I am asleep in the early morning of February 1 when my phone rings. I keep it near to receive word of the latest crisis, maybe bigger than the last. My heart racing, I am always ready for battle these days.
When I answer, my mind ready to problem-solve the crisis, I discover it isn’t Harry with a new problem, nor is it my public relations guy with news about the latest Khadar attack. Instead, it is Nimo, updating me on her latest college news.
Despite all the time I have spent defending the school, I haven’t stopped working on college admissions. Nimo’s best shot is Oberlin College. I had visited Oberlin on my whirlwind tour of U.S. colleges and had seen their international admissions director a second time in New York City. I feel hopeful. Nimo is not the best academic student Abaarso has seen, but in the past year she has finally focused on her classes and the results are excellent. I implore my Oberlin contacts to see her recent grades as a true reflection of her ability. Nimo has put up quite respectable SAT scores as well, beating over half of “college-bound seniors,” quite a feat for a kid with 3.5 years of real education.
I know Nimo would engage and thrive in many college activities, and who isn’t looking for someone like Nimo, who is off the “involvement” chart? She has done everything possible here at Abaarso, and with passion. All students need to do four hours of community service per week. Nimo has done three times that. She is the top debater, a proctor, the organizer of competitions on campus, and a steady member of the girls’ basketball team, despite having virtually no athletic talent and knowing it.
“What’s going on?” I ask Nimo over the phone, hoping. Desperately hoping.
Nimo’s voice is shaking. “I got in,” is all she can say. She is too emotional and stunned to say more.
My clever logic student, the one who has shown the boys what a girl can do, the kid I originally knew as “the girl with the narrow face,” has been accepted and will be fully funded to attend Oberlin.
I want to cry because anything less won’t do this moment justice. This feels like well-deserved vindication after our struggles to survive. I have wanted this more than I can remember wanting anything. But I don’t cry. I couldn’t. I am still at war for Nimo’s school, and there is no break until it is won. Instead, I will use Nimo’s acceptance as a powerful new weapon. I just need to augment it a bit before firing.
Nimo e-mails me her admissions letter. Immediately, I call a representative of the Ministry of Education to tell him an Abaarso girl has been accepted with a full scholarship to an American college and send him the admissions letter. He is floored and says he’ll tell the minister. Nimo’s Oberlin acceptance breaks what has been a three-decade drought in Somalilanders getting scholarships to U.S. universities, and I tell him that I hope the minister will issue a “congratulations” for our press release.
Maybe it is Miss Marple’s magic, maybe Khadar has just gone too far, or maybe I have misjudged the minister from early on. Whatever the reason, less than forty-eight hours later my contact returns with her quote:
TO: Managing Director,
Abaarso School of Science and Technology,
Abaarso, Somaliland
Sub: A Letter of Appreciation
The Ministry of Education is writing this letter as a sign of appreciation for the good news of Ms. Nimo M. Ismail for her hard and diligent work to receive full scholarship to Oberlin College, USA. This is an indicator that Abaarso School of Science and Technology is really competitive in educating Somaliland youngsters and at the same time, the knowledge offered here is accepted by International universities.
May I take this opportunity to express my thanks to the Oberlin College and Abaarso.… In this regard, I would welcome if more similar scholarships are offered to the girls in Somaliland in the future.
Zamzam Abdi Adan
Minister of Education & Higher Studies
With this, it is time to launch. I make sure the story runs everywhere Somalis may look, and indeed even websites we don’t send it to quickly pick it up. What’s more, because of the minister’s quote, the papers decide to put her picture at the top of the article, inextricably connecting the minister of education to Abaarso’s side. In one stroke, the damage caused by the Burao disaster is undone. Even more critically, Somalilanders know the minister’s clan connection to Khadar. By congratulating the school, she has affirmed that the school is reputable, and she isn’t going to play Khadar’s clan games. She is now joining Mohamed Hashi, signifying that multiple big guns from Khadar’s subclan are now publicly on our side.
There are several other students applying to college at the same time. On one of my trips home, I had visited Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and they connected me with their campus in Doha, Qatar. After an excellent call with the admissions director, he invited me to a group tour of Georgetown Qatar, which is part of a series of foreign universities in Doha, collectively referred to as Education City. I jumped at the chance, since the Qatar Foundation was offering huge amounts of financial aid to all of Education City, including Northwestern, Texas A&M, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Commonwealth. My trip almost doesn’t happen, as Immigration mysteriously, and in echoes of the past, blocks my visa extension, but Minister Zamzam steps in. I go to the conference and make important connections.
While Education City is promising, another lead that has appeared too good to be true comes through the African Leadership Academy in South Africa. At the same time that Fadumo, Mohamed, and the others were accepted to U.S. boarding schools, a boy, Hamse Mahdi, had gotten into ALA.
Hamse is an intensely intellectual student and one of the deepest thinkers to walk Abaarso’s halls. Due to visa holdups, he is only now heading to Johannesburg in January, and ALA had just sent a diagnostic test for us to administer in order to determine his academic level. After receiving Hamse’s test book, ALA’s cofounder, Chris Bradford, sets up a call with me. Hamse’s score is high and I think he wants assurance that Hamse couldn’t have cheated. We have an excellent conversation, at the end of which Chris says, “You have to talk to Laura Kaub, who heads a new program we are running for the MasterCard Foundation. I’ll introduce you.”
In fact, I had already heard of Laura during my travels across the United States visiting American colleges. In the world of African student admissions, Laura is a bit of a legend, having done a spectacular job with ALA’s college counseling. Now she had been chosen to lead a new program sponsored by the MasterCard Foundation. The program searches for high-quality sub-Saharan African students who can excel at American colleges if given the chance. The program further requires selected students to be committed to coming back to the continent, which is directly in line with Abaarso’s mission. It is only for the very poor, but colleges are on board because the MasterCard Foundation is paying a partial tuition rate for each student.
Laura and I hit it off from the start of our call. She is witty and fun, but also blunt. Chris had spoken fairly when he described her as “among the world’s experts in getting African students into universities.” She is a pro at matching students with schools where they can succeed.
Abaarso fits the desired program in every way: our students are prepared, poor, and committed to developing their country. Laura seeks students from around Africa and there we fit, too. Neither Somaliland nor Somalia is an easy country in which to recruit.
A week or so later, Laura is using Skype to interview our applicants. Suzanne, who at that time, in addition to her teaching and orphanage work, is our college counselor, joins me in listening through the door. We may have told ourselves that listening is important to better understand our students’ interviewing strengths and weaknesses, but in truth we are just too excited and nervous not to. Laura is no doubt impressed, particularly so by the last boy, whom she describes as “almost a ringer.” While this sounds too good to be true and I won’t believe it until I see an acceptance, this young man, Moustapha Elmi, seems on the verge of gaining an American higher education. I think back to three and a half years earlier when some of the first-year teachers didn’t think he could make it at Abaarso.
In addition to promoting her own program, Laura is always happy to share her knowledge about colleges. As she says, “There’s no competition among lighthouses.” She has a description for almost every college out there, which often includes a witty quip.
The weeks following Nimo’s acceptance pass like a dream. It seems like each day Harry and I will surprise a student with word that he or she has been accepted to college. Laura’s MasterCard program places students into Trinity College, Westminster College, and United States International University in Nairobi. My Doha visit pays off when the top humanities student in the school gets accepted to Georgetown. One student is headed to Michigan State and a couple more to EARTH University in Costa Rica. After every few acceptances, we make another announcement, and with each, Somaliland begins to embrace Abaarso. And why not? Embracing Abaarso is simply embracing their own children’s success. This is a clan society. Nimo and the others are their family.