“After just three months in the Netherlands, I wanted to go back to Guinea-Bissau,” says Fatima. Her uncle brought her here in 1984 when she was 18 years old. “He came here to sell cars or something. He was married to a Dutch person here and had been living here for eight to nine years. They said it would be better if I came here too.”
She herself did not want to leave West African Guinea-Bissau. “The situation there then was not as bad as it is now. We had a normal life. We were not rich, but not poor either.” Still, she joined her uncle in Spangen. “I arrived in October so it was extremely cold. Also, the rest of my family was in Guinea-Bissau, so I felt really lonely. But my uncle said I would get used to it with time.” Her uncle also took her to Belgium, where she also knew family. “We stayed there for two years. That made me realise that it’s nicer here after all. I also made some friends. Contacts with others make you feel more at home anyway. So then I did want to stay.” After putting it off for a long time, she learnt Dutch after all. She married a Dutch doctor and found work at a school in Overschie, in the canteen.
In the Netherlands for healthcare
Still, she always thought she would go back to her homeland. “I never wanted to grow old here. Butja. My son, now 20, is autistic. In Guinea-Bissau, conditions for him are not as good as here. And I don’t want to just leave him behind.” She also does not know if she would still feel at home and welcome in her homeland. “Now my whole family is here. Only my sister has gone back. Europe is nothing to her. And my mother was there too, but she has passed away now. So if I were in Guinea-Bissau, I would only know my sister, nobody else. And people there would see that you are no longer from there. So then I would also feel lonely.” She also recognises this dilemma among other migrants. “I have Cape Verdean neighbours who went back but they are now back in the Netherlands because they also feel lonely here again.”
Safe and at home in diversity
Now she knows that she will stay in Rotterdam, in her neighbourhood in Mathenesse, where she has lived for 30 years. There she feels comfortable. “I have never had any problems here. I feel safe and at home. The neighbours are lovely people too. Almost all of them are foreign: Moroccan, Turkish, African, we all get along well.” Fatima thinks it is good to have so many nationalities in the neighbourhood and even the city. “Everyone has the right to build something good for themselves. And everyone has her or his own reason for staying here. Because if you don’t like it, you go to another country. I did that too.”