Country Girl

I recall my childhood as being somewhat happy, but mostly it was not. We didn’t have bicycles or playgrounds, we didn’t have anything—just the neighborhood kids to play hide-and-seek with. And I was always afraid of being killed by animals. My mother would often tell me, Go out and play, but I was scared because sometimes cheetahs wandered into the village and ate children.

Our school was a small wooden structure with four rooms and a corrugated tin roof. It was a long walk, three miles from home, and crowded with children from surrounding villages. We learned to read and write Somali, but there was no science or learning about the outside world. I think this is one reason Somalis turned to clan violence; we trusted stereotypes because we were ignorant of other peoples.

Our life on the farm was tough. We didn’t have electricity, and, for food, we had only what we could produce. We grew corn and bananas; we also raised cows, camels, chickens, lambs, and goats. Our meals were almost always just meat, no fruits or vegetables. We couldn’t do better on the farm because there was no equipment to till the soil.

But we country girls in Somalia had more to worry about than hunger. When we turned six we had to submit to circumcision. It was very painful and the girls didn’t like it and they didn’t want it. But the elders in the village said they must do this to us to ensure that we remained virgins, or else no man would marry us. If you are open when you get married, your husband will say, I don’t want this lady because someone has been using her.

It was especially tough for the girls in my village because by tradition we were all supposed to get the worst kind of circumcision, the one where they cut out the whole outer vagina and sew it shut. The midwives who carried out the procedure used razor blades, scissors, knives, or pieces of sharp glass. Then, when you get married, you have to get it reopened. Some men don’t want this done at the hospital. They want to open it themselves because they think then they are heroes.

I remember my older sister’s suffering. They sewed her up leaving an opening only large enough to pass blood and urine. She couldn’t walk for a month or even close her legs, and it was very painful for her to pee. She couldn’t stay still and the stitches came out, and when they sewed her again she got infected.

I think my sister’s trauma reminded my mother of how painful it was for her when she got married. So I was fortunate because even though my mom decided to have me circumcised, there are three kinds, and I got the one where there was a small cut but no stitches. After what happened to my sister, my mom didn’t want to do the same to me. But my auntie, she pushed her, and my mother decided I should have it done out of respect for the family.

I’d love for my children to understand the hard life of the village, but I wouldn’t want them to have to live that way. It was harder than they’ll ever know. I feel good that I’ve been able to provide them with a different, better life—most importantly, good education. The schools here have electricity, and tutoring if the students have trouble. They have everything they need. But in my country there is no access to these things.

One morning, around my twelfth year, I learned to fear men as well as wild animals. When we found my cousin Shamso’s body propped against the front door of her house, we were both terrified and mystified. There were only about a hundred people in the village and everybody knew one another. Who could have done something like this? Shamso was only thirty-two years old, four months pregnant, with a two-year-old child, and was completely innocent. She had been raped and strangled.

At first, the police thought Shamso’s husband had killed her. But after an investigation he was found innocent. In my village we received very little information about the rest of the country. We had not heard that women had already become targets of clan warfare in other parts of Somalia. We still don’t know who did it, but after so many similar murders that would occur in coming months, we at least understood why she was killed: This was a hate crime, ethnic violence. She was killed by members of the Hawiye clan because she was a member of my tribe, the Darood.

I couldn’t understand what the problem was between the Hawiye and the Darood. We were all poor people trying to survive in a poor country. It seemed the Hawiye were killing for no reason. I thought they just hated our color and our clan; they killed especially light-skinned people. Elders in the village said that the Hawiye thought we were beneath them. I didn’t understand at the time that President Siad Barre was a member of the Darood clan and had been antagonizing and massacring Hawiye people for many years, and that the Hawiye were out for revenge. I was just a kid. I was not political. It made no sense to me at all.

After Shamso was killed, more and more girls turned up raped and murdered. In the beginning they did not go after the boys, and the girls they hunted kept getting younger and younger. By the time I was around fourteen they were going after girls my age and my mother was sick with concern.

One of my cousins, Layla Mussa, was the same age when some Hawiye men came looking for her. Her mother saw them coming and hid her under a blanket in a corner. They broke into the house: “Where is she? Where is she?” My aunt told them her daughter had run away. By some miracle they believed her and left.

But it was only a matter of time before they would come back for Layla, and before they would come for me. It was 1991, just months before the outbreak of civil war. Layla and I would have to leave Somalia or die, for no other reason than because we are Darood.

My mother told me, “I’m worried because life here is not safe for you. Every morning when I wake up I thank god you’re still alive. I don’t want anything bad to come to you. So you need to go out of the country.” She called one of her cousins who had been living in Italy for a long time and arranged to have me go live in Rome.

My mother then called her brother and said, “Please, give me money. My daughter, I don’t want her killed.” My uncle owned three pharmacies, and he had money. When he heard my cousin had died he agreed to send me to live in Europe.

I was, of course, very scared about leaving the village. I was very naïve. I had never even ridden in a car before. My mother and I took a semi-truck into Mogadishu. We sat on the floor in back; there were no seats. Here they use those trucks for cattle, but there they put people in them. When I got to the city I looked everywhere with wide eyes. Everything was shocking to me. In the village I never saw a car, never saw electric lights, never saw anything. But in the city I suddenly saw everything.

When I got on the airplane I was so afraid; I couldn’t eat. I was worried we were going to crash. I traveled with a friend of my mother’s who was going to Italy on business. My mom asked him to watch me all the way to the house I was staying at in Rome. It was an eight-hour flight but I didn’t even use the bathroom because I didn’t want anything to go wrong.

When I got to Italy I had another big surprise. I got to the train and I said, “Oh my goodness. What is this? It’s not a car, it’s not an airplane.” There are no trains in Somalia. Once again I had to swallow my fear, and I am happy that I got on that train because it took me to a place that seemed like paradise, a place where the rest of my life was made possible.

Soon after I left home the civil war broke out and my mother was desperate for money, for food and supplies. All of the hatred Siad Barre had stirred up between the clans finally brought him down. In January 1991, he fled Somalia and left behind a country that was ready to destroy itself. Groups like United Somali Congress, Somali National Movement, Somali Salvation Alliance, Somali Patriot Movement, and Somali Salvation Democratic Front—they formed along regional and clan lines, and they all began fighting one another for control of the land. All of this conflict disrupted food production and distribution, and hundreds of thousands of people, including my mother, were at risk of starvation.

Today Layla lives in Europe. Even now if we went back to Somalia we would probably be killed. We have a situation there very much like the genocide in Rwanda, where one people so hated other people that the violence got out of control and could not be stopped. Hundred of thousands of Somalis have been killed by fighting and famine in the past fifteen years, and millions more displaced.