Somalia will see better days’

Numerous news articles have lately been circulating on television, radio and in newspapers that Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, Sudan and Uganda are facing famine and need emergency aid. Tens of students who left Somalia, where 3.7m people, half of the population, have been affected by drought and where hunger and lack of water have caused a humanitarian crisis, and came to Turkey to study are following reports on drought in Africa with concern. We hosted two of them, Ayse and Habibe, at our foundation. One question led to another.

20.08.2011 - Somalia will see better days’

Their families live in Mogadishu, which resembles an oasis in the middle of a barren land. Ayse has eight siblings and Habibe has 12, including half-siblings. They are both 21 years old. They said nothing but war about Somalia, which has lacked political stability for the past two decades and de facto has no functioning government for a decade. It makes them think how a country that is capable of self-sufficiency is dependent on other countries. They tell how they had to stay inside and miss school because of curfew and how this situation had become routine and ordinary. People are used to it, whether they can go to work or not depends of the intensity of fighting, they say.  

Once colonialist powers divided Africa into smaller regions and exploited the continent’s resources, the local people could not establish order any longer. Somalia was split into several zones in the post-colonial era. Even through the territories divided by the British and the Italians united after colonialist powers left, Western powers still hold a grip on the fertile land of Africa. Numerous problems left behind by the colonialists such as warring tribes, destroyed jobs, altered but locally-rejected lifestyles and so on have caused endless civil unrests so far. Even Ayse and Habibe could not tell much about their country. I tried to get an idea about how the civil war has affected them while they were talking about their families. Ayse starts to cry, she had lost her father in the war. I could not ask how. Our talk ended there, she was not willing to open her privacy to discussion. She did not want to make her story into a narration. Her pain is real. What she experienced seems hard-to-grasp to those who do not know Africa. I changed the topic asking “What subject are you going to study in Turkey?” “Medicine,” she says. “I will be a doctor. I did not use to think so much about my country while in Mogadishu, but I do now. When I return, I will help the children hurt by war.” Ayse knows enough Turkish to get by although she has been here only for eight months. She has been receiving good news from her family recently. Arms have fallen silent in Somalia, which is fighting famine and poverty.     

Habibe, whose father works as a civil servant, got a call from her mother in Mogadishu during the interview. She is going to study management; she wants to be a businesswoman. She says she might even work in Turkey. Something should be done to increase the number of educational institutions in Somalia, she says and shows the lack of production and economic development in the country as caused by the nonexistence of a central government as the reason for choosing management major. 

I asked whether they were following news. They gave an eager yes. They are not happy about their country being in the news as the country of famine and drought every day. “This cannot continue forever; Somalia will certainly change and better days will come,” Ayse concludes.