Import Me a Wife!

      The glamorous weddings in five star hotels, the gold chains and the opportunity to set foot in the first world is drawing thousands of oblivious young Somali girls into arranged marriages without much protest. The arrangement to get hitched to ‘loser’ husbands living abroad is becoming more of an accepted lifestyle and one who lands the opportunity is even considered ‘lucky’. Once a man has repatriated to the United States/Europe whether illegally or legally, even the lamest of them all becomes the world’s most eligible bachelor among Somali girls.

     Because of the demand for such suitors girls are willing to overlook even the most bizarre of traits. They will gladly get married to the most unattractive,  a blind man, or one with no limbs, or even fat old man just for the opportunity to ‘be taken abroad’.  It doesn’t matter if the guy is working wherever he is or is sitting on his behind waiting for welfare. As long as he can afford the wedding (probably through family contribution), and is willing to file papers in regards to his wife’s joining him, then it is a done deal. So popular is this kind of marriages that men use the lines “am on a flight list” to pick up girls in social gatherings in Eastleigh, a saburb in Nairobi-Kenya largely populated by Somalis. Loosely translated from Somali language this means that his papers are in order and he is just waiting on a confirmation date of travel. And girls dress to kill whenever there is a wedding ceremony whose video recording is likely to land in a home somewhere in America. This, they say will increase the chance to be spotted by a ‘suitor in America’. The real story of these import/export marriages however is one shrouded in deception and misrepresentation.

      I recently met a girl *Ramla (not her real name) who told me the only thing she knows about her ‘husband’ is the fact that he once married her. He came, they had a huge extravagant wedding, he went back and details have been sketchy since then. The poor girl has been ‘married’ for three year with no conjugal rights, been living with her relatives in Nairobi waiting for that elusive Visa application. He calls once maybe twice in three months and sends about a USD100 in those three months. She has no listed phone number of him, nor a mobile number. She has no clue which state he lives in, how his status is in the US and sadly she does not even know the rest of his family. She says they ‘met’ over the phone, ‘dated’ over the phone and he only came for the wedding and left soon afterwards. They hardly knew each other and still hardly know each other three years into the marriage. Her family met some family representatives when dowry negotiations were being made. This story is but a thousand similar ones I have heard in the streets of Nairobi’s Eastleigh area, but the deception goes even deeper.