Forty years after Billeh attended Sheikh Secondary School, and forty years after Somaliland gained independence from England and merged with Italian Somalia to form the Somali Democratic Republic, a boy named Mubarik Mohamoud was running away from his nomadic lifestyle and would soon enter my life. Many parts of the world had seen enormous progress, men had walked on the moon, and computers were now in nearly every American household, but the region where Mubarik lived had been static for centuries.
Mubarik rarely encountered people outside of his own nomadic tribe, so he knew nothing of progress. He was born in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia. While Ethiopian by name and national border, inhabitants of this territory consider themselves to be Somali, even if they’ve never set foot outside Ethiopia. He knew nothing about electricity, technology, or space exploration. He didn’t know that Somalia went through a military coup and that Somaliland was now fighting to regain its independence. What he knew was herding.
By the time he was five, Mubarik was already shepherding the family’s one hundred goats. His job was to graze the goats while keeping predators away. The idea was to run and shout at any animal that approached. When he got older, he was entrusted to graze the camels. He once had a close call with a cheetah, but when the encounter was over, he had scared the cheetah more than the cheetah had scared him. From sunrise till dark, he ran and jogged with the herd, developing a stamina for long-distance running, which would turn into a pastime. On the rare occasion that he saw a truck crossing the desert, he thought it was some kind of animal running quickly. He could hear it coming from miles away, and he could see people riding on it. He immediately assumed it must be some sort of high-speed camel. Camel … truck … same animal. Why don’t we have one of those? he thought to himself. He’d see them only occasionally, and each sighting left him in awe. Eventually, he learned that these were man-made vehicles going places. He started to wonder where they were going and where else there was to go that he hadn’t yet discovered.
When he was nine, word came from his grandmother that she needed help. She was living in a refugee camp, and the camp was counting family members present to determine how much food each would be rationed. The refugees had been living there for years, having been driven out of Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, during the civil war with Somalia. Thousands of people had been forced to flee Hargeisa, its residents relocating to the homes of relatives or to camps run by the United Nations and other humanitarian aid agencies.
Mubarik joined a hundred people to walk thirteen hours across the desert in order to boost his family’s numbers. He had never seen this many people in the same place at the same time. Everybody, even the children, walked through the night, beginning at seven p.m. and arriving at eight a.m. the next day.
The refugee camp had a semipermanent look to it. There were tents, but there were also houses, traditional Somali structures of clay with thatched roofs. Mubarik stayed for about a week. There were kids about his age who, like his grandmother, had been forced out of Hargeisa. They were playing soccer, the first time he had ever seen the sport, and he wanted to join in. The kids started making fun of him, saying nomads were barbaric. He had no idea why they were insulting him like this, until his grandmother explained that these children attended school, something he knew nothing about. In fact, there was a school at the camp that went up to the fifth grade.
When Mubarik went back to his family, he told his parents that he wanted to go to school, too. His mother was sympathetic, but his father said no. No one in his family had ever been to school, and no one had anything good to say about getting an education. So his father thought he was a weak child because he didn’t want to walk with the animals.
Mubarik was stubborn, and although it would be disrespectful, he thought it was necessary to defy his father. He told the family that if they didn’t allow him to attend school, he was going to run away and never return. He didn’t have a plan, but his mother, concerned that he would carry out his threat, convinced his father to let him study with a nearby community of Sufis. Sufis were Islamic mystics who taught Arabic and Islam in exchange for goats, a little money, a little food, anything a student might be able to offer.
Mubarik stayed with the Sufis for less than six months, which he counted by the moon. He didn’t like it there; it was not the lifestyle he had in mind and not the kind of learning, either. Ever since he had seen the trucks crossing the desert, he had his mind set on learning how to build one. He wasn’t going to go back to the nomadic life, so he ran away from his school and traveled to the spot where the refugee camp had been, hoping to find his grandmother. But the camp was now closed and his grandmother had returned to Hargeisa.
He found a truck leaving for the city and hid in the back. He had no idea that the ride to Hargeisa would be longer than an entire night and into the following day. Making it worse, he had been very sick and hungry even before the trip started. When the truck finally arrived in the city, Mubarik was discovered by the driver, who wondered where this ill child had come from. The driver asked his age, which he knew was ten or eleven, but he didn’t know for sure because age was counted by the seasons, beginning in the spring. Every time the rains came, you just knew you were a year older. The driver wanted to help him find his grandmother, fearing that he might collapse or die at any moment. It took days, but eventually they located her.
Mubarik’s arrival in Hargeisa marked the first time he had been in a city, and it was overwhelming. Donkey carts rode down the middle of busy roads; goats ate garbage and wandered into traffic; chickens, baboons, wild dogs, and throngs of pedestrians rushed everywhere. Trucks, the rare wonders of his childhood, were now in the middle of congestion, overloaded with passengers and cargo.
Fascinating people filled Hargeisa’s roads, including schoolchildren clearly identifiable by their uniforms. Mubarik didn’t know where the schools were yet, but when he found his grandmother, he determined that his next stop would be school. He also couldn’t believe the garbage. Where he came from, there were no manufactured products, so there was certainly no manufactured trash. Now everything reeked—the food, the exhaust, the open sewers, the burning garbage. Mubarik held his nose for three days, to very little avail.
The long-awaited reunion with his grandmother was gratifying, although she was very upset that he left his family and then stowed away to the city. Somehow, she got word to his father that Mubarik was with her, and of course he wanted to take his son home. Mubarik remained defiant. He told his father he would rather be homeless than be a nomad. The desire to go to school was his driving force, and with his grandmother’s help, he managed to enroll in a private religious school in Hargeisa, taught in Arabic, which he found intellectually unfulfilling.
Mubarik stayed with his grandmother for about a year, until she became gravely ill and needed to move in with her daughter. Now he was essentially homeless. When he could, he stayed with people he knew, but he always felt like a parasite. He was often hungry and in the streets looking for food. He enrolled at a public school after he received permission from the principal. The curriculum was in Somali, so now he had to learn to read and write in that language. Whereas Arabic was read right to left, Somali was read left to right with a completely different alphabet, which was challenging, but Mubarik picked it up quickly.
In eighth grade, like all eighth graders, he took the national exam and scored high enough to qualify for the entry exam given by the SOS Sheikh School. Mr. Darlington had left Sheikh a couple years after Siad Barre’s coup, and the school closed down altogether during the civil war. In 2000, SOS, a giant international nonprofit, renovated and reopened Sheikh and appended its name to it. At the time that Mubarik was in eighth grade, SOS Sheikh was once again considered the best school in the country. However, Mubarik didn’t have the resources to attend SOS even if he was accepted, so he didn’t want to take the exam. What good would it do if he wasn’t able to go? But some of his school friends talked him into taking it with them.
The test was being administered in a nondescript public school building in downtown Hargeisa. Mubarik was curious to see if he could get in, although he was already feeling guilty. If he was to be accepted, would that mean he had taken the spot of someone else who might have had the means to go? What a position to be in. He had come so far, qualifying for the SOS Sheikh test, which meant he was one of the top students in the country. But whether accepted or not, he thought this opportunity wasn’t going to work out for him. He was wrong.