Shweya, Shweya, Blaucal, Blaucal

We had our home and we had the heating, but not much else, and Algeria in 2004 was rather limited in its choice of furniture.  We decided to start with beds for the children (we had brought our own Ikea one) and found a wonderful carpenter who lived on our road and who actually listened to my husband and made everything according to our explicit instructions.  I had this bright idea that it would be nice to have guest beds that slid under the beds and could be pulled out whenever necessary and he made them with a clip to stay attached to the bed underneath when not in use and with castors for easy use.  These became the bane of my life as the head of each of the beds was  in an alcove, and then as the guest bed became very dusty, I had to pull the bed out of the alcove, then pull the guest bed out, clean it, clean the floor underneath the bed and then push the guest bed back in, and push the bed back in place.  What a palava!  To add insult to injury, when we had guests they usually preferred to sleep on mattresses directly on the floor - so much cooler in the hot summer months. We now use the guest beds as low divans (we gave two away) in our living room which have become very popular with the family and guests alike.  I have had many a guest come and lie down and promptly fall asleep… can’t think why!

Most homes have much the same furniture with much the same arrangement, although 9 years on this has changed a little.  Every living room (called a ‘salon’ here, the French may have left but their influence lives on), has at least 2 ‘canopies’.  Now, where I come from ‘canopy’ means cover or shelter, but here it means something that resembles a divan, sometimes with two drawers underneath for storage.  The mattress is covered in the same material as the three big cushions that form support for the back, and sometimes they put a big round armrest on either side also covered so that it looks like a pseudo sofa.  It’s fine until you sit down and decide to lean on one of the arm rests which then slides off the end of the canopy and leaves you unbalanced (in more ways than one) and if you’re holding a cup of coffee then you’re really stuffed. 

All salons have a ‘bibliothèque’ which I learnt in my French classes in school as the word for library, but here in Algeria it means display case with not a book in sight, but instead coffee and glass sets and other various ornaments.  Of course you have to have the coffee table, and maybe a television in the corner and often you may also have a wardrobe with some large alien shapes on top (usually large saucepans for the huge amounts of food to be cooked during weddings, funerals etc.) draped in embroidered material, maybe a vase or two of dried flowers and…. a suitcase, also draped in embroidered material.  If you ever got a glimpse inside one of these wardrobes you could be forgiven for  thinking that your host had OCD, because you will ALWAYS find each shelf (and you will find only shelves, never any bars from which to hang clothes) with all the contents immaculately folded in order of size, with the shelf trimmed in frilly lace.  I have tried in the past to keep clothes on shelves very neatly folded, but all it takes is one frantic rush to pull something out from underneath all the rest of the clothes, for my efforts to resemble the bargain bin in a department store.  And the suitcase?  That’s usually something the bride brings with her when she moves in.  An Irish friend visited us in 2004 and, after visiting some of my in laws in their homes, she laughed at how every home was exactly as I had said it would be, and all almost identical.

Our next venture was to have fitted wardrobes in the bedrooms made.  My husband insisted on having the carpenters come from the town near where we first moved to Algeria… an hour and a half’s journey each way from our home.  ‘They are known for their carpentry in this area and they are experts at what they do’ he explained.  When I asked him what will happen if they can’t get a lift to our home, he told me that it would be their problem.  As I expected… it became our problem with my husband driving there to collect them and then bring them home in the evening.  They measured up for the wardrobes and then brought the framework first and then afterwards, the doors.  Builders in Algeria seem to have the attitude of why use a spirit level when you can just as easily use a thread and some nails.  As a result many houses have a little quirkiness to them, which doesn’t endanger the safety of the house, but can be a challenge when decorating, and, in this case building cupboards.  Of course the frames didn’t fit properly because the walls and floors were not all the same level all the way across, so the gaps had to be filled in and disguised.  Finally we had our doors and our wardrobes looked great… until we opened the doors.  ‘Mum, these wardrobes are really nice’, said my 9 year old son, ‘but where are we supposed to hang up our clothes?’  Good question… considering there was absolutely nothing at all inside the doors… no side partitions, no shelves, no… nothing!  ‘Oh but they are extra’ said our carpenter-experts-in-their-field (I kind of wished I could just shove them out in a field and leave them there).  So we had to pay them extra, more trips up and down before we finally could use our wardrobes.  The mind boggles as to what exactly they thought we could do with an empty frame of a wardrobe.  But  soon after the exact same thing happened to a friend of mine using completely different carpenters from another area.

Whenever you complain about how long something takes here in Algeria you are usually given the stock reply ‘Shweya, shweya’ which means little by little, or ‘blaucal, blaucal’ which means slowly, slowly.. and they’re not kidding!  If Muslims were allowed to have a headstone on their grave with an epitaph, mine would read – ‘she died as she lived… shweya, shweya, blaucal, blaucal’.

A house built for pianos

I remember when my Mum and Dad got the heating installed in our home in Ireland many years ago when I was knee-high to a grasshopper.  It was a big, oil fuelled monstrosity that took pride of place in the dining room and the general idea was that it would heat up the whole house, a task at which it failed miserably, especially due to the draughty windows and doors, in those days long before double glazing.  My bedroom was immediately above it and was probably the warmest room in the house apart from the dining room, and even then I managed to acquire chill-blains on my fingers in the winter and had to have an electric heater in there sometimes.  The one good thing for us children was the excitement of the huge oil tanker that pulled up outside our home every few months and the massive big pipe that wiggled its way up through the driveway and the garden to the storage tank behind the house.

A few years ago my brothers built my Mum a lovely, warm, cosy new home on what used to be my Dad’s vegetable patch, and one of them then renovated and moved his family into the family home.  My Mum, at first, thought there would be no room in her new home for her beloved piano, so my brother stored it in his workshop.  But she fretted and worried that it would be damaged by being in such a cold environment, so my sister did some research on the care of pianos and found, to her surprise and my Mum’s immense relief, that pianos thrive in cold environments.  ‘That explains a lot’, said my sister, ‘ the home we grew up in was built for pianos and not for people’.

As a consequence I’ve always hated the cold.  When my first born arrived, the nurse who visited our home after the birth advised me that two heaters on in the tiny bedroom was just a little excessive… I think I was trying to recreate the heat of the womb . When we bought our first, and only, home in England, it had underfloor heating… downstairs, which was wonderful… downstairs.  But it was freezing upstairs.  We installed a radiator upstairs but as it was right under a skylight and at the top of the stairs which lead directly to the front door it was useless. The heating came on at night when the electricity was cheapest, and it did keep downstairs nice and warm all the following day.  I used to make sure that the carpet in the living room was always clean at night before we went to bed, because then I would lay all the wet washing across the floor, and the next morning it would all be dry and ready to put away. Of course it would set me into an absolute panic if the doorbell went and there was any threat of early morning visitors, and  I remember someone who caught sight of  my unorthodox laundry drying system, once asking if we had wardrobes in our home. We finally installed proper central heating and enjoyed a wonderful warm winter… and then promptly sold up and moved to Algeria.

So when we finally found and moved into our home in Algeria, having already spent one winter here, I was so determined that, if we had nothing else in the home, we would have central heating.  We knew nobody who had any as everyone had a smaller, gas version of the one we had years ago in Ireland.  As I found out since then some of the older apartments built by the French do have central heating with the old style radiators that work really well even now.  But most people have the one gas fired heater that is usually installed in the hall, right inside the front door, which, as a consequence, is the warmest place in the home.  When my husband started his search for a boiler that included a timer, he was actually laughed at by some plumbing suppliers.  ‘What do you need a timer for? Can’t you just turn it on yourself?’  He started to wonder if there was such a thing to be had in Algeria, and I told him that, if he didn’t find one, he was designated to be the one to get up in the early hours, long before the Fajir early morning prayer, and turn on the heating to warm the house before everyone else got up.  Eventually, Alhamdulilah, he did find one, and then had the fun of trying to find a plumber to install it. Finally he did find one that was willing to install it despite never having done so before, and who told him afterwards, that working for him was an education. (He should try living with him.... it's more like a blooming university degree!)

It was particularly cold that first winter in our new home, with hailstones and snow (one of the strangest sights I saw that winter was a picture my daughter took of a palm tree near the university in Bab Ezzouar covered in snow), and I told my husband’s family that I should sue him for breach of promise as he had always marketed Algeria as being lovely and warm.  They responded that they never had such a cold winter until I had come so they were blaming me for bringing the cold with me.  So we had our own home, empty as it was (our voices echoed so much that if you tried to talk to someone in one room from an adjacent one, you couldn’t understand what they were saying), but it was warm Alhamdulilah.

Settling down to a new life and all the problems that go with it.

Adapting to life in Algeria was difficult for all of us in different ways.  We lived in a seaside town about 35kms from Algiers in a nice but rather conservative area. Six of us lived in a two-bedroomed flat with no furniture or furnishings and most of our things still in boxes. The water was turned off every few days without much of a routine so it was difficult to plan.  My sister-in-law and I agreed that we often felt it all depended on whether the man who was responsible for turning on and off the water for our area had a row with his wife or not!  The electricity supply was also fairly precarious with it going at the first drop of rain or clap of thunder.  Sometimes it didn’t come back for days.  Trying to figure out what to feed my family was another huge problem.  All the produce in the market seemed to consist of green vegetables and unless I started treating my family like cows I had to find what else there was available.  And that did not come to much where I lived so it meant going further a-field.  Also, after several times when the vegetables went off, I realised the reason why Algerian women go shopping every day, as opposed to once a week like I used to do in UK.  Produce free from pesticides and additives go off quicker than those that contain them!  And then there was the irritation I felt when my husband would come back from shopping saying that he could not find some vegetable because it wasn’t “in season”!  When, oh when do onions go out of season!!!!

I remember two different days in particular that epitomised the difficulties of my life during those first months in Algeria.  One was a Friday, both the water and the electricity had gone all morning, and I was exhausted from trying to prepare a dinner from scratch.  My husband came back from Jumuah prayer full of Iman having heard a lovely khutbah, feeling at peace and refreshed.  Just as I was about to collapse, the water and electricity came back, and because I did not know for how long the water was back, I had to wash the huge pile of clothes and clean the flat.  I remember crying and my husband asked me “Do you want to go back?”  I said, without any hesitation no, I just wanted it better than this.  The other time was one of the last nights of my daughter’s holiday from England.  It had been a disastrous holiday with everything that could possibly go wrong, doing so spectacularly.  I wanted to prepare her favourite chicken dish and we had no water or electricity.  I also had a whole chicken that I had to cut up with not a clue as to which end to start with!  I got out my trusty Delia Smith cook book for beginners (good old Delia Smith!) and looked at her diagrams, sitting on the floor of my kitchen (I had no counters to prepare it on), by candle light, and absolutely butchered this poor unsuspecting chicken, all the time thinking “what am I doing here?”

By far the most difficult thing, besides the fact that we had to leave Sarah, our daughter,  behind, was that I lost total control over my children.  From having them 24/7 and being solely responsible for their education and general well-being, I was relegated a back seat by virtue of the fact that I didn’t speak Arabic and hadn’t a clue what was going on unless someone kindly took pity on me and translated for me.  The day the children started school I cried.  And then when I saw what a fuss was made over whether their books were covered in a particular colour of plastic or not, or whether they had the copybooks with the right number of pages I cried again.  They played a lot outside and often went over to their aunts to eat and I never knew where they were, whom they were with, whether or what they had eaten.  It was very hot in the summer and all the children lost weight and I was really worried for their health.

The first days of a new life in Algeria

Port of Algiers

Meanwhile Allah had not finished testing my husband and his determination to make Hijirah.  He stayed in Paris overnight with a friend and drove almost all the way down through France, and had almost reached Marseilles, when he looked for his briefcase with all his documents, passports, money, everything!  And he could not find it anywhere.  So he drove the van back up the motorway, like a maniac, bombarding Allah with dua and retracing his steps.  He rang his friend in Paris to check a service station just outside Paris where he had stopped.  They had found his bag with everything intact alhamdulilah!  So then he had to drive back down the motorway, again like a maniac to make the boat on time.  It was really important to make the boat as he had to have the paperwork for the van stamped and sent back to the dealer in Paris before a certain period expired – and the date was only days away.

He made the boat on time alhamdulilah, and when he arrived in Algeria, he did not arrive at his sisters until the evening.  So his nephew brought the van up to the flat that his sister had found for us and got all his friends to unload it for him.  The next morning my husband had a good look at the flat and decided it wasn’t good enough as it had damp patches and leaking pipes.  He asked his sister was there anywhere else for us, and she told him about the flat next door to her which was available, but said that it was only 2-bedroomed and not the 3-bedroomed one we had requested.  He looked at it and it was immaculate having been freshly painted and he took it.  So along came his nephew and his friends, loaded up the van again and then unloaded it.  Some of the friends swore that with all the boxes of books that they had had to carry, they were put off studying for life and never wanted to see another book as long as they lived!

If I had been told in England that I was going to be living right next door to my sister-in-law I would have been spitting fire!  But, subhanallah, it was the best thing that ever happened.  My sister-in-law is someone who very much keeps herself to herself and she was there if I needed her, but otherwise I was left up to my own devices.  She kept an eye on the children when they played outside and told them whom they should avoid mixing with, corrected any bad language they picked up and trained them and my husband into the pitfalls of living and socialising in Algeria.  She also was family and it was so good for my children to get to know her and her family.  There was also the advantage that when the family came to visit us, they came to her home and we went over there, so I did not have to “entertain” anyone.  It can’t have been very easy for her but she did it all with such good grace mashallah.  We always think of how our in-laws are going to impact on our lives but we don’t always give as much thought as to how our arrival impacts on them.  They do have lives of their own which they have happily lived before we come and then suddenly our arrival puts them in the spotlight, as everyone knows we are foreigners and that we “belong” to them!  May Allah reward her for her patience and support to us during those first difficult months.

We had paid the rent for the flat for a year so we had no problems about that alhamdulilah.  But we heard from England that the man who had put in an offer for the house had to back out as he had problems with insurance.  Meanwhile my husband was worried that the paperwork for the van did not arrive back to the seller in Paris, and that was all the money in the world that we had to live on!  The woman in the office in Paris was extremely helpful and went out of her way to help us, and alhamdulilah the paperwork went through successfully.

The Chamber of Commerce, Algiers

Finally on the move

The plan was that my husband would drive to Algeria a week ahead of me and the children, who would then fly there to join up with him.  Meanwhile another man put in an offer for the house, with a view to adding it to his list of properties to rent out.  So it looked like we had sold it after all alhamdulilah.  The night before my husband left, Sarah, my daughter, and I were packing the last few things and we could hear all the voices and accents from the living room next door where the brothers who lived locally had come to say goodbye to my husband.  There were, of course, Algerian accents, but also, Nigerian, Pakistani, Chechen, English (an “Essex boy” and a Cockney mashallah!!!!) and Kenyan.  They were all so sad to see my husband go as they looked on him as a real brother and there were tears.  My husband felt like he was deserting them and was really sad.  To this day he left a little piece of his heart with these brothers.

You would be amazed at how much you still have to go through, when you think you have done everything.  We had to sort out the utility companies and let them know that we were no longer going to be living in the house, I still had so much to throw out and sort through, and sisters were coming everyday to say goodbye.  I stayed up most nights and lived on dua and coffee and Cadbury’s chocolate (Oh those were the days!!!).  The last night came and, when everyone had gone out of the house I had one last look around.  This had been our home for most of our married life, and where 4 of our 5 children had been born, where we had home educated, and laughed and cried and known so many days of happiness and sorrow and worry and ease.  I thought about it all in those moments, but knew that as long as we were a family together, all of these memories would be coming with us, not locked up in a house that, after all was only brick and cement.  So I locked the house up and left with just one backward glance and felt only relief that we were, at last, following our dream Alhamdulilah.

“Parting is such sweet sorrow” – what a load of rubbish!  It is so painful that you can hardly breathe and the lump in your throat threatens to suffocate you.  You can’t eat or drink because your stomach is churning, your head hurts from all the emotion, your eyes feel sore from all the crying, your face is burning with all the tears, and all the words you want to say just won’t come out because your brain has turned to mush.  It was so HARD to leave my family and also

the sisters whom Allah had blessed me with and whom I had grown to love so much.  It was especially difficult to leave the ones who had no plans to make Hijirah at all yet, or who were not married to Algerians, as I knew they would not be coming to Algeria on holiday.  I felt like I had deserted them, but also that my life would never be complete again without them in it.  And I had to say goodbye to my daughter, Sarah, who had chosen to stay behind for 8 months to finish her studies.  I don’t even want to “go there”.  Suffice to say it was one of the most difficult things either one of us ever had to do.

On a Sunday at the end of October, 2003 my friend’s husband drove us to the airport.  Although I didn’t normally wear niqaab (the face veil) I wore it in the car because I knew it would make it easier for the brother.  I know it’s not exactly the proper Islamic reason for wearing one… but then that’s how I started out wearing the khimar (the head-scarf) in the first place.  It took time before I wore it to please Allah.   I fully intended to take it off as soon as I got to the airport.  I wanted to wear it in Algeria (ironic really when I remember back to my first trip and my fear that they would be handing out abayas at the airport!)  but felt that it might give me problems travelling.  I was standing in line for the check out when I realised that I had forgotten all about it and was still wearing it. I couldn’t take it off now! There was a man at the check out and I was panicking, thinking I shall have to make a big song and dance and ask for a woman to see my face.  Then my friend nudged me and said “look!”  And there was a woman at the checkout!  I had no problems whatsoever travelling with it and wore it in Algeria from that day on alhamdulilah.

I didn’t feel that sad leaving England, only my friends and the family I had there. But then I had left Ireland 20 years previously and had always looked on England as a stepping stone, although this wasn’t quite the one I had envisaged. Also, I was not going to Algeria unwillingly or just to please my husband.  This was a positive step I was taking and I just knew that this is what Allah wanted of me, and so I was happy that I was pleasing Him.   I also knew that after all we had been through, He would not let us down – even at the times when it “looked” to our human eyes, like He was astaghfirallah.

Algeria, Nigeria... what's in a name....

The Emerald Isle

So it looked like all systems go.  I just had the ‘small’ detail of telling my family that we were going to live in Algeria.  When all they had ever heard in the media about Algeria was terrorism, earthquakes, and devastating floods, and I had a hard time trying to convince some Muslims, and especially some Algerians that we had not lost our minds (one lovely sister tried to persuade me not to sell our house, but to rent it out so that we would have somewhere to come back to “if” things did not work out.  I knew she meant “when”!), how was I going to convince my family?  A few years previously when I had mentioned to my younger sister that one day we would probably live in a Muslim country she burst into tears and said “So we will see even less of you and the children than we do already!”  I decided to write a letter to my mum and to each of my brothers and sisters explaining to them all the thinking and planning that had led us to this decision.  I remember the day I posted the letter to my mum – I felt so sick for the next few days thinking of her opening it and reading it.  I had deliberately posted hers before the others as I wanted her to hear from me first. As it happened she did not receive hers for some time and my sister, who had received hers first had already told her my news.  My Mum told me afterwards that she was a lot happier in finding out this way because, by the time she got the letter she was ready for it.  Subhanallah, man (and woman) plans but Allah is always the best of planners!!!!

Then we backed up the letter with a visit home so that they could all see that my husband wasn’t dragging me off to Algeria by my hair and that the children were happy about the move.  It amazes me sometimes how some non-Muslims can see things so much clearer than Muslims!  My mother told me that in many ways she was happy that we were going as she could never envisage a future for our children in England, living life the way we did.  My older sister said that she and her husband wondered why we hadn’t done it years ago! 

My younger sister had a family get-together in her home and it was such a happy and funny time for us all.  My mother, her sister and my niece were sitting chatting.  My aunt, my mum and their other sister were all in their 80s and often had highly entertaining (to the rest of us at least!) misunderstandings due to their difficulties of hearing.  “So why are you moving to Nigeria of all places?” asked my aunt.  I told her that I wasn’t, that we were moving to Algeria.  “But what made you decide to move there?”  I explained that as my husband came from there it seemed the most logical Muslimcountry to move to.  “But I thought he was from Algeria!”   Yes he is I told her.  “So why are you moving to Nigeria?”  At this stage my niece and I were avoiding each other’s eyes because it was all we could do not to laugh.  I told her again that we were not moving to Nigeria but to Algeria.  “So who told me you were moving to Nigeria?” she said, turning accusingly to my mum.   “Well, it certainly wasn’t me – why would I tell you she was moving to Nigeria when she is moving to Algeria!” retorted my mum. At this stage my niece and I had to get up and walk away with our shoulders shaking!

My mother kept saying, “When you move to Africa”.  It reminded me so much of that Meryl Streep film “Out of Africa” when she starts off saying “I had a farm in Africa”!  One of my mum’s sisters had married, given birth to 4 children and lived very happily in Kenya in the late 50s and early 60s, and the only contact then was via airmail post (which would have been more accurately named “snailmail”!) or telegraphs.  And then in the 70s my sister had gone to live there and married out there also, but although she could telephone it was so extremely expensive she never did.  And the flights to Kenya were so long because, of course, it was so much further away from Ireland than Algeria was.  So I found a map and showed my mum that Algeria was only on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea.  I tried to convince her that, in contrast to Kenya, Algeria was just a hop, skip and a jump from Ireland! She was comforted by that, by the fact that we were all so happy to be going and also by the promise we made to come back and visit once we had settled.  It really put her mind at ease.

All it takes is just one small step.....

So from then on it was me who got the ball rolling and I threw myself enthusiastically into all the preparations for our Hijirah.  We had to sell our house as otherwise we had no money with which to buy our own one in Algeria or with which to set up a business.  We had no property ready in Algeria to buy, we didn’t know what kind of business we were going to go into, we didn’t even know where, in the country, we were going to live, or on what we were going to survive once we arrived.  Everything was up in the air and we had no answers.  But we did have an experience a few years previously of where our one small step towards Allah resulted in His innumerable Blessings on us, and we just knew that if we made a step towards Him, He would do the rest – and far better than we could.  So our first step was to call the estate agent and ask for someone to come around and give us an estimate for our house and to see if it would sell at all.  He came around on a Thursday in May and by Saturday he had already some people lined up to view it.

The first people in the door that Saturday morning were a young woman and her parents.  They loved it and came back again the same day, but the girl’s partner wasn’t interested in coming to view it.  When you live in your own home for so long (for us it had been 15 years) you don’t know how outsiders will see it, or whether they will be interested in it.  Therefore we were so happy that it had such a favourable reaction.  The following week we had an offer in from someone who hadn’t even viewed it but had seen other similar houses in the area and wanted it.  She saw it, loved it, and confirmed her offer.  We had sold it alhamdulilah, within 10 days of calling the estate agent!  She had to sort out her chain of buyers, but we had nothing to do now but sort, throw out, give away and pack.

Sarah, our eldest, who was 18 said afterwards that, like all the schemes her father and I had thought up in the past, and all the plans that came to nothing, she didn’t really believe that we were going to make Hijirah until the day she came in from College and the dining area was full of boxes – packed!  By the end of the summer we were getting close to making the big move.  We were just waiting for the woman to come back to us.  Then her solicitor contacted our solicitor to say that she was ready but….. that we had to vacate the premises within a week!!!!  Or the sale was off!!!!! There was no way that we would be ready – we weren’t just moving house, we were moving abroad.  We planned for my husband to go to France, buy a van, come back, load it up and drive it to Algeria.  If, on the departure from France, you sent back some paperwork to the seller you received tax back on the van, but it had to be within a certain period from when you bought it.  So she called the deal off!  I can remember my husband sitting on the end of the bed looking so dejected and saying “what are we going to do now?”  I said to him that, as he had already stopped work, we had almost everything packed, and we already had our sights on Algeria, his sister had found us a flat to rent, and that we should just go ahead.  What did we have to lose?  We would put the house back on the market, the solicitors and estate agents would sort out the sale and Allah just would not let us down now after all He had done for us to get us this far.

There was only one snag – we didn’t have the money to buy the van in France as we had relied on the sale of the house to acquire it.  I considered asking my mum, but I hated the thought of it as she had always said that I was the only one who had never asked her for money.  Some time previously she had promised me some money and I knew it was due to come, but still I could not bring myself to ask her for it.  Then one day, out of the blue, the phone rang and it was her.  She asked me if I remembered that money she had promised me (Oh yeah, I think I did vaguely remember it!!!!!) well, would I mind if she only gave me half of it, and gave the other half to my sister who needed to buy a new car.  Did I mind????  I told her that I had never held her to that promise, and that it made me feel a lot less guilty for taking the money if my sister was taking a share as well.  The amount she gave me was exactly the amount we needed to buy a van in France SubhanAllah!

And so it came to pass.......

Rue D'Isley, Algiers

I still loved the country, but now we wondered if it was Islamic enough for us to grow in Islam and whether it was a place where our children could blossom Islamically.  Ideally we wanted our children to learn Arabic, the Qur’an and live in an environment where they could learn their religion easily, and it wasn’t so much that Algeria wasn’t good enough but more that we thought other countries would be better.

So we started looking at other alternatives.  First it was Saudi Arabia and I remember a Saudi friend of my husband said to him that he was worried that I would come to Saudi and expect it to be like it was in the days of the Prophet Mohammed (Sallalahu Allahi Wa Sallam) with all the people acting like his Companions.  Having been in Algeria I was under no illusions!  And we looked at Syria.  My husband went there for 10 days to look around and loved it.  He said the people were very warm and hospitable and also very calm.  That really attracted me.  Being half Irish, half Algerian can be a lethal mix and I hoped that maybe by mixing in a society where the people were calmer it might tone down my children’s tempers!  Also my husband said that the Arabic there is beautiful. But then it was very expensive to live in Syria unless you had an income from abroad. I now look at what is happening in that beautiful country with it’s wonderful, hospitable people and feel so sad and horrified.

So we looked at UAE and the possibility of teaching English there.  After a while my husband, in desperation, suggested that maybe I could get a job teaching English in that country.  I was not very happy at the prospect of me working full time or being the one on whom our status there depended.  Also I dreaded the thought of being away from my children every day.  I knew sisters who had done it, and  who had done it very successfully but I just felt I couldn’t do it.  We prayed and my husband searched and we hoped.  Looking back on our whole journey into Hijirah, I think this was the most exhausting time for us.  Dithering can be so time consuming and emotionally draining!

I think that by this time and having spoken to a lot of brothers about their experiences abroad, my husband was coming to the conclusion that the only place in the world where he and our children would be totally accepted and not looked down upon was Algeria.  He was getting desperate as we weren’t getting any younger and we both had spent 20 years in England, when we had intended on living there only a short while.  Life just seemed to grab on to you and hold you down, and, at the same time, you were so busy running as fast as you could to keep up with the pace, you didn’t realise that life was passing you by.  And, of course, the children were getting older, needed a life of their own, and what future was there in a society that seemed would never accept them for who they were – Muslims. Don’t get me wrong…. we had a good and happy life in England and the people where we lived were so helpful and accommodating that I have no complaints about that time.  But the society was structured on non-Muslim principles, some of which were compatible with our beliefs and others that were not.

One day, my husband and I brought the children to a little park around the corner from our home, to the swings etc.  It was quiet as all the children were in school – one of the many advantages in home education.  I sat there and watched them play and thought to myself what kind of a life are we giving them.  They had to be brought out and supervised to play, they had to be brought from one Muslim house to another to visit their friends, like one little oasis of Islam to another.  It was all so artificial.  Surely Algeria had to be better than this for them, with all its faults.  Time was passing and every time I read that aya in the Qur’an I felt a shiver up and down my spine: ‘When angels take the souls of those who die in sin against their souls, they say: “In what (plight) were ye?”  They reply: “Weak and oppressed were we in the earth”.  They say: “Was not the earth of Allah spacious enough for you to move yourselves away (from evil)?”  Such men will find their abode in Hell. – what an evil refuge!’ 

I told one sister who is a mathematician, about my fears that once I went to live in Algeria I would live a very lonely life with none of the wonderful friendships I had forged in England.  This is what I had meant, in my very first post, in answer to my husband’s question about moving to Algeria, when I said I felt as if I would be buried alive in Algeria.  She said something that reverberated in my brain until this day:  “Here in a non-Muslim country, where the ratio of non-Muslims to Muslims is so big, you have managed to make good friends.  Don’t you think that in a country where the ratio of Muslims to non-Muslims is big, and where almost everyone is Muslim, you will find it easier to make good friends?”  It made a lot of sense to me, may Allah reward her for her wise words that encouraged me so much in that time of doubt.  

So I said to my husband that I would move to Algeria but with certain conditions.  Top of the list was that I would not live with any of my in-laws (nice and all as they were I knew that our relationship would suffer if we lived together), that I had my name on any property that we owned and that I could come back and visit my family in Ireland if we could afford it.  My husband accepted all of these conditions very happily and  he has kept his word to this day Alhamdulilah.

It all started with a question…….

The bay of Algiers, 1987

“How do you fancy going to live in Algeria?” my husband asked me.  “As much as I fancy being buried alive,” I answered.  He was hurt I could tell, but it was the way I felt, at the time.  I could not lie, and it was our future we were talking about here, not the next day’s dinner.

Don’t get me wrong.  I loved Algeria from the first night I stepped off the plane in the summer of 1987 and felt the heat in my face, smelt the rosewater (to this day I’m surprised it wasn’t bleach with the way the women here have such a love affair with the stuff!) and saw the palm trees.  I fell totally and instantly in love with the place.  It wasn’t an easy place to live in then.  People complain today about how much of a developing country it is, but I always compare it to the way it was then.

The Port of Algiers, 1987

I arrived alone on a flight from Zagreb.  As my husband had not been back to his home country since we were married we thought it would be a good idea for him to go ahead for a week with our young 2year old daughter.  I thought I was being so clever and found a cheaper flight, from London via Zagreb, which meant waiting around in Zagreb airport for several hours, with the military walking around looking very much armed… and dangerous.  I was very grateful for them though when it was my turn to travel, and as evening came and my night flight to Algiers came closer, I was surrounded by Yugoslavian (as they were then) drunk men, who were also travelling to Algiers and who obviously could only make the journey once they were well tanked on alcohol.  One sat beside me and started making unwanted overtures to which a soldier came up and ushered him away from me with his rifle.

No matter how much my husband tried to describe Algeria to me, and, even after having his sister over to visit, I still could not get Iran, with its black clad women pulling at their clothes and the bearded, angry men, all screaming ‘down with America’ out of my head, nor the story of ‘Not without my daughter’ which had made the headlines in recent months.  Despite all his best efforts I was almost certain that I would be handed an abaya at the airport as I went through!  Instead I was met with a certain amount of bemusement and sympathy when I tried to explain to the Immigration Officer, in the best school girl French that the Irish education system had to offer (or at least I liked to think so anyway), why I was in his country and where, exactly I was going to be staying.  Only God alone knows what I told him because I have a nasty habit of putting the worst word possible in the wrong place, both in French and my fledgling derja.

Bab El Oued, Algiers, 1987

I arrived at my husband’s home at 2.00am in the morning and everyone except his mother and sister were asleep.  This was the first time his mother and I met, and while I sat at their Formica covered table and drank tea, I felt so much at home Alhamdulilah. It was a tiny one-bed-roomed flat with only two other rooms and a bathroom and small kitchen, and they insisted on giving us the ‘salon’.  Even when various other members of his family came to visit us and stay overnight, they all crammed into the other rooms and our ‘salon’ remained sacrosanct.  His family seemed to go on forever, so many faces and so many names, some of whom were difficult for me to remember, but I think it was only because it was all at once, as, by Algerian standards my husband’s family is quite small.  The neighbouring women and the families of my husband’s closest friends probably added to my confusion.  But it was ok, because I discovered that it wasn’t from the wind that my husband got his ability to laugh at himself, and not take himself too seriously, and they were all so warm and inviting that it was impossible not to like them.

Anything we brought over – kitchen gadgets, clothes, sweets, you name it, was pounced on immediately as being luxury goods.  The only clothes you could find to buy were cheap “jibbas” and all you could find for sale in the shops were plastic containers – the cheap kind.  To sum it up, the first word I ever learnt in Arabic was one I learnt on that holiday “Ma-kesh” (“there isn’t”), because I heard it over and over again!

Bab El Oued, Algiers, 1987

But there was something about the country and its people that really grabbed my heart.  Maybe it was their sense of humour and their willingness to laugh at themselves, or their warmth and hospitality.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I loved it, as I loved the heat of the sun, and the beautiful beaches with the magnificent Mediterranean Sea.

I was dreading leaving as I had never seen my husband really upset before and was anxious as to how I would be able to comfort him leaving his family again at the end of the holiday.  The dreaded day came and my body went into major biological dysfunction – I had butterflies in my stomach and my heart was in my mouth.  All of his family were in his mother’s tiny flat to say goodbye and when I saw him saying goodbye to his sisters and brothers, I thought to myself “it’s not so bad, nobody seems really emotional”.  And then it came to him saying goodbye to his mum and I just dissolved into a quivering blob.  Yes! Me!  Afterwards, he said he too had thought he had got away without the emotional goodbyes, and when he looked behind him, there I was, in the middle of them all, bawling my eyes, out, with all his sisters and nieces doing the same around me!  He said it was entirely my fault! I had started them off!  I cried all the way to the airport, with my husband patting my hand and saying, “It’s ok, we’ll come back soon”!  So much for MY comforting my husband!

Bab El Oued, Algiers, 1987