Billeh and his family lived in Brooklyn, New York, and although I grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, several hours away, our families were always together on holidays. He called me “Señor” for as long as I can remember, which even as a little kid made me feel special despite having no idea what it meant. I just knew he liked me by the way he said it, and that I was the only nephew with that title. In the summer, we’d often vacation with Billeh and his family, too. My mother and her sister-in-law, Marjorie, would rent various houses in different New England spots. In ninth grade, my parents got divorced, but the two women continued the tradition, even though my father no longer came. By my late teens, the rental was always a modest shared cottage in the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts.
Back then, I could kick back and relax, so these were wonderful times. While I swam, canoed, and husked corn, Uncle Billeh would stand on the dock fishing for hours at a time. Sometimes I’d see him smiling as he fed fish out of his hand. At the end of the day, I’d realize that he never actually caught anything to keep. He was such a gentle soul that everything would be released, and for all I know he had bait but no hook, just feeding them by line. Nights would often be spent playing his favorite Somali card game, which quickly turned into my favorite, too. The game was complicated, bizarrely based on 187 points, and a player could be your ally one minute and your enemy the next. My mother’s twin brother, Eli, often joined us, with the three of us locked in intense battles. At the end of one game, Eli complained that Billeh handed me the win with poor play. The complaint was fair—he had definitely handed me the game, which otherwise would have gone to Eli. But it wasn’t poor play. I was family and a Somali man takes care of his family.
Everybody knew that Billeh worked for the United Nations, but we didn’t actually know what he did there. When asked, he would say that he “deployed his experts to the field,” but nobody had any idea who these experts were, what they did, or where this field was. I once went to a party for his promotion to a P5, but that didn’t explain much, either, nor did Billeh help. “What does it mean to be a P5?” was answered by, “I’m no longer a P4 and am now one step below a D1.” A Somali American who worked a mysterious job might sound like a CIA agent, but anyone who knew Billeh knew that this was not possible. He just led a quiet private life.
It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I learned more about Uncle Billeh’s birth country. I was at a summer party in the Berkshires hosted by one of his UN colleagues, and the guests were talking about Somaliland. While the hostess knew it well, she and Billeh seemed to be the only two who did. Somaliland definitely needed explaining, even to those people worldly enough to know Somalia. Apparently, it held its own separate democratic elections, yet it was still considered an autonomous region in northwest Somalia. Billeh lamented that his peaceful country wasn’t being recognized as an independent nation. Without this international recognition, Somaliland suffered economically, unable to secure international loans, have a seat at the trade table, or attract foreign private investment. This left the people in poverty and the education system in havoc. The days of potential scholars being prepared for global education were over. Someone like Billeh would not have access to proper schooling and would therefore be unable to launch to a university-level education overseas.
To those at the party, Somaliland’s problem was as simple as having the wrong name. If Somaliland wanted to be considered separate from Somalia, a country defined by international media coverage of the Black Hawk Down fiasco, which generated a book and a major motion picture, then you didn’t use the same first six letters “S-O-M-A-L-I.” It was hard to deny this branding issue, but I left that night with a different thought. Before the party, Billeh had been my gentle, intensely private uncle. Now that I saw how the hostess, Billeh’s old colleague, looked at him and treated him, I viewed him in a new light. She had such great respect for Billeh and his potential role in improving his country’s prospects that I saw him in greater depth, now recognizing this whole other “world-player” side to him.
In the following decade, while my personal career ambitions consumed my focus, my uncle’s dreams for the people of Somaliland were never far away.