Despite everything, I feel the whole experience has made me a less vindictive person. Having fought for Abaarso against so many wrongs and with so much at stake, I no longer need to fight all the small stuff. That even includes Khadar. If he cuts out the Hargeisa Programs nonsense and makes a proper public apology, then I believe I can truly forgive him. However, I’m not holding my breath.
Of course, I can only speculate about what makes Khadar finally throw in the towel. Unfortunately, here I have nothing more than speculation. Many students, parents, townsfolk, and ministers have helped us win the battle for respect and approval. But I like to think it is Miss Marple who saved the day. I’ve been told that she has kept good relations with Khadar for some time after, which I don’t find surprising. Like a good Somali, she values peace and balance. She would not permit him to destroy a good thing, but that doesn’t mean she needs to see him crushed.
PART SEVEN
WHEN ARMS ARE OPEN
You can blow out a candle
But you can’t blow out a fire
—PETER GABRIEL
42
SHOW ME THE MONEY
With our first graduation, we decide that the education would be vastly improved if students started in seventh grade. We are no longer desperate to show quick results, so in the summer of 2013, we recruit our first seventh-grade class.
Since the population is now excited about Abaarso, we try a financial experiment with the applicants. After running successful exams in both Hargeisa and Burao, we tell the high scorers that the tuition is $1,800, as that is the cost of running the school, and we can’t guarantee them a spot unless they commit to the full $1,800 and send the first $300 within a couple weeks. If they can’t pay that much, then they should tell us the best they can do, because there is no telling when the financial aid will run out.
By “we” telling them, it is actually little Muna who did, the still-tiny girl who’d come to us as a twelve-year-old ninth grader—the one who told me not to worry because she was taking her medicine. We still don’t have local staff who can do such things, and I still don’t speak Somali, so Muna is as good a choice as any. I explain the situation, then I show her the famous “Show Me the Money” scene from Jerry Maguire and give her the list of students to call.
One by one she makes the calls and handles the follow-ups, staying at it for a few weeks. In some cases, when we know she is talking to a top scorer, we negotiate. In others, we play hardball and make them come back with their best. When all is said and done, the results are remarkable. We have filled the seventh-grade class, only losing one student. Of course, we’ve made a few financial concessions, but nothing like we’ve previously done. Many families who originally said they could only pay a few hundred dollars now agree to pay much more and even send the money. We are bringing in the seventh grade at approximately three times the tuition of the other classes, and pretty darn close to breakeven. A couple months later, we recruit our new ninth grade, and they come in the exact same way.
An obvious question, and one I’ve been asked many times, is How is this possible? After all, we are dealing with one of the poorest countries in the world. The best explanation I can give is that the same clan system that had caused us so much grief is now smiling down upon us. The parents themselves aren’t generally paying. But, with Abaarso’s reputation, they are able to go to clan members around the world and ask for money. They just need the desire and the pressure to do so. After all, wouldn’t Billeh say yes to any Musa Ismail who had the chance at such an education? Wasn’t such an opportunity exactly what had given him the chance so many decades ago?
We also have Ava. Ava came as a math teacher a couple of years before but is quickly taking on administrative responsibilities. In pure brainpower, I consider her the smartest teacher we have ever had, and her college career supports the claim. She graduated from college in three years with only a rounding error away from a 4.0. As the new assistant headmaster, she makes sure our accounting is booked daily and that we budget and compare the results versus forecast. With that, she can quickly home in on any problems before they get out of control.
One significant success is our auto fuel costs, which were running well over $1,000 monthly before Ava took over. They’d increased dramatically with no reasonable explanation, but because our financial management was poor, we didn’t even know it until long after the fact. Ava pinpointed the inefficiency and got fuel spending down to $500 a month, where it has stayed ever since. Needless to say, some folks had been taking advantage of us before. We were able to make similar improvements across the board, and despite a 50 percent increase in the student population, the school’s operating expenses went up by only 5 percent.
In addition, Ava started properly enforcing tuition payments on all students, not asking them for more than they could pay but making sure we collect what we are supposed to. This makes another big impact on the tuition money we are taking in, which is now $200,000, versus just $72,000 the year before. On the whole, Abaarso would go from losing $182,000 in the prior year to losing under $70,000, and the path to achieving breakeven is now clear. As more students come in under the new tuition policy, and the old ones cycle out, the school will get closer and closer to covering its costs. As I write this in 2016, we are projecting the operations of Abaarso School to be within $10,000 of breaking even.
Another first for us is the acceptance of several students from the Hargeisa Orphanage, among them Rooble, a slightly built boy of thirteen, who will be a member of our first-ever seventh-grade class, and his older brother, Saeed. Rooble and Saeed are two of the students who were taught by Suzanne and her troop of volunteers, which makes their presence on campus all the more special for their elder classmates, who had once tutored them. In time, the orphanage tutoring comes full circle, with former orphanage kids like Saeed joining our crew who tutor there each week. Rooble, Saeed, and the others from the orphanage have been academically competitive while making a wonderful contribution to the school. While Abaarso must be financially sustainable, and we will continue pushing families to pay what they can, we will never stop taking society’s neediest. After all, Abaarso was once carried on the back of a homeless nomad.
43
OUR BEST AMBASSADORS
The home of my friend Anand and his wife, Erica, overlooks Madison Square Park in Manhattan. The giant double-unit apartment is stunning in every respect, from its maze of rooms to its view of the city. This evening, Anand and Erica host a crowd of their friends and colleagues; their living room is packed with folks who’ve stopped by on their way home from work.
The world loves to hate hedge fund people, but few have ever met one or can even tell you what a hedge fund is. Those closer to that world know that if nothing else, hedge fund managers are extremely smart, and Anand is on the bright end of even this spectrum. He is a deep thinker, known for being intensely analytical, and so when he told his friends and colleagues that Abaarso was exceptional, they respected him enough to at least stop by. The one piece of analysis Anand hadn’t gotten right? He’s my friend who originally thought the Abaarso idea was nuts.
Today he wears jeans and cowboy boots. He and Erica thank their guests for coming. He’s arranged for servers to pass around hors d’oeuvres, and the whole event seems like just another high-end party. To us, however, it is not. There is a serious goal at hand. Despite all of our success, it is unclear if we will ever be able to generate serious donor interest. As Anand would say to me, “Why can’t we be raising money for homeless dogs in Central Park?”
Unfortunately, we are finding that Abaarso is an “orphan charity,” the kind without enough financial demand or interest. To the non-Somali donor, it is a theoretical concept as opposed to one that is front and center, like your child’s school. The natural donor base for Abaarso is the Somali community, and while a couple of the local companies had been very generous, on the whole Somalis are not wealthy and are mostly trying to survive. What extra money they have goe
s to their extended families.
We haven’t had luck accessing corporate money, either. Multinational companies have large charitable programs but they are generally only for places where they have offices or big consumer bases. In Africa that means the usual suspects of Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa. Most African countries have at least some multinationals to turn to; Somaliland has none. Greatly disappointing is that foundation funding generally doesn’t work, either, though, unlike in the case of multinationals, whose explanations are quite reasonable, foundations’ rejections are much harder to swallow. Time and time again we’d hear that this or that foundation just doesn’t work in Somalia or Somaliland. When pushed harder, some cite the State Department travel warnings. Foundations would also tell us that we aren’t scalable. They want someone working in twelve villages where in theory they could take funding and support fifty villages. That Abaarso is a completely different animal is not even a conversation starter for most.
Some experts in the fund-raising world would tell me the problem was that I was going about it wrong. But by this they did not mean changing how I attracted funds, they meant changing Abaarso into something different. With the international aid industry’s spectacular history of failure, you’d think donors would want to adapt to fund what’s both working and cost-effective. You’d think wrong.
Because we had been rejected by all the usual suspects, and did not have a big celebrity to hawk the cause, Anand’s event was an experiment in a new strategy. We do have a few strengths, and we are trying to play to them. The first of those is that Anand, and I, to a much lesser extent, know a lot of wealthy people. Today he has gathered a room full of folks, many of whom might not notice the difference if they mistakenly added another zero to their $10,000 check. If they do agree to part with some of their money, those donations can add up quickly.
A second strength is that our product is a good one. Almost everyone here tonight has children in New York City private schools, which even for day students cost $40,000 per child annually. At Abaarso we are educating the students for $1,800 per year, and they can see from our results that the students are now on par with their own children. They can respect that.
Our real secret weapon, though, how we are hoping to separate ourselves, is that we have our products right here in the room. Everyone has heard of sponsoring an African kid for X dollars per month. Never do they say, “And then you’ll meet them at their U.S. private school.” We’ve brought five of our Abaarso students to the event to speak and then meet the guests. They are our true products and our stars. And they don’t disappoint.
The first time we tried such a plan was at the Yale Club of New York City. Anand and another hedge fund supporter had arranged the gathering, which happened around the time Deqa came to America for Worcester Academy’s summer school. I hadn’t really prepped her for what was going to happen, nor did I think I fully could. How could I even describe a place as classy and gorgeous as the Yale Club, and the crowd of well-to-do New Yorkers who would attend? I didn’t want to tell her what to say, either. I trusted her to do that on her own.
Deqa, five foot four, with flashing dark eyes, was dressed in a long and colorful traditional Somali dress, a black-and-red headscarf, and four-inch spike heels. For Deqa, the opportunity presented by Abaarso had fundamentally altered the trajectory of her life, and she let the audience know that in no uncertain terms. She didn’t use words like “trajectory,” but she described what her future might otherwise have been, and it was easy for the audience to imagine it. The crowd was awestruck by this teenage girl, her beaming smile, not intimidated in the slightest by the environment. That two years before she barely knew any English was beside the point, as such a speech from a private-schooled American teen would have blown people away. It was clear that Deqa was a talent who just needed opportunity. And what’s more, the world needed Deqa and all those like her to have that opportunity. When Deqa finished, one woman ran up and hugged her while the rest of us wiped our eyes.
We raised tens of thousands of dollars. We also found some new long-term supporters who would help spread the Abaarso gospel. However invested Anand was before the night began, Deqa had doubled the strength of his commitment. She and the other students were the key, and now we had a whole group of them to show what Abaarso is doing.
Tonight Fadumo speaks, and like Deqa at the Yale Club, she describes how Abaarso has changed her life; her Hargeisa friends who had not gone to Abaarso were planning their weddings while she expected to study health or medicine in the United States. She would then return to Somaliland and open doors for other girls. “Fadumo stole the show” were the precise words that would later come out of guests’ mouths. She was confident, yet humble. Charming, but still strong. Her words and her very presence strike a chord. And for those who’d been at the Yale Club, she proves that we aren’t a one-woman show. We’d sent a different pitcher to the mound, and she is every bit as dominant as the first one.
While Fadumo’s charisma would be hard to match, the night was also a coming-out party for our other student speaker, Abdisamad Adan, a short boy with John Lennon–like glasses, who had almost gone to SOS Sheikh instead of Abaarso. Halfway through the SOS/Abaarso exam, he had unchecked “Sheikh” as his first choice and changed it to “Abaarso.”
Abdisamad has eighteen siblings, some illiterate. His home had no electricity or indoor plumbing, and an illiterate grandmother raised him. He excelled in his primary school, not because anyone encouraged him but because of his own self-motivation. If he needed to study by candlelight, he would. Like Mubarik, he could not afford Abaarso. He had barely been able to afford the one-dollar-a-month payment to his public school. At Abaarso, we waived his tuition, and he quickly became an academic star.
Wearing a suit that one of our supporters bought for him, Abdisamad launches into a discussion about gender. “Abaarso has changed our perception of the girls, but it also has changed the perception of the girls of themselves,” he explains. “I remember the first debate we had during freshman year about whether a girl could become president or not. Every single boy and the majority of the girls said, ‘No way. Are you kidding? She’s a woman.’ We had the same debate in my junior year after being exposed to education at Abaarso. Every girl said, ‘Of course she can be president,’ and the majority of the boys said yes. Only two boys said no.” He smiles. “We need men and women working side by side together to transform this country into a better place for everyone.… The American founders wrote that everyone has the right to liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. But I am sure if one of the founders walked into this room today, the first most shocking thing they would say was, ‘What are these ladies doing in this room?’” He laughs out loud. His poise impresses everyone, as do his words.
Anand closes the program. In one of the most poignant lines of the evening, he points to his daughter, six-year-old Ella, who has quietly seated herself on a couch. “When I think it could be Ella with no possibilities,” he begins, and it is clear he cannot let himself go there.
At the start of the evening, no one could have guessed which attendees would become the next big supporters. That is why we cast a wide but targeted net. Long after the program has ended, Mitch Golden, a financial manager, is still talking to our students. When Anand and I follow up, Mitch beams with excitement and says he will be a host for the next event. Anand’s event brings in tens of thousands of dollars, but the long-term support of people like Mitch will be critical. Six months later, supporters gained from Anand’s event, including Mitch, join forces to run their own event, which raises an additional $100,000. That, in turn, brings in new, long-term supporters, including Steve Kuhn, the chief investment officer of a nearly $20 billion firm. Abaarso might not be able to follow a traditional fund-raising model, but with verifiable success and our students out front, good people are stepping up to adopt our orphan charity.
44
THE FUTURE
Billeh and I are in the
backseat of a Land Cruiser heading north on the road that connects Hargeisa to Berbera. In the front passenger seat is a security guard, and seated next to him at the wheel is Rashid Guled. Rashid is a Somali man in his midfifties with a bigger-than-life personality. He is fun, loves life, loves his children, and, more than anything, he loves a good story. Rashid is an engineer who received his training at SUNY Buffalo, so to distinguish him from all the other Rashids, people refer to him as “Rashid Buffalo,” or simply “Buffalo.” “Buffalo” now has several children at Abaarso, and he is a great parent to have on board. His engineering knowledge, in particular, has proved invaluable. He advises us and creates engineering drawings at no charge.
About twenty-two miles northeast of Hargeisa, we come to a tiny village, Diinqal, the literal meaning of which is “to slaughter a tortoise.” It is thought that at some point in the village’s history, a drought struck and the people had to slaughter and eat tortoises in order to survive. The name stuck.
There may only be a thousand people who live in Diinqal, and in many ways the village is just as Abaarso Village was when Billeh and I first visited—undeveloped, not much more than a truck stop along the highway. Unlike Abaarso, there is a shallow well in Diinqal that provides some water. That has led to a small but thriving orchard.
Billeh and I are looking for more land. Today Rashid has offered to help out, which explains why we are in Diinqal. We will see this small village and then head off the main road to another village twenty minutes away. This is near Rashid’s tribal area, a situation I now well understand. I had told a handful of people about my desire to get land and, like everyone else, Rashid will look to whom he knows. From that handful of folks, I’ve been receiving offers of massive quantities of land all over the country. Some are five times bigger than Abaarso. Others are twenty times larger. One mayor came four hours from his city to make his pitch.
It Takes a School Page 22