Fatiya Abdullahi, SOMALIA
Back in Somalia, I lived in a small house on the outskirts of Mogadishu with my mother, father, and brother. In 1992, when I was three years old, fighting began in town between the Somali National Movement (SNM) and the government. My dad was at work and wasn’t home when the fighting started. He didn’t come home that day, and we didn’t know where he was.
The fighting lasted for days. We could hear the noise, but couldn’t go outside at all. Our house even shook. From inside our house, I could see dead soldiers lying on the street. I had never seen a dead body in my life. I started to wonder about my dad—if he had been killed, too.
A few days after the fighting began, my mom and brother and I were home and some soldiers with guns broke open our door and told us that we had five minutes to leave or we would be shot. We threw some dried milk, water, and rice in a bag. My mom grabbed a family picture we had taken last year. She looked so scared. Dad still hadn’t returned, but we couldn’t wait for him. We had to go. We said a silent prayer, and ran out the door.
By the time we had joined our neighbors on the road leading away from town, we could see smoke rising from the lane behind our home. We could not tell for sure if it was our house that was burning, but we also knew that it didn’t matter. Home was gone. It made me sad to leave my house and all of my friends there. And I was so worried about my dad. I wondered if I would ever see him again.
We walked to Kenya to a refugee camp. The walk was hard; we could still hear bombs and fighting going on. We had to walk mostly by night because it was safer. It took days to get there—I don’t know how many miles we walked! One of my friends told me that her uncle died in their house during the fighting, but they couldn’t bury him because of all of the fighting.
The conditions in the Kenyan camp were terrible. Some people got sick; they didn’t have very good medicine there. The woman who lived next to us in the camp died. We had to stay in the camp there for 7 years. The atmosphere in the camp was so depressing. Even when school was in session—which wasn’t very often—I had a hard time studying and concentrating. I kept worrying about my dad and wondering if we would ever get out of this camp.
My family and I moved to Marshall, Minnesota in 1999. My brother and I attended a middle school there. When I got to school, the only words I knew in English were Hello and Thank You. I had no idea what people were saying. Also, the people who live in Minnesota don’t wear the shador, and sometimes they give me funny looks when they walk by me. But I am happy there are some other people from Somalia here. I feel at home when I smell Somali stew cooking!
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