Chronicling the two-way flow between Canada and Somalia

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Chronicling the two-way flow between Canada and Somalia

 

On a Wednesday last June, I received an e-mail from Fahima Osman. Regular readers of The Globe and Mail will remember Fahima as one of the main characters in our New Canada series two years earlier.

 

We profiled Fahima because she was on target to become the country's first Somali-Canadian doctor. In the process, we at The Globe, thousands upon thousands of our readers and pretty well the entire Somali community fell in love with Fahima and her family for their humanity and humility, among other attributes.

 

Fahima wrote to tell me she had just returned from a trip to Somalia and had been badly discouraged by the devastated condition of the country's health system. Years of war and poverty had taken their toll.

 

Fahima Osman at the upper right with the lovely smile

 

"I was so, so disappointed with the situation the country is in that I felt so overwhelmed and paralyzed at the same time. The poverty is unbelievable," she wrote. She described the acute shortage of doctors and the near impossibility of training new ones. She had always intended to move back and forth between Canada and Somalia in her career, but now she felt that the medical gifts she could bring to the country of her birth would be insufficient. She has decided to pursue a master's degree in public policy and finance because the fix for Somalia's health system is more political than medical.

 

During a series of wars, tens of thousands of Somalis sought refuge in Canada, among them, Fahima's family. Today, the flow is two-way, as some refugees try to help their homeland recover from its deep travails while others still seek the better life in Canada. In today's Focus section, we tell one of these stories. Two award-winning Globe journalists, Stephanie Nolen and Marina Jiménez, have teamed up on the Abdul Rahman family, Stephanie on the Somalia end and Marina in Canada.

 

They are middle-class refugees from Mogadishu: a sister, Saido, now lives in the remote town of Xuddur, while a brother, Abdi, is in Toronto. Her life now revolves around the sorghum fields, while he is about to become, after Fahima Osman, the second Canadian of Somali descent to become a physician. Stephanie and Marina, working 7,000 kilometres apart, vividly explore the contrasting lives, thoughts and experiences of brother and sister. The family is, of course, also separated by 7,000 kilometres, but without Stephanie's satellite phone and computer. At least, not normally. In Xuddur, the family was thrilled to be able to send news and photos to their brother. In Canada, he receives them and weeps.

 

As for Fahima, well, you can read her first-person account, also in Focus, of how she is handling her initial shock at the conditions at home and her plans for her future.

 

Meanwhile, on Page A4 today, we continue our season-long chronicle of Sidney Crosby, the rookie phenom whose arrival has been (perhaps prematurely) equated with that of Wayne Gretzky.

 

This project had its genesis on a long afternoon drive from the Miramichi to Halifax. Shawna Richer, our Atlantic correspondent and a former sports writer, was returning home from interviewing Jason Dickson, a former major-league pitcher now playing in the New Brunswick men's senior league. The car radio was tuned to the NHL draft.

 

Shawna was thinking about how rare and how fragile is true athletic talent, and how success and failure in sport often hinges on factors outside the control of the athlete. As our Atlantic Canada correspondent, she had written about the Cole Harbour, N.S., native and had met his family, and so listened with special intensity as the drawn-out draft lottery ended with Pittsburgh claiming its prize.

 

Soon enough, another e-mail arrived in my in-box -- this one from Shawna proposing a season-long series on the most important rookie in decades. Now, she's living in a furnished apartment in Pittsburgh, complete with Steeler coffee mugs. The question is whether Mr. Crosby can generate sales of similar paraphernalia for the Penguins.

 

Shawna's articles will appear regularly in the paper and daily on her globeandmail.com blog (Go to http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports and follow the links) as she keeps track of the season.

 

And while we are on the subject of the Web, let me take this opportunity to introduce Style Counsel, an e-mail newsletter that arrives on the scene Monday. We've been thinking for a while about the enjoyment that readers derive and the guidance they seek every weekend from the Globe Style section in the newspaper. We asked ourselves how we could provide similar helpful and entertaining material on fashion, decor, food and beauty on a more regular basis. The answer was a daily e-mail blast for the style-conscious audience. You can get a taste of Style Counsel today on pages L4 and L6.