Childhood Home and Family  

Mrs Hawa Ismail Mumin

I was born in 1933 in Bargal, North Western Somalia. I was raised in a nomadic family. Somalia has a long coast, all around the North and Eastern side of the country. Bosaso was the main city where nomads used to go and trade. My home was a traditional nomadic hut, a communal hut for all the family to share. However, the hut is not that important because even if the children are a little bit older they can sleep outside. The weather was not very cold, we just had our clothes to sleep in. We didn't have any furniture like beds and chairs; the whole house was empty. We just used to sleep on soft mats which we wove ourselves. I remember that when the weather turned bad we had to pack up our homes and move on. The goods and the hut were packed-up and it became a mobile home. We moved from one place to another to another. Camels were our transportation. Weather was not the only reason for moving as most nomadic families owned livestock and moved to where there was grass and water.

I grew up in Bargal with my two brothers, two sisters, mother and father. I was the middle child, but we also lived with our extended family. Everyone was very close, it is not only the mother and her children. Everybody looks after each other.

Our life was a nomadic one, where we were reliant on our livestock. We were only using our milk to drink and ghee to cook. We lived very far from the cities and had no-one close to trade with. Everyone in our tribe had the same thing, livestock! My father and brother had to travel along the coast to trade, until they reached the main city of Bosaso. They used to work on the harbouring ships where they spent three or four months until they could get some money and buy extra livestock for the family. That is how the family kept going.

Every morning we would wake up with the sunrise and pray. We would have something to drink and clean out the goat's pen. The adult women would be making ghee from the milk and preparing food. We were surrounded by land and there was nothing to do except look after the animals and interact with friends and family. We were with the livestock from 9.00am to sunset and they ate as much as they could from 9.00am until 6.00pm. We ourselves were not allowed to eat anything during that time. We couldn't even milk the animals, it was forbidden. However, we did not go hungry because there were lots of trees and we were allowed to eat their fruit and the seeds. We returned to the family and that is when we got our dinner. People were not the priority; animals were! We were raised to protect the livestock and we had to protect them from wild animals. We were never afraid, we used to see lions and foxes. If we saw a lion heading towards the livestock, about 10 to 20 children would just bang everything and shout very loudly. If animals did come, they used to take one or two livestock. In the nomadic area, no-one fears anything, but here I am even scared of cats!

Nomadic culture is about the open land, your job is to go and find water and grass for the livestock, and all you care about is the animals and nothing else. We sing a song for rain called Come, Come because we want the water so we can have grass and produce. If there is a heavy rainfall and a possibility of a flood, you have to take all the goats and put them on high land or a mountain. If the water goes straight to the animals they will be sick, so we shelter them in the caves.

Everyone had rice to eat because of the trading that took place. We had white rice with yoghurt. That is all we ate. At night we had more fun! All our traditional storytellers competed to compose the best songs that described something like, for example, a tree - its qualities and flaws. That was our literature.

The whole community came together to make music. There were big families and it was a very close-knit community. Even if the people didn't know anything about composing, they still sang, rehearsed and played instruments as well.
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Mr Ke Wing Pang

I was born in 1935 in a village in the New Territories, an area of Hong Kong. My village was quite large, almost a town. My house was surrounded by farmland and lots of trees, but I could hear the trains as the railway line ran close by. I remember the weather was relatively warm, not usually hotter than 29 degrees.

Back then the old houses only had one bedroom and one sitting room. Mine was a one-floor house with an attic upstairs which was used for storage. The whole house had only two windows, one at the front and one at the back. I slept in the backroom, where there was one bed for my parents and one bed I shared with my siblings. There was an extra bed in the sitting room. We just had these two spaces, plus a little area where we could make our tea and boil soup. The house was open-plan but we had a divider to separate the bathroom from where we slept. For bathing we would have used a bucket and a small jug. At dinner time a folding table would have been put in the main room. We didn't have much furniture, just some small wooden chairs.

There was also a proper kitchen, which was used for lots of cooking, making dinners and boiling water for baths. Houses then didn't have running water, so we had to boil water, and firewood was used as fuel to heat everything up. In every house, there was an altar for prayers: you prayed to the god of the area and remembered all the people who had died in the area.

I was the youngest of three in my family, I had an elder brother and an elder sister. Altogether there were five people in my house. We were a family of farmers, my grandfather and his father were farmers. It wasn't just my family who were farmers; mostly all the families in my village were, but we could only afford to rent the land. My father mainly grew rice and sweet potatoes. Everyone worked on the farm, men and women, it was a long, hard day! We would normally get up at six in the morning but if seedlings need to be planted my family would get up around five. The crops were planted at certain times of the year. November was the time for growing sweet potato. We would harvest two crops of rice, one at the end of February and one at the end of May or beginning of June. My father kept some of the crops for us to eat and sold the rest.

It was a hard life, my family really struggled, they didn't have a lot of money, it could take up to three months from the day we planted the crop to the time we actually harvested. Then next month we could get the rice and sell it. After a long day's work in the field, my family would all sit together and have an evening meal of rice, vegetables and salt fish.

I really looked forward to the festivals because it gave me an opportunity to visit the city. I used to go with my friends and we would travel by bicycle. I didn't ride one myself, but I would sit on the back of my friend's bicycle. The Chinese calendar is very different to the British one and festivals took place at different times of the year. The fifth month of the Chinese year we would celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival. The seventh month we would celebrate the Ghost Festival. In the eighth month of the year we would celebrate the Moon Festival in my own village.

Extracts from the 'Mapping Memories' publication. Many more stories are included in the book. Find out how to obtain a copy here