Strangers In A Strange Land

Cafe Ginjan’s story is not unique. What makes it uniquely compelling is the survival story that leads up to it. Mohammed and Rahim hail from a middle-class family in Conakry, Guinea’s
capital. They had a happy childhood, though their country “was always in turmoil,” said Mohammed, recalling “bullets falling through the ceiling” during ethnic riots. Their father, an alumnus of the prestigious Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship international leadership program, worked  as an advisor in Guinea’s U.S. embassy. This afforded Mohammed a rare treat: in July of 1997, when he was 13 years old, he received a tourist Visa for a visit in Pennsylvania, where he would stay for a month with family friends. A week before his scheduled return, Mohammed’s father called with dire news. The upcoming Guinean election was getting contentious, “and a bunch of people were just disappearing… my father had gotten tips that he might get arrested next. He had to leave the country,” Mohammed said. As the firstborn, he was in danger of being targeted as well. Until the danger passed, his father arranged for Mohammed to stay with another acquaintance near Atlanta, Georgia.

“This person must have thought that I came from a wealthy family, and that she would get money to take care of me,” Mohammed said. Once it became clear this was not the case, the relationship with his host soured. The next few years were some of his “hardest and loneliest". Having long trained to focus on the positive, Mohammed declined to delve into what made them so: Instead, he spoke about the emotional touchstones that got him through it.

“I grew up in an amazing family. I had a mom who was not educated, but she's probably the smartest, biggest hustler. She knew how to get things done no matter what. She was very loving, kind, caring. And then I had a father who was one of the only educated people in his village, but he never acted like he was special. He exemplified how to see every human being as an equal, no matter how poor or rich they were. What he didn’t have in money he had in human capital. He helped everyone, and everyone was his friend. He was loving, he was kind, he was one of the few people I knew who would just sit and listen to us. He let his kids challenge him, which in Guinea was rare. And then we were surrounded by a bigger family: uncles, aunts, neighbors, everyone raising you, everyone caring for you. When you have this kind of security and comfort from early on, you know who you are. No one can break that.”

At the age of 16, with $80 in his pocket, Mohammed left Atlanta for NYC. Only then did he tell his parents about some of the conditions he had endured. After several weeks of couch-surfing with family acquaintances in the city, a connection in New Hampshire agreed to take him in until he completed high school.

In 2001, Mohammed’s mother and his brother Rahim flew in for his graduation. His mother returned to Guinea after the ceremony, but Rahim stayed. With the government crackdown in Guinea intensifying and their father still living in exile, he could apply for asylum in the U.S. After 9/11, though, Canada became the more likely destination. Mohammed bought Rahim a one-way Greyhound ticket from Vermont to Quebec, where he planned to seek asylum with the Canadian immigration authorities. He never made it: two hours south of the Canadian border Rahim was pulled off the bus by the American border patrol, and sent to a juvenile immigration detention center in Buffalo, where he was held for the next 12 months.

Much like Mohammed, Rahim is determined to focus on the bright side. “I’m a lucky dude, one of the luckiest I know,” he said, with conviction. “Things always come pretty easy to me. Sure, if I knew I would end up in jail for a year, I probably wouldn’t have gone, but conditions weren’t too bad there. I was safe, I was fed.” Being an unaccompanied minor, Rahim was released from the detention center into foster care -- which, again, he views as a lucky turn. “I know the foster care system can be horrendous, but I was super fortunate with the family I ended up being placed with. They are good people. They didn’t have much, but they made sure I had what I needed, and supported me right through college.”

During this period, Mohammed was painstakingly eking out a living in NYC. He lived in a 1bdr in the Bronx, with an uncle and five other Guinean immigrants. He worked as a cab driver, a street vendor, a furniture salesman, a courier, and any other jobs he could get. What remained from his income after paying rent and sending money home, Mohammed spent on community college — which took him nine years to complete, since he could only afford a couple of courses per semester. It took more than ten and many more thousands of dollars, to resolve his immigration status and receive a green card.

During that decade, Mohammed ate little, slept little, and dreamt of the day he and Rahim possessed the necessary credentials to pursue the American dream as equals. But inequality appeared as inherent to America as hope.

Coming from a country where 99% of the population is black, Mohammed was unprepared for systemic Anti-Black racism. He recalled being tackled by two police officers one morning, at 6 am, while he was walking home from a night shift. “They yelled: ‘Stop! Get your fucking hands in the air! What do you have in that paper bag? Is that weed?’ Then they grabbed me and pushed me against a brick wall. I told them, ‘It’s just a sandwich. I just bought breakfast from Dunkin Donuts.’ I repeated it a couple of times. Instead of looking inside the bag, the guy threw it on the ground and squashed it. The other one knocked the cup out of my hand. Then they just walked away.” Another time, as a cab driver, Mohammed was assaulted by a white passenger, who broke his glasses. But when he called the cops for help, “they threw me against the trunk of the car, thinking I must be the attacker.”

But it’s the smaller, more insidious stuff that really got to him. Being regularly stopped by security guards while white people were waved through. Showing up for a high-stakes job interview and being told that “delivery is in the back”.

“When you walk into the nicest restaurants or hotels, 99% of the guests are white, while 99% of the staff are black. So there’s always this assumption that if you’re black, you're less. It's in the glare, the look you get when you walk into places, even when you’re wearing a suit. Once you start noticing it, you keep seeing it everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. And if you're not careful, that stuff will break you. It'll destroy you, you know? Because it simply doesn’t matter what you do.”

College degrees and green cards did not change the brothers’ trajectory. “We were still driving cabs and working in restaurants. We were filling out hundreds of applications, writing personal letters, showing up at companies. But we couldn’t even get an interview. It felt like we’d done everything right. But nothing was happening,” Mohammed told Humans of New York in 2022. “But we always look on the bright side, and every problem has a solution,” he added now. “So rather than throw in the towel, we decided to launch our own business.”