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. The Independent;Tuesday, 26 May 2009
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."
When the whole world ignored Somalia…one country stood up quietly, without drum beats or headlines, or invitation to corrupted officials, and opened its doors to welcome the traumatized Somali youth as well as elders, mothers and children. MALAYSIA has done something no country has done for Somalia…not IGAD, not the AU, not the Arab league, not the EU, not even the UN.
It was a nice feeling to find the Somali flag flying at the Utara Malaysia University. This was days before the Students graduation ceremony. 
Not unlike the Arab poet of the Andalus days who saw a palm tree in South America, and asked the palm tree what brought him so far away from home. A Somali activist, pays respect to a flag that like him feels lonely in a crowded world.
