FAMILY TIES: AIMERANCE IBRAHIM STANDS OUTSIDE HER NORTH PORTLAND HOUSE WITH GRANDSON ISRAEL AND DAUGHTER FLORENCE.
afford food. Their rent in North Portland’s Portsmouth neighborhood keeps rising, now at $1,327 a month. “People would talk, ‘You can go to a place on earth that is like heaven,” she says. “‘You can go live the American dream life.’ I thought all of my problems would be solved.” Ibrahim’s case manager, Megan Wilson of IRCO, says it took three years for Ibrahim to receive Social Security benefits and Medicare to cover her insulin and hospital stays. For a period of time, she had no insurance, no Social Security and no Medicare. Then Ibrahim received a notice: Social Security had overpaid her. Instead of receiving aid, now she owes money. Her debts are over $10,000. On a Sunday afternoon, Ibrahim is weeping, tissue in hand. She sits on her living-room couch with her son Dien-Merci, who’s lying motionless across her lap, save for a few eye movements and the occasional moan. There are photographs of the family covering the walls. Proof sheets from yearbook photos never ordered. A portrait of Barack Obama with the words “America. This Is Our Moment, This Is Our Time” is above the television. A painting of American fighter jets hangs in the corner. Ibrahim grows a garden to make up for the food she can’t afford. She holds back a flood of
“People would talk, ‘You can go to a place on earth that is like heaven.” —Aimerance Ibrahim
tomatoes from pouring out of her freezer. The kitchen drawers are filled with them. “Organic,” she says, proudly. Her son Espoir Mbiriz moved to Corvallis last month to start college at Oregon State University. He talks about a research paper he wrote while he attended Roosevelt High School about the American dream—something his family talks a lot about. “I started asking people, ‘This American dream—do people believe it? Or is it just a name?’” he says. “Most people, these are Americans, they say, ‘Nobody lives that kind of life. There is no such thing as the American dream.’” The way Mbiriz sees it, it’s up to him to fix his family. But for now, his mother is miserable. “She just feels like she’s being treated unfair,” he says. “Like she was brought here to suffer.”
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 30, 2015 wweek.com
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