Profiled in 2009 by world newspapers as a bright student beating the odds, Fatuma Omar from Dadaab refugee camp heads to Toronto to study engineering at the prestigious University of Toronto.

[Admin]

On September 15, a young, towering Somali girl landed in Toronto, Canada. Looking at the 20-year-old, everything seemed just fine.

She did not look like she would be a befitting image on a booklet about squalor and abject want, especially if the narratives in mainstream media are used as yardsticks.

Just a few hours earlier, she had been driven hundreds of kilometres from Dadaab, home to the world’s largest refugee camp, to Nairobi, from where she would take the flight to Toronto.

She was heading there, not to tour the land or visit a friend, but to study chemical engineering at the prestigious University of Toronto, which is ranked at position 24 in the latest Academic Ranking of Word Universities.

To make it to such an institution of higher learning from the dusty Dadaab is a great achievement, but it is much more extraordinary for a girl to leap that far in a society that still favours boys.

HELPLESSJust before she left, Fatuma Omar Ismail, 20, granted DN2 a short interview at Hagadera, one of the camps within the Dadaab complex. She grew up here, surviving on two things — the donor-dependent economy of the place, and her instincts.

Like many her age here, life did not look that promising. No, not at all. All around her she could see people barely surviving, young and old beaten by the vagaries of a refugee camp, fathers unable to fend for their families, and mothers watching helplessly as disease wasted their children.

But it was not just sadness that characterised her early childhood. Children tend to be naïve, almost ignorant.

As such, as the mothers and fathers struggled to feed their families, their children, among them the young Fatuma, jumped around, singing nursery rhymes and maybe jumping rope. Dadaab was home, and home is always a celebration.

This, though, had not always been home. Fatuma was born in Kismayu, a port city in the Lower Jubba region of Somalia best known for once being a stronghold of the notorious Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group, Al-Shabaab.

CIVIL WARHer parents fled the country when the civil war gobbled up all that they had. After a long and tortuous journey, the family arrived in Hagadera, where they were settled inside the refugee camp. They have been there since.

When she came of age, Fatuma joined a primary school in the camp, where she slowly learnt how to read and write under the watch of inexperienced teachers, some of whom were primary school dropouts.

To supplement the little she learnt in school, her father bought her books and encouraged her to read them at home. He told her that everything was possible, that she could break away from the yoke of refugee life if she wanted, and that books were her only hope out of the squalor she had known all her life.

“My father never disparaged me for being a girl, unlike what many of my peers went through,” she remembered. “He always wanted the best for me.”

As a young girl, Fatuma listened to her father, reading her books diligently and seeking help whenever she was stuck. But as she approached the teenage years, the rebellious nature of the age started to stealthily replace the uprightness that had guided her all through.

EXCEPTIONAL PERFORMANCEShe stopped reading at home, arguing that she had a retentive memory, so she did not need to put in the extra effort.

She was wrong, and the folly of her thinking hit her when she joined Standard Seven at her school. Where she had been performing exceptionally well in the lower classes, she failed miserably, scoring a miserly 177 marks out of the possible 500.

Her father hit the roof. How could she, he asked, fail so badly when he had dedicated so much time and money to providing her with all the books she needed, and more? Fatuma knew her father was justified.

She had performed badly in the exams because she had stopped taking matters seriously, and that had to stop. And so she buried herself in books.

It worked. By the time she sat the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examination in 2008, she was so prepared that she did not expect to get less than 400 marks out of the possible 500.

When the results came, however, she had scored 36 marks less than her 400 target. “I was disappointed,” she says, “even though I was still the best girl in the entire north-eastern region.” As a result of her sterling performance, she received a scholarship to study at the Kenya High School the following year.

CULTURE SHOCKElated, she boarded a bus to the capital city, home to Kenya High. She was, however, not prepared for the culture shock that awaited her; first of all, she had to wear the school uniform, leaving behind the hijab she was accustomed to, and which she had always viewed as a religious obligation.

She was uncomfortable about it at first, but she settled down and life became a little bit more bearable. The ban on her hijab, however, troubled her for a number of days, but she did not report it to her parents because, she says, “they would have immediately withdrawn me from the school”.

The hijab is a mandatory head covering for Muslim girls, and has been a source of friction between conservative administrations and religious purists, both locally and internationally.

In April this year, for instance, female Muslim students put their head teachers on the spot for forbidding them to wear, among other religious pieces of clothing, the head scarf while in school.

“The rule is putting us at a crossroads,” said Rehema Waqo, a student from northern Kenya during the sixth student leaders’ conference at the Bomas of Kenya in Nairobi.

“Should we go against our religion and stay in schools, or should we leave a very good school that we have been admitted to and transfer to a Muslim school?”

BOOKWORM

The issues she was raising were the same that had troubled Fatuma years earlier, and to divert the dilemma she buried herself in books once more. The learning environment was far much better than that in Dadaab, and Kenya High was well-equipped and staffed.

“The teachers were quite an inspiration and the laboratories well stocked,” she says. It was while at Kenya High that she noticed she had something for chemistry, yet she had always thought she would fare better in biology and medicine.

“The one thing I loved about Kenya High School is the fact that students were told they could become anything they wanted,” she remembered. “They believed they could make changes in the society. But students in Dadaab are always told they are refugees, and that constant reminder of their destitution tends to cloud their visions.”

In 2012, Fatuma sat the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE), scoring a 78-point A-. A year later, she was selected for the World University Service of Canada (WUSK) scholarship.

As she prepared to travel to Canada, Fatuma started talking to students back home in Dadaab. She wanted to change their attitude towards school, and of course reading.

Even refugees, she told them, can perform equally well in national examinations if they prepare well in advance.

“You would think the girls would listen to me, but the boys were much better. The girls were disgruntled because they did not want a fellow girl to lecture them,” she said.

AN INSPIRATIONOn her relative success, she said, “It does not matter whether you are in Dadaab or Nairobi, if you really work hard in school, it will definitely pay off”.

Fatuma strikes you an as open-minded person, some sort of liberal, but she is also equally God-fearing. Before she set foot in class, she studied the Quran and other books of Islam at a madrassa.

A decade from now, when she completes studying and makes a name for herself, she hopes to establish a foundation to assist women and children back in Somalia.

In Dadaab, she has become the talking point, something the community can be proud of, for once. Young girls are encouraged to read and “be like Fatuma”.

They might not all make it to Toronto, or to any other high-end university for that matter, but, as you read this, a girl who was once just like them will be dealing with test tubes at one of the best universities in the world.

Hard, but not impossible. And that, for a lot of girls in Dadaab, as indeed anywhere else, is such an inspirationSource: http://www.nation.co.ke

http://www.somaliaonline.com/profiled-in-2009-by-world-newspapers-as-a-bright-student-beating-the-odds-fatuma-omar-from-dadaab-refugee-camp-heads-to-toronto-to-study-engineering-at-the-prestigious-university-of-toronto/

[BiLaaL]

 

Fatuma Omar Ismail: A scholar born into squalor

 

270,000 people are marooned in the hopelessness of Dadaab, the world's largest refugee camp. But one extraordinary Somali girl found a way out.

 

Daniel Howden reports

Tuesday, 26 May 2009

 

If Fatuma was an ordinary Somali girl, she might well have been traded for some cows or a couple of camels by now. At 15, she's at prime marriageable age and as the daughter of a poor family, her bride price would be a comparative bargain. Luckily Fatuma is anything but ordinary. Born in the war-ravaged Somali city of Kismayo and raised in the world's largest refugee camp on the border with Kenya, Fatuma Omar Ismail now spends her days in the leafy surroundings of Nairobi's best girls' school, Kenya High.

 

She got there by beating every other student in north-east Kenya.

 

At first, the young Somali can appear to be shy but that exterior belies an inner strength born of an intense competitive spirit. Asked to test a microphone by saying the first thing that comes into her head, she replies: "Number one."

 

In Kenya, access to secondary school depends on your mark out of 500 in an exam sat at age 13 or 14. A mark of 250 or more is considered good. Anything over 300 for a girl, in a system which still favours boys, is exceptional. Fatuma scored 364.

 

Grace Wachuka, an education specialist with the non-government organisation Care International, worked in the refugee camps at Dadaab for five years and has taken a special interest in Fatuma.

 

"In Kenya," she says, "for a girl to get over 300 marks means she is very bright. For a girl to do that in Dadaab is outrageous. Fatuma is one in a million."

 

When Fatuma talks of her life-changing exam results, she is a picture of frustration. "I was expecting to get 400-plus," she grumbles. "But the moderators cut some marks I think."

 

Midway through her second term at the Nairobi boarding school, Fatuma's presence here is still a surprise, even to senior members of staff who privately admit that they would prefer the handful of scholarships at Kenya's elite national schools to go to Kenyans.

 

Most of the other pupils in their regimented ranks of red and grey uniforms made it to this imposing school from the comparatively well catered-for suburbs of the capital or places like Central Province.

 

The imposing institution, built under British rule from grey stone, is the alma mater for daughters of ministers, businessmen and judges.

 

But the refugee girl is not intimidated. "I don't care even if their father is President," she says without aggression. "I know where I came from. I know why I'm here. We sleep in the same beds, we eat the same food."

 

It wasn't always so. Fatuma studied for her exams in a shack built from flattened, empty cooking oil cans provided by the UN's World Food Programme. There were at least 100 pupils to a teacher in her class and almost all the teachers were untrained volunteers.

 

Dadaab is a dust-blown trinity of overcrowded refugee camps, built to hold 45,000 refugees, on the arid plains that divide Kenya from its northern neighbour, Somalia. Today it shelters 270,000 people in conditions Oxfam describes as "conducive to a public health emergency".

 

Some of the best stories have humble origins but few of them emerge from Dadaab. Understandably, Fatuma is a hero in the camps and the sometimes awkward teenager at Kenya High knows that thousands of refugee children are counting on her to blaze a trail for them.

 

When news of Fatuma's scholarship came through there was a rare party in Dadaab's Hagadera camp. The heroine of the hour remembers celebrating with fizzy drinks.

 

"School is not a priority at Dadaab – girls don't have an equal chance," says Ms Wachuka. "Fatuma has triumphed in very difficult circumstances."

 

From the age of 12 she "had a dream" of going to a national school in her host country and wasn't going to be put off by naysayers who told her that refugee girls could not go. "It can be done," she says. "I've done it."

 

Her eventual aim is to study medicine and one day return to Dadaab as a doctor. "If there is peace in Somalia," she adds, she would like "to go and help people there where there are not enough qualified people."

 

The teenager understands that she is a role model and has a simple message for other young Somalis.

 

"You know education is the key to success. First go to school, work hard and choose a career. Work hard, aim higher and be nice to people."

 

This is almost exactly the advice Fatuma's mother gave her eldest daughter before putting her on a UN flight out of the refugee camp and into a world unknown to either of them. The culture shock must have been immense but has been managed with another maternal tip: "Don't take these things too seriously." The lawns and courtyards of Kenya High are eerily quiet for a school of nearly 850 pupils. The watchword here is discipline.

 

They are certainly a world away from Fatuma's first school in Kismayo. The Somali port is now the stronghold of the radical Islamic militia, al-Shabaab, where last year a 13-year-old girl was stoned to death in a sports stadium after reporting that she had been raped.

 

Fatuma remembers the school she left at age eight as a place you "would hear gun shots and fighting ... You would see people killing each other."

 

After a lifetime of wearing the hijab in front of other people, the most difficult adjustment has been wearing the compulsory uniform of a skirt and a short-sleeved blouse. The awkwardness of the transition is doubtless compounded by being 15 and relatively tall. Fatuma carefully folds her gangly limbs into the smallest space possible but she is far from invisible.

 

She admits that her new life is not always easy. She misses her seven brothers and sisters and speaks to her mother by telephone only once a month. Her scholarship pays for boarding fees and uniforms but nothing more. There was no money to pay for the nine-hour bus ride to Dadaab during the Easter holiday, so she stayed in Nairobi.

 

Faced with the brightest girls in Kenya Fatuma is no longer "number one". In her first term, she lagged behind in the two national languages, English and KiSwahili.

 

But there is plenty of reason to think she will catch up. Remarkably, she came near the top of her class in computer education, having never seen one before; and has taught herself to swim butterfly, having never been in a pool before reaching Nairobi. But it's not enough for her.

 

"I don't feel good. In my school I used to be the best," she says. This is followed by a note of polite defiance that lands somewhere between a promise and a warning: "They are not brighter than me. They are just better at the moment."

Source

[Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar]

I remembered reading this brother on Daily Nation paper a few months ago.

___________________

 

 

Abdi Ahmed Mohammed, the top boy in the 2008 KCPE exams in North Eastern Province with 434 points out of a possible 500. He is with his grandmother Khadija Omar Hassan, who encouraged his parents to take him to school.

 

 

 

Reluctant pupil who topped national exam list

19-year-old Abdi Ahmed Mohammed joined primary school at the age of 12 years, dropped out twice, was in primary school for only four years instead of eight but beat all the odds to emerge top pupil in North Eastern Province in the 2008 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education examination.

 

Mohammed had lived all his humble life in North Eastern Province. He had never set foot in Nairobi where he now has joined Starehe Boys Centre in Nairobi. Starehe, which was his first choice, gave him a four-year scholarship due to his good results. What he went through to emerge top student can only be described as extra-ordinary.

 

Beat all odds

 

After dropping out of school twice – Mohammed beat all odds and scored 434 points to emerge the top pupils in the hardship arid province that is known best for producing not images of success, but those of destitution due to hunger. The province is perennially hit by drought.

 

This is no mean feat for a boy coming from a province which is struggling to shed an image of poor performance in national examinations. Like many other children in this region, whose inhabitants lead nomadic lifestyle, Mohammed, too, faced his own share of challenges. School and modern systems of learning remain unappreciated.

 

Born in a family of 10 children, Mohammed was the child who had the opportunity to go to school. Thanks to the stubborn determination and intervention of his 70-year-old maternal grandmother Khadija Omar Hassan, she persuaded his parents to enrol him in Standard One. He was aged 12 years.

 

And like many children from the region, the nomadic life did not allow him to go through the eight academic years of primary education. “I will always be indebted to my grandmother for being resolute in her quest to educate me,’’ Mohammed told the Nation in Garissa.

 

Teachers at the Kulan Primary School near the Kenya-Somalia border were reluctant to enrol him in Standard One because of his advanced age and relatively bigger frame compared to other children. They decided to enrol him in Standard Three.

 

And after just one term – Mohammed deserted school to go back to herding goats, which offered him a carefree and independent life in the expansive desert fields. “I was naughty then,” admits Mohammed “I could not cope with being instructed to do things and obey orders.” His grandmother Khadija Omar Hassan, who lives in Garissa agreed.

 

“When I look back at his behaviour as a child, I never thought he could ever succeed in anything,” she says. But she did not relent or give up. She asked his parents to return him to school. But Mohammed was not for the idea.

 

However, after wasting time, the old woman in 2004 invited her grandson to her Garissa town house where she counselled him on the virtues of education. The old woman took the boy around the town, showing him various investments by educated people.

 

She introduced him to prominent people and role models from the area. Among them was the current Deputy Speaker of Parliament Farah Maalim. On hearing the boy’s story, he offered to take him to private school and pay his school fees.

 

But Mohammed rejected the offer. His grandmother kept her cool but once again refused to take the boy’s No for an answer. Like a good sales woman, she finally managed to persuade a reluctant Mohammed to take the scholarship.

 

Private school

 

The boy was, taken to a private school where he was given a test to determine the class he was most suitable to enrol. He qualified to be in Standard Six. To compensate for the boy’s lost time Mr Maalim hired a teacher to coach him at home. It worked. Mohammed was soon top of his class and won the admiration of his teachers something, he says, motivated him to stay at school.

 

Today, just four years after he first went to school, Mohammed, is now determined to focus on education. He says he will never let an opportunity to study slip through his fingers. He has big dreams, too; to be a civil engineer. He says his ambition is driven by the pathetic road network in his home province.

 

Mohammed’s former headteacher at Garissa Mnara School, Mr Charlis Juma, said of his former pupil: “The boy coupled discipline with hard work. He was always focused and knew what he was doing. Those made me appoint him the school captain.”

[Castro]

God bless Faduma. Such a bright spot in an otherwise dreary landscape.

 

They are certainly a world away from Fatuma's first school in Kismayo. The Somali port is now the stronghold of the radical Islamic militia, al-Shabaab, where last year a 13-year-old girl was stoned to death in a sports stadium after reporting that she had been raped.

This can't be true. The Shabaab would never do such a thing. :rolleyes:

[FatB]

^'...but print and radio journalists who were allowed to attend estimated that the woman, Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, was 23 years old. "

 

"23-year-old woman who had confessed to adultery before a Sharia court."

sourse

 

read the facts people read the facts!

[BiLaaL]

Fatuma is yet another example of the differing attitudes to education between Somali Youth back home (as well as nearby African countries) and those in the West.

 

Somali youth back home are eager to educate themselves, struggle and often exceed all expectations. On the other hand, their counterparts in the West are the opposite. They do not take advantage of the vast opportunities available to them.

 

A very strange phenomenon.

[Khayr]

If Fatuma was an ordinary Somali girl, she might well have been traded for some cows or a couple of camels by now.

Aha, the biasness of the author. The author proceeds to insults All 'ordinary somali girls' with the exception of the one meets "his approval".

 

Journalism - My story and how "I" want to paint it.

[Ibtisam]

^^If you don't like it, you can become a journalist and write your story, your way

 

Congrats for Fatuma, and the boy Ali. Mashallah.

[grasshopper]

"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

— Stephen Jay Gould

 

(make that refugee camps, too.)

[grasshopper]

congrats to those kids - I wish there was a way we could help kids like these reach their true potential... this has inspired me to look into scholarship programs that sponsor students and donate!

[Buuxo]

^Great idea Grasshopper.I would also love to help.Noo biloow.

 

Great news.Congrats Fatuma.

[BiLaaL]

^ I second that. Grasshopper, there are plenty of Somali organizations, spread in the diaspora who aim to do just that. I'm sure you'll find a local one to contribute to or even lend some of your time and ideas to - wherever you may be.

 

Below are a couple of quotes from the article which I'd like to share.

 

Along with her intelligence, Fatuma bursts with what Somalis term 'karti'. Very few Somalis today (male or female), do justice to the true Somali character traits of our forefathers. I find her strength and determination at such a young age all the more astonishing!

 

From the age of 12 she "had a dream" of going to a national school in her host country and wasn't going to be put off by naysayers who told her that refugee girls could not go. "It can be done," she says. "I've done it."

At first, the young Somali can appear to be shy but that exterior belies an inner strength born of an intense competitive spirit. Asked to test a microphone by saying the first thing that comes into her head, she replies: "Number one."

But the refugee girl is not intimidated. "I don't care even if their father is President," she says without aggression. "I know where I came from. I know why I'm here."

[Admin]

http://www.somaliaonline.com/profiled-in-2009-by-world-newspapers-as-a-bright-student-beating-the-odds-fatuma-omar-from-dadaab-refugee-camp-heads-to-toronto-to-study-engineering-at-the-prestigious-university-of-toronto/

[Nin-Yaaban]

Well is she running for an Office too? I've been reading to many Xalimos running for some kinda seat or council or Kursi...

 

Well good luck to her, hope the guys step up too.

 

 

[Samatar Rooble]

Gabadhan caadi maaha she looks like she'd suck some mad D.