Freedom in lockdown
Ellie Kisyombe left direct provision this year. She tells Liadan Hynes about the process of healing from the trauma of living within the system, her grief over the lost years, and the new home she is creating
THIS is not how Ellie Kisyombe had imagined life after direct provision would look during all those long years in the system. Ellie and her two children moved from direct provision into her new inner city Dublin home at the start of this year, just weeks before Covid-19 restrictions came into place. “The day that we processed everything and knew that we could move in, it was a huge relief,” she tells me now.
“I remember going days hardly ever sitting down. Being in the kitchen, making food, sitting in the garden, looking at the house and thinking ‘is this where I live or is somebody going to come and say this is not your house — you have to leave?’ But it’s my house, I’m sitting in my bedroom right now,” she concludes.
A residue of fear that it will all be taken away remains. “You feel like you’re going to be woken by a knock on the door and told you have to go. With all that is going on there are times when it hasn’t sunk in that we’ve left direct provision,” Ellie says. “It’s like we’ve come from direct provision to another direct provision. One that is a natural direct provision. I don’t know should we blame God for this?” she laughs, looking to the sky.
Ellie Kisyombe first came to Ireland roughly 10 years ago, and has spent most of that time as an asylum seeker, living in various direct provision centres around the country, first in Mayo, where her efforts to campaign against the system within which she lived began.
In that time, she became for many the most recognisable face of direct provision. Growing up in Malawi, Ellie’s family were political; she says her father and uncle died of suspected poisonings as a result of their political activities. Her father passed away before she left Malawi, her mother shortly after. Just before she herself left, Ellie was imprisoned for activism, and told it was best for her safety that she leave the country.
She was finally granted permission to stay in Ireland last July, just after the local elections in which she ran for the Social Democrats as a candidate for Dublin North inner city; the first person living in direct provision to ever do so.
It had been a gruelling time. During the elections, there were queries about the veracity of Ellie’s account of how long she had spent in direct provision; she says now it was the best part of a decade. At the time, she recalls, she was feeling low, just taking things day by day.
“I’ll be honest with you, it was very, very unexpected,” she says now of the news that permanent residency had been granted. “I was just living in the moment; I didn’t know what was going to happen the next day.”
She was at a meeting in the Gresham Hotel when the call from her solicitor came. “My lawyer said ‘Ellie, we just want to tell you that we’ve decided to resign as your lawyer, because your case is getting complicated’,” she recalls. A huge smile breaks over her face. “Because, you have f*cking got your status,” she recounts him saying, bursting into laughter.
She still didn’t yet know how long a residency she had been granted. “It could be either way, one month, two months, a year, anything ,” Ellie explains. She would need to wait to receive her actual papers from the Department of Justice. In fact, they had arrived back in Balseskin, the direct provision centre, where her family were living at the time in one room divided into three spaces and a shower area; her children, twins, called her shortly afterwards. The twins had joined Ellie in Ireland five years ago, having been looked after by friends and family in South Africa and Malawi before coming to join their mother.
“‘Mum, Mum, you’ve got your papers’, they said.
“I said, ‘I know, I’m coming’. I was thinking ‘am I dreaming?’” she recalls now of the journey home. “I thought ‘okay, I’ve got my papers, but what about my kids?’ Because that happens in direct provision.”
Ellie had been granted permanent residency, in years to come, she will be able to apply for Irish citizenship. A week later, the family received word that her children had been granted international protection. It was only then that she felt able to relax into the news. “Then I was like, this is real. This is happening.”
The family didn’t leave the direct provision system until January. A house was found with the assistance of HAPS. Darina Allen, with whom Ellie has studied, provided a reference. Ellie first went to Ballymaloe on an internship, organised by her friend, food writer and owner of The Cake Cafe, Michelle Darmody.
“A week after I arrived there, Darina decided to invite me on the full course, so
I did the whole certificate, and I stayed over afterwards to help out,” Ellie recalls. “Since then, Darina has always kept in close touch and generously supported me in many ways.”
Michelle and Ellie together founded OurTable, a successful pop-up restaurant, catering company and now food production business, creating food inspired by African and European fusion, which Ellie ran for the past few years, despite not being able to earn a wage while living in direct provision.
“That was something like my therapy. That’s one of the ways that I’ve carried myself,” she says of the company. It has been frustrating not to be able to really get stuck into her business now, but she is focusing her efforts instead on developing the online side of the company. In recent weeks she has created two new
‘When you’ve lived through traumatic situations; they play out a lot afterwards. When you’re in there, you have to have strength to survive’
products, a readymade pasta sauce and an energy drink, adding to the existing range of sauces and hummus. The aim is to sell the products from the company’s website, www.ourtable.ie. She’s also begun working on a book about her experiences. “I’m still hoping for the best, when everything reopens,” she says.
Now that she is not shouldering the day-to-day burden of simply living through direct provision, the trauma of the past decade is confronting her. “I always find when you’ve lived through traumatic situations; they play out a lot afterwards. Because when you’re in there, what you feel is you have to have strength to survive, to get through the day.”
She describes an understandable sense of residual institutionalism. “Sometimes you think ‘it’s easier to be in direct provision than where I am now’, because you don’t know what to do next.”
A few weeks after she first received the news that she had been granted residency, Ellie began to notice her mood dropping. All that she had lost in her time in the direct provision system began to hit her, she recalls now. “I started feeling homesick. During my time in direct provision, I lost so many people and I didn’t even get to go to their funerals. I lost one of the big pillars in my family, my aunt who raised me after the death of my parents.”
After a few weeks of getting settled in their new home, Ellie decided to return to Malawi in February of this year.
“Part of me felt like if I went to Malawi, I could have a sense of healing; I was in a very bad place. To go back to Malawi and see where my aunt lay, see where the whole family lay. I went to the graveyard and it was just filled with tombstones. I went to many houses, my aunt’s or my dad’s, all these homes were empty. Or I found a stranger or a house caretaker. There was only my uncle. It was just the two of us.”
She arrived back just as Covid-19 restrictions began to come into place, putting on pause the new life she was beginning to build. Healing from the trauma of her time in direct provision is not going to be a quick process, she reflects. “It’s a journey. It might take months, years, decades. Also sometimes for us to grieve better we need to find peace within ourselves.” There is a lot to come to terms with.
“You go through blaming someone for being in that situation. Sometimes you hate yourself for making certain decisions. You have kids, they’ve lost so many years of their childhood, you yourself have lost so many years of being a human being, a woman, a mother.”
Sometimes the answer is in letting go, she reflects. “I don’t think you can find the answer to everything, or address every situation. The best thing you can do is find peace within yourself. And then you start looking for other ways to help you on your journey. I’m great in the kitchen, I’m great with community, with writing; I’m a storyteller. These are some of the tools I’ve figured out. But to overcome grief, it’s a very difficult thing. Hope, forgiveness and healing, I feel like that’s the three tools that can help you survive.”
Ellie is still in regular contact with people living in direct provision. “I get so many calls from people in the centres telling me what’s going on. I got a call before people started protesting,” she says of the situation in Cahirsiveen. Just last week, called by a family whose child needed a laptop for home-schooling, Ellie managed to secure 12 laptops for children living in direct provision after reaching out to contacts. She has been making food to bring to some of those living in the emergency centres. “I don’t think it will stop today or tomorrow,” she says of her ties to the direct provision system.
“We always say ‘never forget where you’re coming from’. It’s always going to be part of me, as long as I live.”
On the treatment of those in direct provision during the Covid-19 crisis, she says “the way the Government is dealing with each group of people, they should just treat the people in direct provision the same”. Living in lockdown has been difficult, she acknowledges. Ellie is a community builder and you get the sense that it is hard for her to be cut off from the work and the people who lifted her up for so long. As well as working on the online side of her business, she is producing cooking videos for her Instagram feed, @elliekisyombe.
That said, the sacrifices we are making now are so that we may have a life, she says. “Being in direct provision has helped me to appreciate that this is actually better, because this is about us wanting to live. One year of trying to keep ourselves from dying, it’s greater than being locked somewhere for nine years.”