The Hamilton Spectator
(Mar 13, 2007)
Now she's doing her best to save the people who lived through it -- and who are still suffering.
As civil war loomed on the horizon, her family escaped Somalia in 1988. Her father, a single parent, came to Canada, sending his daughters from Somalia to neighbouring Ethiopia until he could bring them to his new home.
They were separated for seven years, but at least all of them managed to escape Mogadishu, the Somali capital where the worst fighting of the civil war would bring conflict and devastation that has continued from 1991 to the present.
Those who didn't make it out before the government fell were left to fend for themselves in an anarchic brew of clan fighting, famine and failed international intervention. Few families were left untouched by sudden death and other horrors, including widespread rape.
Many survivors fled for the safety of neighbouring countries, with the greatest number escaping to Kenya. Eventually, the United Nations' refugee agency was able to establish a network of three refugee camps at Dadaab, on a remote, arid plain near the border with Somalia.
About 135,000 refugees settled there, subsisting on meagre rations and defending themselves from thieves trying to steal the very little they did have.
Between 2003 and late 2005, the Canadian government and the UN co-operated to take out about 400 of the most vulnerable of those refugees and settle them in Hamilton.
It was members of that group who taught Amal, now 23, what the war and the camps had been like.
After moving to Canada in 1995, Amal had lived in Kitchener before coming to Hamilton in 2002 to study at McMaster University.
Fluent in English and Somali, the psychology student started volunteering as a translator for the newcomers, and soon found herself hungry to know more and do more.
With funding from an experiential learning grant from McMaster, she went to Dadaab last summer, spending three eye-opening months as a volunteer.
She came home deeply humbled, with a new drive to do more to help the refugees.
"I was not able to sleep," she said. "I felt so helpless.
"They were so hopeless."
Since she returned to Canada, the situation at Dadaab has only worsened. The population has swollen to 170,000 -- the result of new fighting in Somalia and devastating floods in eastern Kenya.
Last autumn, Amal became a founder of the McMaster Somali Students Association (www.macssa.netfirms.com), representing about 30 Somali students on campus.
Their small group is trying to raise $10,000 to improve the lives of Dadaab's most vulnerable refugees.
"They're skeletons, lying there," Amal said. "It's not life, but it's not death."
As its first major project in the broader community, the Somali student group is presenting a program of speakers, poetry and drama March 24 at 6 p.m. in the atrium of the McMaster Student Centre, with the $10 admission charge going toward the refugee project.
[email protected] - 905-526-3254
Source: The Hamilton Spectator, Mar 13, 2007