When I tell my daughters how I used to make dolls from mud and stones and sticks, they say, "Oh, mom, that's gross. Not those old stories again. " I tell them to appreciate their dolls and toys and books and clothes and TV and computer...........
This is how I grew up. This picture shows my earlier existance. How did I go from nomad to nurse? How did I go from riding a camel to driving a car?
"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader" John Quincy Adams
"Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it's always your choice" Wayne Dyer
"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader" John Quincy Adams
"Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it's always your choice" Wayne Dyer
I was born in Africa in 1982 in the eastern coastal city of Mogadishu, Somalia. Shortly after my birth, my father and my mother separated and were divorced. Unable to take care of me by herself, my mother brought me to live with her mother, my grandmother, and her three sons in the small, primitive village of Balcad located in the southeastern region of Somalia. By primitive, I mean very primitive – no electricity, no cars, no phones, no motors of any kind, meals cooked outside over a fire, herders and farmers living in small domed huts with dirt floors, crocodiles, jackals, hyenas, snakes and mosquitos carrying malaria. There, living with my grandmother I suffered from physical abuse and sexual molestation starting at the age of four.
By the time I was five, I was trained by my grandmother to herd the sheep and goats out in the grasslands where I had to chase off not only hyenas and jackals, but boys herding their flocks as well who saw a young girl out by herself as easy prey. I was more successful at fending them off in the grasslands than home in the hut.
I survived the attacks of crocodiles at the river next to our village as well as malaria, not once, but more than dozen. By the time I was eleven, I was taking my grandmother’s cattle deep into the grasslands, living as a nomad for months at a time with nothing to eat or drink except the milk I could get from the cows and the fruit and honey I could find in the wild. There, I learned what survival meant! I also learned how to depend on myself and myself only; I learned how to endure extreme hardship and loneliness, and I learned just how aggressive the young men herding camels could be, only wanting the thrills of rape to satisfy themselves when they saw a girl, the only girl, out by herself in the savannah. There I learned how to fight as well as hide without being seen!
I witnessed the breakout of civil war as Somalia fell to her knees into utter chaos, everyone fighting against everyone, tribe against tribe, clan against clan, everywhere! Which eventually brought me to my life in the largest refugee camp in the world – Dadaab in eastern Kenya, where I lived with my mother and four siblings for three years.
There, I saw mothers and fathers, each day carry the lifeless bodies of their children and loved ones, wrapped in an old blanket or cloth, to bury them outside the camp. There I also witnessed women fighting each other with machetes or sticks or knives simply over their place in line to get water from one of four wells – four wells for one hundred and fifty thousand people! There I witnessed the passive acceptance of seeing little children with very large stomachs and small skinny legs, dying, too weak to chase the flies away, their eyes pleading for help.
Memories! Memories which I thought were placed on a nice safe shelf in my mind, often come flooding back to me where, I too, scratched out an existence within the hopelessness of Dadaab - the name itself sounding like something out of World War II with scenes of dysentery, cholera, unsanitary living conditions, people fighting over food and water, human waste everywhere, malaria being a household term, and no work or purpose or hope of anything better. I lived with the ever hungry beast called malnourishment, indiscriminately eating its fill of young and old alike.
I look back now, after spending the last dozen years in America learning English, becoming a U.S. citizen, going to school to learn the basics of reading, writing and math, and eventually earning my BS degree in nursing working for one of the finest medical facilities in the world - the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
I’ve tried to put my memories of fear and shame, disease, and hunger…and rape out of my head, as now I’m thousands of miles away from Somalia. I’ve had the luxury of being so busy getting up on my feet in America, that I haven’t had the time to think about where I came from or what I’d been through – until recently!
Now, working as a Registered Nurse in a nice office with an eight-to-five job, my life in Africa and the struggles I’ve had to embrace to survive, are fading into that area where memories can be carefully placed into perspective; a perspective that helps me answer some questions like, why me? What was the purpose of all this, and how have I been so blessed to be where I am today? My heart goes out to those around the world, of all nationalities, who are still struggling with extreme conditions of life and death, to those who can barely buy bread for themselves and their children, to those with little or no medical service to help with even the most common infections and disease, to those fleeing for their lives from the anger of war, to those victims of abuse and rape, and to those who have escaped but are living in a foreign land with no knowledge of the culture, the language, or how to succeed in life.
Being a first generation immigrant myself, from a country swallowed by chaos, I appreciate the tremendous effort that all immigrants had to make to leave their homeland to start from scratch and rebuild their lives - all those that came to improve life for themselves and their children and their children’s children.
My most recent memory of my home country is the life I led, along with one hundred and fifty thousand others, in the Dadaab refugee camp. A camp which, established in 1992 to accommodate ninety thousand, has now swollen to one half of a million people and growing each day; growing not only by those fleeing for their lives across forests and deserts, being robbed and raped and murdered on the way, but by the ten thousand third-generation refugees born in Dadaab to their refugee parents, some of whom were also born there years ago. During the recent famine which struck Somalia, over one thousand people per day fled to, and set up camp, in Dadaab. Some months saw as many as forty thousand seeking refuge! The famine has subsided, but the civil chaos has not. And the people remain.
Somehow, through great providence, I was able to leave the camp, come to America, find work, educate myself and have my own family, not living in a hut, or sleeping on the dirt, or looking for any handout of food we’re given, but owning our home, buying our food from grocery stores, sending our children to schools, hiring tutors, and living the American dream.
I’m hoping to share my story with you, not that it’s so unique, but because it isn’t unique. It’s similar to the stories of many, many people. People who have struggled from one mouthful of food to the next; people who have endured extreme physical and mental hardships, and forced to cope with them as well. People who still aren’t sure whether they’ll see the sun go down tonight or the moon rise, but pray, sometimes without hope, that they and their children might be spared from disease, murder, rape, and starvation.
Flying into New York, fresh from Dadaab, I saw the Statue of Liberty with its golden plaque:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.