Country Girl

I look into the faces of many of my clients and it is clear to see how much they’ve suffered. It makes me feel awful. Sometimes I wait to cry until I get home so that they won’t see me. I often think about how these Somali people never would have gone through those terrible times if my brother hadn’t been assassinated. There may never have been a senseless civil war, or a mass exodus from Somalia, or people displaced to countries all over the world—so much upheaval, sadness, and longing for home.

I never knew my brother, Abdirashid Ali Shermarke. (He was my cousin, but in Somalia we call cousins “brother” and “sister.”) He was our second president since 1959—when Somalia gained independence from Italy—and a man of peace. He was murdered by a policeman on October 15, 1969, while visiting northern Somalia. This was about three years before I was born. His killer was hired by Major General Siad Barre, an army commander who took over the Somali government and ruled the country as its dictator for twenty-two bloody years. The man who killed Abdirashid was from our clan, so the crime wasn’t ethnically motivated. Siad Barre had my brother killed because he wanted all the power. After Abdirashid’s death, Barre ruled by setting the clans against one another. This allowed him to hold onto power, but also caused Somalia to unravel and eventually tear itself apart. We lived in Afgooye, a small, sheltered village on the outskirts of Mogadishu, and didn’t see violence until 1989. That was two years before the start of the civil war.

I was around eight years old when I learned about my brother the president, and I was shocked. American parents tend to tell their kids everything. But Somali parents keep some things secret from their children. One evening my father was talking to one of his cousins and I was eavesdropping from the next room. My father said Abdirashid had been the president of Somalia, but that he had only been in that position for two years.

The other guy said, “What happened to him after that?”

My father said someone killed him.

The man asked, “Was he bad; did he try to ruin his people?”

My father said, “He loved the people; he was a peaceful man, a good man with a good education, and he believed in his people having good educations.”

Like everyone else in the village, we were very poor. Sometimes we didn’t know what we would eat the next day. This was not how I imagined a president’s family would live. I popped into the room and shouted, “If my brother was the president of Somalia, why aren’t we rich?” I ran to my mother and asked her how it was possible for us to have a president in the family if we weren’t wealthy.

She said, “Because he believed everybody was equal, he didn’t believe in his people being rich unless the rest of the people were rich, too.”

My father, Yusuf Mussa, was a general practice doctor. He traveled to work wherever the government needed him to go, and divided the remainder of his time between my mother and his three other wives. I did not realize when I was a child that my father was actually middle-class. He had wives scattered around the country—one in Mogadishu, one in another state, one somewhere else. My mom, Awadeo Mussa, had seven boys and two girls. Another wife had ten children, another wife four, and the fourth wife two. So my father had a total of twenty-five kids; all of them would eventually escape Somalia.

We were his country family, left to fend for ourselves, living off only what we could produce. I believe that he cared about us and that he was a good father. He told us whenever we saw him that he would love to stay with us on the farm, but could not because of his work.

I rarely saw my parents together. I was jealous of the kids who could run to their fathers and say, “Oh, Daddy!” I missed my daddy very much. In hindsight, I should have been grateful for any time I was able to spend with him. When I was about nine years old he went to Germany for an operation that we hoped would save his life. He had bad diabetes, and they had to take his leg. But after he came home to Somalia, he died. I was left without my daddy, and we were left without any money at all.

 


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