Leaving

On page 4, Rageh Omar wrote the following:

"Until the early 1990s I had not thought of a life in London. My parents had never believed we would stay. They had left Somalia before the catastropes of war and fanine had descended on our country and so had not come to Britain as exiles but to send us to the English private schools to be educated in the skills that would help to build and renew post-colonial Somalia. It was temporary for them; it felt even more temporay for those who were forced to flee. I was at the tail end of the generation whose parents were convinced that their children would become part of a generation that would help lead Somalia towards the developed world. The civil war changed that."

This, I think, is neither the story of Rageh Omar alone nor that of the great number of Somalis leaving their country to whatever place or country on earth. This is the story of people from far and wide, especially in the third world or may be in what, out of compassion may be, is called developing world. Personally, I don't tink this is a developing world. The direction is, to some extent, to the other way.

Many of those who studied in the West and then came back to help develop their coutries simply, and put bluntly, regertted it. They find that no body is willing to listen to them and no body is open towards change. When I was at secondary school we had a teacher who spoke 8 languages. He was 45 years old. He had very smart kids and a nice family but still he regretted the day he decided to come beck from America.

Later on, and as I was starting the C.A.P.E.S training program and wanted to move from one governarate to the other in order to be able to pursue an MA degree, I was made to know by an official who had to sign a paper that I was not supposed to finish my MA- he himself tried 18 years ago but did not make it.

Some 3 months later, and as I was half-way through with my C.A.P.E.S training, the teacher trainer asked me, in very clear terms, to abandon my MA studies because it did not make sense to her to teach for some time at secondary schools and then to get a promotion and move on to work at the tertiary level.

The story does not stop there. I know a researcher who had to wait a whole year to get what he needed in the lab, and guess what he needed??!!! MICE!!!

Hard-working people like these, when they get the opportunity to study abroad, and work in an environment where the only criterion whereby a person is judged is his or her perseverance should no longer be looked at with mistrust or contempt when they do not come back.