‘I left my children behind to escape pattern of sex assault’
Direct Provision is not as bad as billed, says an asylum seeker who tells Donal Lynch why she wants to stay
TEARS spring bright in Senzeni Nomasonto Mpofu’s eyes as she describes the fear she lives under. “It’s like a sword hanging over your head,” she says of the Intent to Deport order served on her last December. “Every day I feel like I don’t know what’s coming. I don’t want this journey to end like this. I am afraid of what’s waiting for me ”
Noma (33), as she is better known, arrived in Ireland five years ago. She stepped completely alone out of the plane at Dublin Airport. “I was frightened because I knew there was another process waiting for me,” she says. “Nobody was just going to open the doors for me. Fortunately enough, the person I made contact with at the airport was a very nice man. And he listened carefully to my story.”
Noma told him that she grew up in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city. She never knew her father. Her mother and stepfather “did the best they could for me”. As a child she was sexually molested by a relative. “It happened repeatedly. I was 18 when I told my mother.”
Most sexual assault cases in Zimbabwe never reach even the stage of an official complaint, this was no different. “My mother did counsel me but I was hoping he could be brought to justice. But that is not what happened. That was a time when I was just finishing my O-Levels and she said that she didn’t want all the bad attention coming to me because people would be asking negative questions about me rather than focusing on him. I still think about it often because he is out there walking the streets somewhere and who knows who else he did it to.”
She remembers the Zimbabwe of her childhood as a peaceful place — “it was calm and you could speak your mind” — but Robert Mugabe’s land grab in the 2000s changed that.
“I never took so much interest in politics, but things changed when black people claimed what they saw as their land. There was a scramble for produce, a scramble for everything. There were no more farmers.”
Noma had two children with a man but they split up. She moved to a different part of Zimbabwe to work as a schoolteacher. It was while she was living at the school that she was taken in for an interrogation by local police, who accused her of spreading anti-government propaganda among the schoolchildren. They released her but a few weeks later she was brought in again, this time by a man who was acting alone.
“I hadn’t seen the man before but the way he was dressed made him look like a detective — we call them CID — I also got this impression from the car. He said to me to get in the car and I believed I was going back to the same camp where they had questioned me a few weeks before.”
Instead, the man assaulted her violently and sexually. She becomes emotional as she recounts the terrible toll this took on her. “It wasn’t the first time that something like this happened and I knew it had changed my life before. So now I felt that this is a pattern. You feel like people look at you and you and feel, somehow, that they have the right to touch you, that you draw attention to yourself and invite this. It completely changed my life.”
Rape has been described as Zimbabwe’s silent political weapon and given the political overtones of her initial interrogation, Nomu did not see a prospect of her attacker being brought to justice, even if she reported the crime.
To add to her pain, she became pregnant from the assault. “I didn’t know what I would do after that happened. It was very hard to make a decision. In the end I had a miscarriage.”
She says deciding to come here, leaving her two children behind, was the hardest decision she ever had to make. “When you are growing you never think you are going to have to leave. I had children that I had to think of, I had family I had to think of. My daughter is 14 and my son is seven.”
She travelled first to South Africa, and then on to Dublin, where she was housed for a few weeks before moving to a direct provision centre in Cork. When she arrived in Ireland she phoned her mother. “She said I am finally happy that you are safe, where you can leave everything behind and start over. My kids didn’t even know that I had left. I called them from Ireland and said that I would be away for a while and they’ve been strong. I miss them terribly though.”
In Ireland, Noma was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. “When I first came to Ireland I wasn’t sleeping at all,” she says. “I started suffering from what I thought were minor mental health issues.
“I had depression, panic attacks, trouble sleeping and I developed really bad anger issues. I realised that I hadn’t really processed anything, I didn’t really deal with it all.”
The opposition to Direct Provision in this country has been pointed. Some rural townspeople have spoken out against provision centres being located in their area. Even those who see the necessity for the centres don’t deny that there are deep flaws with the system. Noma says that some of the criticisms of Direct Provision in this country are not well founded.
“I know people don’t like it but it’s not so bad. We have food and shelter and we can get medication if we’re not feeling well. That’s more than anyone else in any other country would be getting and it’s a safe place where you can fall asleep. I’m in a room by myself.
“My only criticism is the length of time it takes. You have to wait for years. I’ve tried many times to do my Leaving Cert or to go to school and I’m always told that I would be regarded as an international student. The time it all takes affects people socially and mentally.”
Just under 3,300 people have been granted asylum in Ireland in the past 10 years. The Department of Justice says that an Intention to Deport letter “is the start of a process whereby detailed consideration is given to each case. A decision is made at the end of this process either to make a deportation order or grant permission to remain”.
Noma now faces a dilemma — if she remains here and a deportation order is served, she could be banned from returning to the country for a number of years. But if she leaves voluntarily, as many asylum seekers do, she will be giving up.
Instead she has chosen to make her presence felt here. She tells her story as part of Cead Mile Failte, a new documentary this coming week on TG4, and she speaks of wanting to “give something back to Ireland”.
“I really love this country and I want to stay here. I want to become a mental health nurse. I don’t want to go back to Zimbabwe.
“Waiting for this decision is so stressful. The fear is there every day. I don’t know what’s coming next.”
See Noma’s story in Direct Provision in Tabu: Cead Mile Failte which airs on Wednesday at 9.30pm on TG4 as part of the Wednesday Documentary Season