By Nair Aboubacar Allaoui, Comoros
First of all, we have to understand the origin. Where we come from. I’m coming from a family where my birth grandfather came from Yemen. We were raised to stories about our ancestors doing commerce, from Yemen to East Africa. They were Arabs. They came by the ocean with their boats, doing their commercial activities, and finally they settled on the island and married and had kids – which is where my family came from. I come from a family where our relatives, such as my grandfather, used to have ships and boats, and we had that relation to the ocean from a very early age.
Secondly, as an island, we are surrounded by the ocean everywhere we go. When we go to work, when we go to school. We have to see the ocean, as the ocean is setting the status of the day and tell us how the day is going to be when we wake up. You see the state of the ocean, and this tells you how the day is going to be. When the weather is very bad it affects your mood, and you know this is going to be a bad day. However, when the weather is very nice, there are no waves and the beaches are very clean, this motivates you and your mood. You say that okay, the day is going to be nice.
The ocean has two contrasting aspects. Mainly, the ocean brings me good memories, because as kids almost every weekend and holiday would be spent on the beach doing barbecue with the family. We swim in the ocean, play football on the beach and we have fun with our family and friends. The ocean also provides us with our resources and our livelihoods, such as fish and food and beautiful tourist attractions. The other side to the ocean is our collective memory of the ocean as a place of loss and bereavement. When people move from one island to another there have often been accidents as there are not sufficient security measures to protect the passengers on the boats. During bad weather, we sometimes have accidents, and most of the people of Comoros have been affected by this. We have lost so many people to the ocean.
Nowadays there is a turning tide, where people are turning away from the ocean. The population of Comoros comes from the ocean, and most of us came to these islands by sailing across the ocean and most of our cities used to be coastal cities. Now, however, people are leaving the ocean behind. People who used to be fishers and many who had jobs related to the port are not working with land issues. Somehow, we forgot where we came from.
I am therefore very proud of my work being related to the ocean. I’m trying to go back to our ancestry and connections to the ocean, and share stories with people of how it is important to us in Comoros. Even though the fear is still there within me, I am trying to fight this through my daily work with ocean issues and ocean opportunities. Through my work with marine spatial planning, I am trying to share the ways in which the ocean is good to us, particularly the people of Comoros.
“Journeys to the Sea” is a new series of inspiring stories that highlight the personal connections of marine professionals with the ocean. As a follow up to World Oceans Day on June 8th, WIOMSA is excited to launch a three-month-long celebration dedicated to the ocean. The series will feature 34 unique stories from across the Western Indian Ocean region. These stories will share firsthand accounts of ocean-related experiences, reflections, and narratives from participants who have been part of the Sida-funded International Training Programme on marine spatial planning, “Planning for a Sustainable Blue Future in the Western Indian Ocean”. The stories have been part of the Ocean Storytelling component of the workshop, led by Dr Mia Strand, Nelson Mandela University. Read the collection of stories here.
Feature photo: © Nair Allaoui