to-be in advance for any potential misbehaviour, I accepted this, and got involved! I tried to get all the children to line up before the bride but it was hopeless. Amaani suddenly spotted her uncle at the front of all the guests, so –desperate not to miss the wedding – pelted up the aisle all on her own. Asim, not to be outdone, then ran down the side of all the guests to try and ‘win’. We had to tell them they both won. They were not impressed by the bride, as she proceeded slowly and came in last!

The wedding was near a lake, which Amaani calmly observed had pirate ships sailing on it so made herself busy searching for pirates. Asim heard someone talking about seagulls, which he misheard as ‘seagirls’ and so started looking around for seaboys, thinking life was otherwise most unfair. Amaani’s sunhat blew away in the lake and promptly sunk: ‘Only Allah can get it now’, said our highly religious 4 year-old. The whole event was a little surreal. In the middle of it all, Amaani asked to go home. I asked her where home was. ‘I don’t know’, she replied, ’but I know it is a long way away’. And that was our next job: to make a new home, albeit a long way away.

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