It Takes a School

by Jonathan Starr

  At the time, Al Shabaab, the Somali terrorist organization linked to al-Qaeda, was in control of the vast majority of southern Somalia, including the capital, Mogadishu. When I first started my recruiting effort, they had yet to make inroads in Somaliland, but a few months later they bombed three sites in Hargeisa: the presidential palace, the Ethiopian embassy, and the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) headquarters. It was against this backdrop that I was trying to convince teachers to come to Somaliland. And yet they still came.

  My first hire was Kiette, a young woman who was already working for an NGO and was interested in changing to a different organization. She was short with blond hair and, depending on her expression, could look as young as eighteen or as old as thirty-two. As it turned out, she was twenty-four, was a graduate of Northeastern University, and desperately wanted to be working “in the field.” She had little interest in a typical life track and saw herself living in a place like Somaliland. Kiette quickly became the “manager” of everything, frantically running around, but smiley and always willing to take on more. She would ultimately spend a couple of years working with me, and finding crucial recruiting websites would be her first contribution of many. We also did campus recruiting, and one by one we brought a core group of five teachers into the fold. They were an eclectic bunch of varying ages, nationalities, and temperaments: Anthony, fresh out of Harvard; Vigdis, a public school teacher from California; Colin, a Canadian citizen with a BA in history and philosophy; Daniel, a citizen of Mexico with an undergraduate degree in engineering, an MS in materials science, and a PhD in physics; and Tom, the eccentric math teacher.

  Tom was my favorite of the teachers who arrived the first year. A skinny twentysomething, he grew up in Minnesota and had most recently lived in Yemen. He was a math major who loved everything about the subject, from simple arithmetic to areas way over my head. Tom was also extremely handy. That was a good thing because quality local furniture was hard to come by. Tom built basic shelves and tables to fill out the school’s needs.

  About a month before the teachers were scheduled to arrive, Al Shabaab was once again all over the news. The terrorist group had been warning NGOs in southern Somalia that an attack was imminent. In 2008, there was so much violence against educational facilities that all of the schools in Mogadishu were temporarily closed. It wasn’t long before family members of my small group of teachers were calling me to express their personal alarm. All I could do was reassure them that we were going to Somaliland, not Somalia, and Somaliland was a much more peaceful place. Thankfully, none of my teachers backed out. They were pioneers and adventurers, willing to come despite the danger and the fact that my school wasn’t even open yet.

  By the middle of August, all of our teachers were in-country. In addition to the teachers and Kiette, there was Keith, who used to work with me at my hedge fund and was now here looking at business opportunities; and soon Daniel’s Ukrainian girlfriend, Genia, would join the staff.

  The teachers’ contracts committed them to one year. Staying for more than one year required extraordinary dedication because living in Somaliland wasn’t easy for a Westerner. There were no bars or clubs. There were extremely few social opportunities. The Internet in the country was very poor, making it hard to keep up with friends and family back home. Abaarso itself was an extremely isolated location, and safety precautions made it even more so. What’s more, I was, of course, demanding. This was about hard work, not about travel, sightseeing, or fun.

  Where I could, I tried to improve teachers’ lives. The teacher housing was actually reasonably nice, an apartment with a bedroom, sitting area, and a private bathroom. Teachers had their own cook, a young Somali woman named Nimco, who we all grew to love. Once you showed her a dish, she’d be able to consistently make it better than you had. Keith taught her fajitas, which were an immediate hit. Somehow she learned to make pizza, even making her own dough. In addition to providing a cook, we also did the teachers’ laundry, another service they definitely did not have back home. Still, several teachers found my attempts to improve their quality of life far from sufficient. Perhaps they were right and I should have done more, but for me staff amenities were beside the point. They’d signed up to build something special, they knew they were coming to a start-up school in a war-torn country, and the students deserved our complete focus.

  11

  THE ABAARSO CONDITION

  With the exam finished and school about to start, tuition is a big issue for a lot of our incoming students. Now, Amal Mohamed, who wanted SOS Sheikh to the point of tears, is totally on board to come to Abaarso, but her family and the parents of two other accepted girls from her home city of Burao are asking for a “group discount.” They are by no means alone in asking for financial aid. Many students are pushing for reduced tuition, and I feel obligated to grant their requests. After all, I am in no position to judge who can pay and who cannot, and in each case we are talking about such small amounts. How can we let a handful of dollars stand in the way of a kid’s education?

  A few days after acceptance day, I am in my office when a young incoming student named Mohamed Hussein knocks on my door. He wears what appears to be a new outfit—blue dress shirt, black dress pants, and a pair of fresh white Air Jordan sneakers, which I’m sure are knock-offs. He beams, but in a nervous kind of way. He is accompanied by his father, a large man who looks to be in his late forties, and dressed in a much more customary way, complete with a mawiis and a nice scarf neatly folded over one shoulder. There is a third man—Abdi Suudi from Djibouti, a family friend, who speaks English well enough to be their translator.

  “This is Chief Abdirahman Hussein,” Abdi Suudi says, gesturing toward Mohamed’s father. “He is a tribal leader and well-respected man. His son, Mohamed, wants to accept the admissions offer, but the chief has only a small income derived from a welding shop.”

  The father-and-son team stand quietly beside him. Abdi adds that the chief has many children, another reason that he cannot afford to pay. He then presents me with a letter carefully written in English by a religious leader of their region, which essentially states the same thing, just another angle of support.

  I take a good look at Mohamed, standing there with his dad and his dad’s friend. The fact that the chief and his son have recruited Abdi to make the appeal is remarkable. Djibouti is fourteen hours away on a good day, assuming you have a way to travel between the cities. I have no idea about this kid, only that a big effort is being made. He sweats anxiously and almost prays with his eyes that I let him in.

  “Mohamed can come to Abaarso for free,” I say, my message instantly translated for the family by Abdi. Upon hearing the translation, Mohamed looks half elated, half full of fear, but definitely relieved.

  “However, there is a condition,” I continue, my comments quickly translated sentence by sentence. “I want Mohamed to make me two promises. First, he will strive to be the best student in the entire school. He should work as hard as he can to achieve this. Second, someday, when he’s in my position, he’ll do the same for someone else.”

  Mohamed stands there with stoic joy. The terms I have put on him pale to the fact that I have accepted him. He has been absolutely terrified that I am going to say no. After all, why would a headmaster from the United States who was opening a brand-new school take a chance on a Somali kid like him, especially when he can’t even pay?

  After the group leaves, I look up Mohamed’s entrance examination. He is one of the last students we’ve accepted, and his scores are weak across the board, so it isn’t like English is his only weak link. Oh no, I think, figuring I have just set this kid up for failure.

  A short time after, two more boys arrive at my door. One of them is Mubarik, the formerly nomadic boy who missed the Sheikh cut and ended up at Abaarso for alphabetical reasons, and I do not recognize the other young man. Neither of them speaks English, so I find someone to translate for me. Mubarik gets right to the point. “I was accepted to A
baarso, but I can’t pay the fees,” he says rapidly. “I’d like my friend here to take my position.”

  This isn’t the same kind of conversation I had with Mohamed’s family. Mubarik isn’t bargaining or posturing, he is defeated. I know he is one of my most qualified students, and I feel sad seeing his resignation to a lesser life. Here is a society with so little, and he’s come to feel that even what is available in his poor country is unattainable due to his financial position. I’d never thought before about someone with $100 of monthly income being so much wealthier than someone with none. It is more than I can take and I can’t let him get away. I tell him he is coming to Abaarso, and I give him a full ride. As with Mohamed, the condition is that he excel academically and pay it forward someday. As for his friend, I am unable to add him to the charter class. We must keep standards on who has earned his way, and this boy hasn’t.

  Mohamed and Mubarik have both been offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance for success, or at least that’s my opinion of Abaarso. They are both beyond grateful, especially now that tuition is no longer an issue. But this crazy launch at a strange new school elicits different reactions in each boy.

  Mohamed is so happy that he cries during the car ride home to Hargeisa. He no longer has to go to a public high school, his fate had he not gotten the tuition offer. In public school, he had teachers who were themselves poorly educated and yet were handling the daunting task of teaching eighty to a hundred students in one classroom. Poor performance would not impact their excellent job security, a situation all too similar to what we see in the United States. Had he continued on that track, Mohamed feels he would have reverted back to his old habits and lifestyle, not focusing on school much and playing soccer to ease his boredom.

  Mohamed also wants to get away from the city and all the stresses that come with it, but mostly the soccer mob mentality. He says it’s not so much the games themselves but the aggression that happens before, during, and after the matches when team members go out into the neighborhood looking for people to beat up, either members of the opposing team or its fans. This was the life Mohamed was living before his pro-education parents intervened.

  Mubarik is on his own, having left his nomadic family several years earlier. He has been living off friends in Hargeisa, feeling more scared than joyful, maybe even unworthy because of his poverty. Mubarik is a constant reminder that even within a poverty-stricken community there are different levels of disadvantage. During the acceptance day welcome, when he had seen me and the other teachers speaking English, he had felt so overwhelmed and frightened that he wanted to run out of the room. He has come around, but he still feels intimidated. Like Mohamed, he wants an education more than anything. He still dreams of building trucks, like the ones he saw in the desert when he was a child.

  In the coming few months, I try to meet all of the students and familiarize myself with their strengths and weaknesses. They need to know that I see them, I am here with them, and I’ll be with them on their tough climb ahead. This will take a lot of work, and I find some students harder to reach than others. They will take more time. I am also up against some superficial barriers. For instance, I am struggling badly with their names, and my calling someone by the wrong one will not help them feel connected.

  Particularly challenging is that so many of the boys have the same first name. One particularly common one is “Mohamed,” the name of the Islamic prophet, and undoubtedly the most common name in the country, with many first sons receiving this name. In addition to Mohamed, there are boys named Mohamoud, which at first I don’t realize is actually a different name. Complicating matters further is that there are also multiple derivatives of “Abdi,” such as Abdikarim, Abdirahim, Abdirahman, Abdisamad, and Abdiladif. Because “Abdi” means “servant,” and there are ninety-nine different names for Allah, there are ninety-nine different names that can be formed by using Abdi, plus one of the names for Allah. As an example, Abdirahman translates in Arabic to “servant to the one who is most merciful,” whereas Abdikarim is “servant to the one who is most generous.”

  The use of Abdi is so widespread in Somaliland that you often see it listed in shorthand—A/karim for Abdikarim and A/lahi for Abdilahi. And if that isn’t enough to learn, in Somali the letter c is actually a guttural a sound, which I can’t hear or make. Spelled in Somali, “Abdi” is actually “Cabdi.” So now, Abdikarim, Cabdikarim, A/karim, and C/karim are all different spellings for the exact same student. And our student by that name chooses a fifth way of further shortening C/karim: he calls himself CK.

  Our class has eight different boys whose first name starts with “Abdi,” including one student whose name is Abdirahman Abdisalan Abdilahi. I get to know him early on, initially as “Abdi Abdi Abdi.” The class also has three Ahmeds, a Mohamoud, and six Mohameds. At one point, I look at a list and see that I can identify everyone except for a boy named Mukhtar and a handful of the Mohameds. I fix this in one stroke. A teacher points out Mukhtar, and from then on, any boy I don’t know I just call Mohamed.

  A statistician could look at Abaarso’s student body and give a bunch of metrics: 100 percent Somali students, 74 percent boys, 64 percent from Hargeisa, and so on. I’m a finance person and I love statistics, but my job is to see each student for who he is; an individual with certain abilities, insecurities, dreams, and fears. I need to know the students so that I can best motivate them while also working through the issues holding them back.

  People use the word “miracle” when describing what would be needed to take these students from Somaliland to success in U.S. higher education, but I don’t think a miracle is necessary. What we need is for the students to believe it is possible, so that they will give it all they have and won’t stop until reaching their goal. That belief—nurtured by motivated and educated teachers—fuels tenacity and focus. It can go a long, long way.

  PART THREE

  SCHOOL CULTURE

  The most unprofitable item ever manufactured is an excuse.

  —JOHN MASON

  12

  MOHAMED: A DAY IN THE LIFE

  The campus mosque calls out the four thirty a.m. prayer. Mohamed Hussein hears it and comes to life. A lot to do today. A lot to do every day, including five daily prayers. Mohamed sleeps in the mosque as well as prays there. He has been selected by his peers to be one of the mosque leaders, a great honor. In fact, by choice he now sleeps in a small room behind the big prayer space instead of in the dorms with the boys. Each morning, he goes down to the boys’ dorms and knocks on each and every door to wake them up. The prayer lasts for ten minutes, after which most students go back to sleep. But Mohamed spends the next two hours before first period studying. He finds these two hours to be the most productive of the day. He memorizes new vocabulary, does SAT (which stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test, now Scholastic Assessment Test) math, and finishes some other homework. Almost two years in, he now knows advanced words, the kinds one finds in the books he wants to be reading. His slang and jargon are still catching up, and there are holes in some of his basic English, but they are getting filled in with practice every day.

  Mohamed couldn’t speak any English when he arrived at Abaarso; he didn’t understand a word I said in our first meeting, and his writing skills in the language were extremely limited. Although his parents support his education, they aren’t educated people. They always motivated him to excel in school, but they couldn’t provide much assistance.

  Mohamed’s father lost his own father at the age of three. By the age of twelve, he was financially supporting his mother and younger brother. He worked at a carpentry shop until noon and then went to school until the evening. At the age of eighteen, Mohamed’s father married and acquired full ownership of the carpentry shop. That year was indeed his last year of formal education, and he dropped out in the middle of his senior year of high school.

  Mohamed’s mother was born in a small village deep in the countryside. She grew up tending to the cattle of her nomadic family. Like
many Somali nomad families, her family herded their cattle all year long. The prospect of receiving an education was at best an improbable dream. Nonetheless, his mother moved to Hargeisa in her early teens in hopes of going to school. Yet the Somali civil war soon left the country and her dream in shambles.

  Mohamed’s parents sacrificed to ensure that he and his seven siblings had schooling from an early age. Though they struggled financially, his father made sure the children didn’t miss a day of school, paying whatever school fees he could afford. Mohamed credits his parents for instilling in him a great work ethic, a deep sense of gratitude, and an insatiable appetite for learning.

  Mohamed thanks God that he has gotten into Abaarso, although here the pressure is on, especially with the all-English policy, which threatens to overwhelm him. Soon after arriving, he called his father to say it was too hard for him and he wanted to quit, but his father told him he must stick with it.

  I’ve started hearing from teachers that Mohamed is memorizing every word for every object, that he is memorizing the words from the dictionary along with their definitions. Whenever I see him, he is either studying or memorizing words. If he goes to play soccer with the other boys, he has his flash cards with him for before and after the game. One time, I ask him about objects in the room. I give him the word “pillow,” and he gives me a textbook definition. I say, “Yes, Mohamed, but you could simply have pointed to this,” as I pick one up to show him. For “bed,” he says “A long piece of furniture with four legs that people lie on to sleep.”

  On most days, Mohamed gets to breakfast a little before his seven a.m. class. The lines for breakfast are always long and the atmosphere very competitive. Breakfast is usually laxoox, a spongy, pancake-like bread similar to the Ethiopian injera. It is served on a metal plate, accompanied by a cup of tea, Somali-style, essentially overly sweet black tea with ginger, a couple of other spices, milk, and a preposterous amount of sugar. Most of the kids eat the meal with their hands, cupping the bread like a spoon; some mash up the laxoox and pour the tea on it first. When we had built the cafeteria, we had intended for it to be coed, but not long into the first quarter, we learned that the girls didn’t like to eat where the boys can see them, so now we’ve set up a separate cafeteria for the girls.