It Takes a School

by Jonathan Starr

  21

  A COMPLEX WORLD

  Before the Abaarso School took its name from the small village where it is located, the school was called Somaliland Academy of Science, but an early conversation I had with a Somali living in the United States changed that.

  I had gone to eat at a Somali restaurant in Boston near a giant mosque. While it didn’t look particularly Somali, it was a place Somalis could meet and eat like they were back home. The owner was a nice gentleman who upon learning I was planning to build a school in Somaliland came to sit with me. He said the site I had selected was a bad choice, as most Somalis would not feel welcome there. He thought his home village would be a better location. By how he described it, I thought it was in the eastern part of Somaliland.

  “Oh, so you’re from Somaliland?” I asked him.

  “No, I’m from Somalia,” he replied.

  Next he showed me his village on the map, and now I was completely confused. “Isn’t that Somaliland?” I inquired. The spot where he was pointing was definitely inside of the boundary of geographic Somaliland.

  “No, it is Somalia,” he insisted.

  Now, I was truly baffled. “Does the government of Somaliland consider your homeland to be within its borders as part of the original British Somaliland?”

  “Yes, it does,” he replied.

  “So it is Somaliland,” I stated.

  “No, it is Somalia.”

  This man’s home village is east of the Somali city of Las Anod, well within the confines of the former British Somaliland, yet he clearly was not recognizing Somaliland’s current independence. This was my first big lesson in Somali clan politics.

  In Hargeisa, Somaliland patriotism is all around, the green, white, and red of the flag everywhere. I assumed that everyone from Somaliland was for Somaliland, but things aren’t that simple. The restaurant owner was from an area within the former British protectorate, but he wasn’t a member of Somaliland’s dominant Isaaq clan, nor were most of the people who lived in that region. As far as he was concerned, his clansmen had joined with Somalia after independence in 1960, and there was no looking back. They had no interest in joining this “rebellion,” which they felt cut them off from their larger clan, the majority of whom were outside the British Somaliland borders.

  Perhaps the most interesting thing about the restaurant owner was that he had lived in Boston for decades, and I’m not sure he’d ever returned home in that time. Nonetheless, his clan loyalty was undiminished. He wasn’t playing games with me or being difficult. His mind could not begin to consider “Somaliland” his home.

  When I learned that not all people in Somaliland were pro–Somaliland independence, I thought it best to avoid politics. If I could start again, I might have kept the original name. But at that time, naming the school after the local village seemed like the safe play.

  22

  THE VILLAGE

  Abaarso Village is little more than an assortment of shack-like shops on a half-mile stretch of the highway that runs from the border of Ethiopia to Somaliland’s capital of Hargeisa. It is not a highway in the American sense, more a main road through a desolate stretch of desert, with goats rummaging among the rocks and scrub plants. Abaarso Village is only nine miles from the outer-city limit of Hargeisa, and it is home to a customs office that processes imports from Ethiopia. The shops sell drinks, packaged cookies, and sambusas, bite-size pastries stuffed with meat, to the passing travelers. That’s about it in terms of commerce. The shops themselves look so flimsy that I wonder how they remain standing in an Abaarso wind.

  Most of the dwellings in the village, which is along the main road, are makeshift. You see materials marked “UN” being used for roofing. Flattened tin cans have been nailed together to form aluminum walls. Other shelters are made of cloth propped up by sticks. There are not many concrete houses. There are small farms in the distance, but in this arid, inhospitable climate, the fields are only green in the rainy season.

  The first weekend of school, I lead the students on the thirty-minute walk down to the village. We bring garbage pails with us and upon arriving start picking up the trash that is everywhere. The villagers’ first reaction is anger. They think we are stealing their trash. Not that they want the trash for anything; in fact, they’d rather it get cleaned up. It is simply that no one has ever done something like this before, and they can’t comprehend that we are truly there to help. There is absolutely no trust.

  Periodically, students make the walk down to the village for tea and sambusas, which they eat at the plastic tables and chairs outside the shops. The boys are allowed to go to the village unchaperoned, but the girls need a teacher to escort them. On the occasions when male teachers walk the girls, the villagers make comments. We have to prod them to translate, as the comments are in Somali, but it is always some version of “Stay away from these white men,” with an implication that we Westerners must have plans to harm Somali women.

  The girls are rightfully embarrassed and at the time, of course, I am infuriated. Not only is it insulting, but it is also an injustice based on prejudice. There is no way they would say these things if our teachers were Somali men.

  Before the staff and I arrived in Abaarso, most of the villagers had probably never seen a white person, not even on TV, as the village only recently received electricity. Some of them had never seen a non-Somali. They were completely unfamiliar with anything that was not Somali, and in this way they were like the vast majority of their countrymen. Somaliland used to be a British “protectorate,” not a “colony,” because the British only had a small interest in the area. It is thought that fewer than one hundred British were ever in the country, and almost all of them pulled out at independence in 1960. After the merger with Somalia, Mogadishu, five hundred miles to the south, became the dominant city in the country, not Hargeisa or any other city in the north. Mogadishu was the international city where all the foreigners stayed, while the former British Somaliland remained a mostly rural and nomadic society.

  When I first arrived in Somaliland, a security expert told me that there were fewer than fifty Westerners in the country, and I’d already learned that those people were not interacting with the actual society. Mostly they were hopping between secured compounds meeting with bigwigs and writing reports.

  Like the nomadic Mubarik thinking a truck was an animal, the villagers had no framework to approach what they were seeing at the school. They only knew that it looked and acted different, which made them uncomfortable and put them on the defensive. It is not that different from when a first black family would move into an all-white town in the United States. People often believe the worst until they are convinced otherwise.

  23

  LIKE WATER THROUGH A SIEVE

  It is spring 2010, an ordinary afternoon in our first year at Abaarso, and I’m called to the front gate to handle a problem. The security at school is supposed to be tight, with both SPUs, Special Protection Units, and watchmen. We have about a dozen watchmen on staff, and they are gathered together. I notice one in particular who must be six foot six and has a menacing look. I have a translator with me so we can communicate.

  The watchmen aren’t alerting me to a problem they’ve seen; the watchmen are the problem.

  “You will immediately double all of our pay and cover all of our medical expenses,” the chosen speaker announces.

  “Or else?” I ask.

  “Or we all quit and leave right now.”

  “So you will quit in the middle of a shift and leave the school without your protection?”

  “You must double our pay and cover all our medical expenses.”

  I don’t need to think for a second before responding. Luckily, my translator probably doesn’t know the Somali for “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

  NGOs had convinced the local population that foreigners were gullible, deep pocketed, and not going to do anything useful anyway. To a local living on tiny wages, he might as well ge
t what he can. That’s how the villagers no doubt saw us in these early days. They had no idea if this compound on the hill would ever improve their lives, but what they did think was that we had a lot of money. They weren’t used to a situation where the guy who controlled the money was also the guy whose money it was. That isn’t how most nonprofits work. Normally, there’s the head of the organization in Somaliland who reports to Nairobi who reports to D.C., who, after several more steps down the line, reports to the taxpayer. The taxpayer isn’t even aware that Somaliland exists, never mind that he’s paying for some program there. NGOs are nongovernmental organizations, but they do take government funding. It’s just that the government doesn’t run them. But unlike the American taxpayers, who don’t know they are getting robbed, I did know, and every shortfall at the school would come out of my pocket. People were trying to overcharge us for everything, and it aggravated me that villagers considered our school to be their piggy bank.

  I was beginning to realize that I could no longer rely much on Khadar to negotiate these kinds of issues, despite his Somaliland expertise. He had been our partner on the ground while I was setting things up from the United States. We created a Somaliland entity with Billeh as chairman, Khadar as vice chairman, and me as the chief executive, for which I used the finance term “managing director.” The board, however, had never taken on its proper role of oversight and assistance, with Khadar instead periodically sticking his head in and acting on his own. When I was in the United States this was necessary, but now we should have been running professionally.

  Despite his confidence and local knowledge, Khadar was unhelpful when it came to running a tight ship, which I chalked up to his history as a politician who wants everyone to like him. I didn’t realize that virtually everyone I was dealing with was his clansman, no doubt another reason he didn’t want to take a hard line. His clansmen would expect his loyalty to them, not to some foreigners.

  Before moving onto the Abaarso campus, Khadar insisted we put the kitchen in the northwest corner of the campus five hundred feet from the cafeteria, down a steep hill. In fact, the kitchen was forty feet lower in altitude than the cafeteria. He said he and the new cook, who was, of course, one of Khadar’s relatives, didn’t want the smell to be near the students, so it needed to be done this way. I thought this was ridiculous and said so. How could the smell be so bad that it would justify such a setup? I couldn’t figure out why they were pushing this, but Khadar fought hard, insisting this was the right way to do things in Somaliland. Eventually, I decided this wasn’t worth fighting with Khadar. What was the worst that could happen? We soon saw part of the answer: the meals were disasters. Due to the kitchen’s location, the vats of rice and other mass-produced food had to be rolled up a hill that was not only steep but incredibly rocky. It was so difficult that we often had to put the food into a car and drive it up. This required our car to be on campus, which was not always possible. So of course, the meals were rarely served on time. How was this the better way?

  Our method for serving the meals was also terrible. All fifty kids would line up in the cafeteria, as the head cook insisted on personally spooning out food one student at a time. There were others to help and multiple lines could have formed, but the head cook seemed to insist on some sort of ritual. First, the cook would receive the plate, then scoop some rice on it, then scoop some sauce on the rice, then maybe add a lime or a spicy Somali topping called shigney. It would take forever to serve each student, and those in the back of the line were rightfully annoyed.

  The head cook for the kids was a tall, thin, older man whom Khadar suggested I hire. He stated that the magnitude of the job required that he have more manpower, which it probably did. He brought on four other men from the village—all clansmen of his and Khadar’s—to help him in the kitchen, which for fifty students was more manpower than necessary. They were hired before I knew what had happened, so now I would have to fire some of them, which created more trouble than not hiring them in the first place. This was offensive to my sense of efficiency, not to mention bad for the budget, but I would have to wait to address the situation later. We had a more pressing concern.

  There was significant inventory loss happening in the kitchen. As the kitchen itself had been placed in the far corner of campus, our outer wall paralleled two of its sides. As extra defense against intruders, the wall had glass on top; however, the glass was not sharp and could easily be removed by hand. You didn’t even need to do it carefully, so the glass in fact provided no physical defense at all. One day early on, I saw that a section of glass a few feet long had been removed from the wall directly behind the kitchen. This was a section of the wall that the kitchen completely blocked from view. I alerted the handyman, a villager named Mohamoud who had previously been the construction company’s watchman for the site. He took some cement and put the glass back in the wall. The next time I looked, the glass was gone again, and again Mohamoud repaired the wall. When it happened a third time, I knew something deliberate was going on. Sacks of flour, sugar, and rice were being smuggled over the wall. The kitchen’s location offset its difficulty of operations with its ease of theft. Perhaps why it was put there?

  Keeping track of the school’s assets was like keeping water in a sieve. All kinds of resources were leaking out of the campus. I watched women from the village fill up their yellow water jugs at our tanks and then walk out to bring them home. The head cook was right there and was at least accepting of it, if not outright inviting it. Our guards either didn’t consider this an important issue, or maybe even thought I was okay with it, or they were watchmen from the village, whose loyalties lay with the villagers. Mohamoud, the man who fixed the glass, was genuinely honest, but that didn’t mean he was going to stand in their way. It was one thing to quietly replace the missing glass but another to forcibly block his clansmen.

  I thought about the water jugs and the fact that Abaarso was a poor village that struggled with the cost of water. But this was not our mission. We weren’t an NGO focused on water. As was true with the villagers, our water needed to be trucked in, and we couldn’t possibly solve all of the problems in their society. People were testing the boundaries, and if we didn’t tighten up, the floodgates would open. We’d need to block off all leaks, whether they be theft, waste, or unnecessary staffing. I ran out to block any yellow jugs from leaving, I talked to the cook, I talked to the guards, and I even permanently blocked off a second exit from the campus that I couldn’t monitor. This was one step in the struggle for efficiency, a victory Abaarso needed for survival but one that was not without its costs. I had made a number of local people mad.

  First, I didn’t act like a Somali; then I didn’t act like a salaried NGO worker who had no incentive to stop such graft. At this point, the villagers considered me the worst of both worlds; I am not Somali and I am not a pushover. They are used to non-Somalis at least being easy marks.

  24

  DOING SOMETHING RIGHT

  When you don’t understand people, you have no idea about the many ways you might be upsetting them. You are also surprised when you finally do something right.

  Our auditorium is a large concrete structure with a sizable stage and granite-tiled floors that slope upward in several levels. Khadar had insisted on building it, saying it would bring revenue-generating conferences to campus. It seemed reasonable enough but turned out to be completely incorrect; the auditorium never brought a single dollar of income. The funds to build it were to come from a British government grant and a Somali donor. However, Khadar unilaterally changed the designs, which added significantly to the cost. I wasn’t aware until I got the bill, and once again I needed to personally cover the shortfall.

  Today villagers fill our auditorium in order to sign their young children up for afternoon classes at Abaarso. It is chaotic, but that is because of the excitement. The villagers are bringing their kids to Abaarso; the school is now for them, too.

  It has now been fourteen months since
we arrived at Abaarso. The public school is about halfway between our school and the village itself. From the beginning, we’d been sending our students to teach there.

  Some days, Deqa, Amal, Nimo, and other students had taught English. Other days, a group of boys had taught math and Arabic. They would walk down with me or another teacher. The program needed improvement, but it had been a way to help the community. However, it turned out that the full-time teachers in the village school considered the program competitive, sometimes even telling us we couldn’t come. That is one reason we are now moving the classes to our campus.

  For the life of me, I cannot understand why the village is now excited about the after-school program on our campus, when they hadn’t seemed to care about the same program at their school. Maybe it is seen as a gesture that we are willing to share? Maybe they think that the secret to education is the facility itself? Our classrooms are certainly nicer and our fields great for playing. Whatever their reason, I hadn’t predicted their positive reaction any more than I’d predicted their initial mistrust.

  The move to our campus makes for a massive improvement, and not just for the unexpected PR. We’d had a hard time teaching the kids in their own classrooms. There, they had come to behave in a certain way. We were the visitors and subject to their rules of engagement. Now, in our environment, the children are open to our way of doing things. This means properly behaving and following the discipline code. The program is also now far easier for our teachers to manage.

  Our students have learned so much from these “student-teacher” experiences. It has helped Amal, whose struggles with math had left her in serious need of a confidence boost. For Nimo, it is a new passion, her own schooling having still not inspired her. At times, she puts more effort into these classes than her own. And for all our students, it shows them what it is like to be on the other side of the desk. Periodically, our students become incensed that some of those kids had dared to “cheat on my test!”