Europe | Migration in Europe

Looking for a home

Asylum-seekers, economic migrants and residents of all stripes fret over their place

|BRUSSELS, HELSINKI AND WARSAW

FINLAND, with its baffling language and culture of reserve, is not an easy place for outsiders to penetrate. For Nura Farah, the breakthrough came via the dissected brains of dead cows. Ms Farah, who arrived with her mother in 1993 as a teenager seeking asylum from Somalia’s civil war, spent eight years dreaming of a better life in London while she was taunted at school and bore racist abuse on the streets. But in 2001, working as a lab technician in Helsinki, she found herself charged with testing cow tissue for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad-cow disease. The work was fulfilling, her colleagues encouraging, and she moved on to bigger challenges. She took on Finnish citizenship, gave birth to a son and last year became the first Somali Finn to publish a novel.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Looking for a home”

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