It Takes a School

by Jonathan Starr

  A few days later, the religious council holds a meeting at a hotel in Hargeisa to discuss their results. Parents are present, but I choose to stay behind the scenes, no longer willing to play into Khadar’s story that the Abaarso conflict is really a battle between the Somali and the foreigner. The only way he can go against this group is to position himself as opposed to the parents and the religious community.

  Which is not to say that I am passive. Knowing the high likelihood of a positive statement, I make sure that every major Somaliland TV station is present for the council’s report. Even Radio Hargeisa attends. By the time the council finishes, much of the Somali world hears that the religious council has investigated Abaarso and has given it the thumbs-up.

  While the media attacks don’t stop, their target needs to be greatly narrowed as the school and the students are now off-limits. No longer can anyone claim that the environment isn’t proper or that the students have been corrupted. I, however, am still fair game.

  40

  VINDICATION

  I am asleep in the early morning of February 1 when my phone rings. I keep it near to receive word of the latest crisis, maybe bigger than the last. My heart racing, I am always ready for battle these days.

  When I answer, my mind ready to problem-solve the crisis, I discover it isn’t Harry with a new problem, nor is it my public relations guy with news about the latest Khadar attack. Instead, it is Nimo, updating me on her latest college news.

  Despite all the time I have spent defending the school, I haven’t stopped working on college admissions. Nimo’s best shot is Oberlin College. I had visited Oberlin on my whirlwind tour of U.S. colleges and had seen their international admissions director a second time in New York City. I feel hopeful. Nimo is not the best academic student Abaarso has seen, but in the past year she has finally focused on her classes and the results are excellent. I implore my Oberlin contacts to see her recent grades as a true reflection of her ability. Nimo has put up quite respectable SAT scores as well, beating over half of “college-bound seniors,” quite a feat for a kid with 3.5 years of real education.

  I know Nimo would engage and thrive in many college activities, and who isn’t looking for someone like Nimo, who is off the “involvement” chart? She has done everything possible here at Abaarso, and with passion. All students need to do four hours of community service per week. Nimo has done three times that. She is the top debater, a proctor, the organizer of competitions on campus, and a steady member of the girls’ basketball team, despite having virtually no athletic talent and knowing it.

  “What’s going on?” I ask Nimo over the phone, hoping. Desperately hoping.

  Nimo’s voice is shaking. “I got in,” is all she can say. She is too emotional and stunned to say more.

  My clever logic student, the one who has shown the boys what a girl can do, the kid I originally knew as “the girl with the narrow face,” has been accepted and will be fully funded to attend Oberlin.

  I want to cry because anything less won’t do this moment justice. This feels like well-deserved vindication after our struggles to survive. I have wanted this more than I can remember wanting anything. But I don’t cry. I couldn’t. I am still at war for Nimo’s school, and there is no break until it is won. Instead, I will use Nimo’s acceptance as a powerful new weapon. I just need to augment it a bit before firing.

  Nimo e-mails me her admissions letter. Immediately, I call a representative of the Ministry of Education to tell him an Abaarso girl has been accepted with a full scholarship to an American college and send him the admissions letter. He is floored and says he’ll tell the minister. Nimo’s Oberlin acceptance breaks what has been a three-decade drought in Somalilanders getting scholarships to U.S. universities, and I tell him that I hope the minister will issue a “congratulations” for our press release.

  Maybe it is Miss Marple’s magic, maybe Khadar has just gone too far, or maybe I have misjudged the minister from early on. Whatever the reason, less than forty-eight hours later my contact returns with her quote:

  TO: Managing Director,

  Abaarso School of Science and Technology,

  Abaarso, Somaliland

  Sub: A Letter of Appreciation

  The Ministry of Education is writing this letter as a sign of appreciation for the good news of Ms. Nimo M. Ismail for her hard and diligent work to receive full scholarship to Oberlin College, USA. This is an indicator that Abaarso School of Science and Technology is really competitive in educating Somaliland youngsters and at the same time, the knowledge offered here is accepted by International universities.

  May I take this opportunity to express my thanks to the Oberlin College and Abaarso.… In this regard, I would welcome if more similar scholarships are offered to the girls in Somaliland in the future.

  Zamzam Abdi Adan

  Minister of Education & Higher Studies

  With this, it is time to launch. I make sure the story runs everywhere Somalis may look, and indeed even websites we don’t send it to quickly pick it up. What’s more, because of the minister’s quote, the papers decide to put her picture at the top of the article, inextricably connecting the minister of education to Abaarso’s side. In one stroke, the damage caused by the Burao disaster is undone. Even more critically, Somalilanders know the minister’s clan connection to Khadar. By congratulating the school, she has affirmed that the school is reputable, and she isn’t going to play Khadar’s clan games. She is now joining Mohamed Hashi, signifying that multiple big guns from Khadar’s subclan are now publicly on our side.

  There are several other students applying to college at the same time. On one of my trips home, I had visited Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and they connected me with their campus in Doha, Qatar. After an excellent call with the admissions director, he invited me to a group tour of Georgetown Qatar, which is part of a series of foreign universities in Doha, collectively referred to as Education City. I jumped at the chance, since the Qatar Foundation was offering huge amounts of financial aid to all of Education City, including Northwestern, Texas A&M, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Commonwealth. My trip almost doesn’t happen, as Immigration mysteriously, and in echoes of the past, blocks my visa extension, but Minister Zamzam steps in. I go to the conference and make important connections.

  While Education City is promising, another lead that has appeared too good to be true comes through the African Leadership Academy in South Africa. At the same time that Fadumo, Mohamed, and the others were accepted to U.S. boarding schools, a boy, Hamse Mahdi, had gotten into ALA.

  Hamse is an intensely intellectual student and one of the deepest thinkers to walk Abaarso’s halls. Due to visa holdups, he is only now heading to Johannesburg in January, and ALA had just sent a diagnostic test for us to administer in order to determine his academic level. After receiving Hamse’s test book, ALA’s cofounder, Chris Bradford, sets up a call with me. Hamse’s score is high and I think he wants assurance that Hamse couldn’t have cheated. We have an excellent conversation, at the end of which Chris says, “You have to talk to Laura Kaub, who heads a new program we are running for the MasterCard Foundation. I’ll introduce you.”

  In fact, I had already heard of Laura during my travels across the United States visiting American colleges. In the world of African student admissions, Laura is a bit of a legend, having done a spectacular job with ALA’s college counseling. Now she had been chosen to lead a new program sponsored by the MasterCard Foundation. The program searches for high-quality sub-Saharan African students who can excel at American colleges if given the chance. The program further requires selected students to be committed to coming back to the continent, which is directly in line with Abaarso’s mission. It is only for the very poor, but colleges are on board because the MasterCard Foundation is paying a partial tuition rate for each student.

  Laura and I hit it off from the start of our call. She is witty and fun, but also blunt. Chris had spoken fairly when he described her
as “among the world’s experts in getting African students into universities.” She is a pro at matching students with schools where they can succeed.

  Abaarso fits the desired program in every way: our students are prepared, poor, and committed to developing their country. Laura seeks students from around Africa and there we fit, too. Neither Somaliland nor Somalia is an easy country in which to recruit.

  A week or so later, Laura is using Skype to interview our applicants. Suzanne, who at that time, in addition to her teaching and orphanage work, is our college counselor, joins me in listening through the door. We may have told ourselves that listening is important to better understand our students’ interviewing strengths and weaknesses, but in truth we are just too excited and nervous not to. Laura is no doubt impressed, particularly so by the last boy, whom she describes as “almost a ringer.” While this sounds too good to be true and I won’t believe it until I see an acceptance, this young man, Moustapha Elmi, seems on the verge of gaining an American higher education. I think back to three and a half years earlier when some of the first-year teachers didn’t think he could make it at Abaarso.

  In addition to promoting her own program, Laura is always happy to share her knowledge about colleges. As she says, “There’s no competition among lighthouses.” She has a description for almost every college out there, which often includes a witty quip.

  The weeks following Nimo’s acceptance pass like a dream. It seems like each day Harry and I will surprise a student with word that he or she has been accepted to college. Laura’s MasterCard program places students into Trinity College, Westminster College, and United States International University in Nairobi. My Doha visit pays off when the top humanities student in the school gets accepted to Georgetown. One student is headed to Michigan State and a couple more to EARTH University in Costa Rica. After every few acceptances, we make another announcement, and with each, Somaliland begins to embrace Abaarso. And why not? Embracing Abaarso is simply embracing their own children’s success. This is a clan society. Nimo and the others are their family.

  41

  THE CHERRY ON TOP

  The staff enters the meeting hall in April 2013 with the same serious look we have worn so many times before. Our students have been through so much: school closures, attacks from their own countrymen, a visit from the Higher Education Commission, even defending themselves to the religious council. And those events account for just a fraction of the times we’ve gathered to discuss the latest threat to their school and their futures. Unexpected assemblies rightfully trigger fear.

  I walk to the center of the stage with several other teachers wearing the outraged look our students have unfortunately come to know. Our situation has suddenly turned so joyous with all the college acceptances, and now they anxiously await what bad news could once again turn our fortunes to the negative.

  I quiet them and start my announcement. “They’ve told all kinds of lies about us. We’ve had to suffer injustices and attacks from everywhere. Well, what are they going to say now that Mubarik is going to the best engineering university in the world? He’s going to MIT!”

  After a second of shock, the students start screaming, hugging each other, even crying. Boys and girls alike could not have been happier if they were the ones accepted. For Mubarik’s victory is their victory, too. They’ve all fought to reach this point, and they are proud that once again Mubarik will be leading them forward. As for me, I am lost in the power of the moment. There is nothing that needs to be done now, no imminent press release, no defending the school. I finally shed some tears.

  There are other victories. News of Nimo and the other female students being awarded scholarships has struck a chord with Somali women. Between colleges and boarding schools, there are six new girls headed for American private education, and many of the fanciest women in Somaliland society host a dinner to congratulate them. In attendance are our girls, our female teachers, parents, a female representative of the Higher Education Commission, and even the vice president’s wife.

  Nimo speaks at the event, so when our bus returns to campus I ask her how it went. “Terribly,” she says. “I made them all cry.”

  One of the Higher Education commissioners is supposed to speak after Nimo, but she is too choked up to get the words out. Finally she says, “This is a great night. Seeing young girls so educated. So trained. Able to speak so well. Somali women have gained something so great.” She compares how advanced Nimo is, her ability to deliver such a speech, to where she herself had been at that age. She congratulates all of our young women, as well as Amran and the other parents who have been fighting for the school.

  One thing I hear but can’t confirm is that in her emotional state the commissioner has said, “I never knew.” I’d like to think she was saying, “I never knew there was so much at risk here.” As Amran would say to me, before the college admissions, no one really knew what our school could accomplish. Students earning scholarships to U.S. universities had been beyond anyone’s reasonable expectations. This is true not only for this commissioner, but for the Higher Education Commission and the government as a whole. I think it is true for everyone, even the parents. They have fought hard, but if they had known all that they were fighting for, they would have left even less to chance.

  Billeh flies to Somaliland in June 2013 for our first graduation, staying at the Maansoor Hotel in town. It has been some time since we’ve seen each other, as unfortunately all of Abaarso’s trouble has come between us. Billeh is a peaceful man, and I had been angry that he had taken so long to see the evil in Khadar. That is another thing that Khadar’s media attacks changed. Until then, Billeh had still wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but after the public attacks, this was not possible. Billeh wanted nothing more to do with him.

  When I walk into the Maansoor Hotel, I see Billeh standing in the lobby. My uncle is not normally a sappy guy, but he pulls me in for a hug. The bad days for Abaarso are over, and it is time for the two of us to also put them behind us.

  In his short stay at the Maansoor, Billeh can see that Abaarso is now the toast of the town. We are walking out of the hotel when, coming right toward us, is Khadar’s close cousin, the hotel owner who had hosted the TV bashing of Abaarso and me. He has been Khadar’s most loyal supporter, even taping a video that Mohamed Hashi should stay out of Abaarso business. Now, he, too, opens his arms to give me a hug.

  “We are so proud of you. We are so proud of Abaarso,” he says. “And I told Khadar that, too.”

  We have so much to celebrate at our first graduation. We will have twenty-five students studying at colleges and boarding schools around the world, including nineteen who will be in the United States. We decide to invite parents and society leaders to campus for a celebration. Mohamed Hashi and a few members of the Higher Education Commission are among the first to arrive. We are on the same side now, the side we should have been on from the start, the side of the children. Suddenly, we hear there is a group of villagers at the gate trying to stop the event. This has been happening for months, anytime anyone comes to the school. I am told that the editor from Khadar’s Gollis is in the village paying some guys to cause trouble.

  “Well, they can’t do that,” one of the commissioners says, hopefully getting an even clearer idea of what we’ve been dealing with. He joins Mohamed in walking over to the gate. They tell the group to leave and to knock off this behavior. The group turns around, leaves, and never causes trouble again. A few dollars for qat does not buy conviction, and it isn’t enough to stand up to Mohamed Hashi for a cause they don’t even understand. These aren’t bad guys; they are poor kids being used, and we don’t hold this against them. In fact, one of them would later work for the school, making good money as a contractor.

  Graduation, which includes a lot of dignitaries, opens with a speech by Nimo, and ends with Mubarik, our valedictorian—two of my heroes bookending it. Mubarik’s speech is all in Somali. The crowd, which includes Somaliland’s vi
ce president, clearly are hanging on his every word. This former nomad once again shows his immense talent.

  Seemingly every paper but Gollis covers our good news; Khadar’s hypocrisy at work, Billeh happily points out. Word is that Khadar now argues that Somaliland students shouldn’t go abroad for higher education, a laughable position since “I’m the PhD from America” is essentially his one claim to fame. He tries a few last-ditch attempts, including a video in which he suggests there should be an investigation into whether I have a girlfriend among the students. He pays the TV network to run the video, so it does, but nothing comes of it.

  Khadar continues to run the Hargeisa Programs in a manner that looks like we are one and the same. When we change our school seal, he changes his school seal to match in color, shape, even design. When we benignly post that we are two different organizations, his organization posts that it isn’t true. People continue to get confused, thinking that we are running these Hargeisa Programs; but over time, this will also catch up to him. Once anyone figures out the truth, they ask, “Why would he do that?” The look on their faces shows they’ve answered their own question.

  The last time I laid eyes on Khadar was at a meeting that previous summer, the summer of 2012, and I am hopeful that will be true for the rest of my life. The horror he inflicted on us was traumatic, and whenever I think back to those times, I can’t help but relive them. I tell one of the students that I still have this problem, my mind going back to the dark days, and my needing to remind myself that the students are okay. “We are more than okay” is her response. The roles have somewhat shifted. Now they worry about me.