By ADOW JUBAT
Sunday, January 12, 2014
KENYA: Many have lost hope in North Eastern, arguing there is nothing good that can come from the region. However, for Saadia Abduallahi Sheikh, 49, this has not been the case.
Saadia has defied lack of opportunity among her Somali womenfolk. She has succeeded in life after taking uncharted “terrain” in North Eastern region and studied Graphic Design, Textile, among others at the Kenya Textile Training College.
Her drive to join college and study was to empower women through acquiring hand-on skills. This, she argues, would not require huge capital to utilise skills acquired.
At the age of five her nomad father, the sole breadwinner died at Damajale, a remote village near the war ravaged Kenya-Somalia border.
The soft-spoken mother of three, two girls and a boy, experienced at first hand, the hardship exposed to many women in neglected region at a tender age. Her young mother struggled alone to place food on the table for the family of 12 children.
“Being the eldest daughter in my family, I was close to my mother and I saw her weeping uncontrollably several times in the kitchen after she returned home without anything to feed us on. She used to wash dishes for neighbours who again didn’t not pay her promptly,” she recalls.
Mother suffering
To ease her mother’s suffering, Saadia took the challenge of looking after the few camels left behind by her late father since her close relatives had disowned the family because the mother refused to be inherited according to the Somali culture.
“I learnt resilience from my mother. She was just 29 years old and she declined to succumb to strong cultural practices of being remarried by my father’s relatives. Her drive was to make a decent life for us despite our poverty and excommunication from the wider society”. She adds: “My elder brothers were forced to drop out of schools to take up herding of other peoples’ animals.” Saadia is now Programmes Coordinator, Hashash Weavers, a non-governmental organisation she founded 10 years ago.
The initiative is aimed at empowering girl child and pastoralist women in the region by providing them with free life-skills trainings. “Everyone all-over the world talks about women empowerment with millions of dollars spent, but nothing much seems forthcoming particularly in North Eastern region, which I blame on duplicated approaches taken by many donors, government agencies and both local and international NGOs,” she revealed during an interview at her regional office in Garissa town.
Her organisation, which has so far partnered with Garissa County in empowering local women through life-skills trainings, invites other counties in the region to follow the suit.
She says, as a young camel herder, she experienced the hard life as was faced by thousands of pastoralist women in the area. “My struggle as a camel herder at the age of five and the cries of my mother neglected by my society has not been in vain. In fact, camels indirectly inspired me to be strong and survive in hardship circumstances without complaining and instead emerge victorious,” she asserts.
She continues, “One day I took after the camels without having even a plain cup of tea. At first I cried and I hated my family for disowning all of us in totality for a single defiance action by my grieved mother. Then I remembered, among the camels, I was herding there was a calf orphaned like me. I looked for her and felt encouraged by the way she was joyfully learning to feed on grass.”
Saadia says unexpected turn of events struck her family when drought killed all the camels. This forced the mother to leave the village for Garissa town to look for menial jobs.
The girl remained behind in Dadaab village with her aging grandmother.“After our camels died in a quick succession, I saw my mother growing frail and at most times crying alone outside our hut at the wee hours of the day until her cheek bones were exposed,” she remembers.
Encouraged to study
“My mother despite being illiterate encouraged me to do well in my studies arguing that education was the only way to a better future for us. Through her personal initiatives, she enrolled me at Dadaab Primary School before she later moved me to Jaribu Primary School in Garissa town in 1979,” she explains.
She adds, “My mother wanted to have me closer to her to monitor my performance in school and to know my needs. And I never disappointed her. When I sat my KCPE in 1985 I scored good marks to allow me to join North-Eastern Province (NEP) Girls’ Secondary the only girls’ school in then the greater Garissa District, now Garissa County.”
Due to lack of fees to pursue her secondary education, Saadia opted to join the fledging North-Eastern Technical Training Institute (NEP TTI), which offered cheaper Tailoring and Secretarial certificate courses for school dropouts.
“Every evening my mother will go to distant bushes in the outskirts of the town, exposing herself to the dangers of then marauding shiftas (bandits) to collect firewood to supplement her little earnings from washing dishes, so that she could get enough money to cater for my fees and that of our daily needs,” she says. Saadia says as she was studying, lady luck smiled at her when an Islamic organisation, North-Eastern Muslim Welfare Society came to open a branch in Garissa in 1990’s to provide a humanitarian assistance to the drought-stricken pastoralist communities in the region.
Passed interview
“I went for an interview for the post of an office secretary and I was lucky to emerge the best and secured the job,” she says with a tinge of pride in her voice. But it was not an easy task for her since she was forced to joggle between her studies and the demanding job, making her to register as a private student so that she could have evening classes.
Her teachers supported her too, with then principal Bishar Mursal being her mentor. Saadia who got married to a military officer Rashid Abdi Elimi, now a colonel, says following the New York City terrorist attack, which was blamed on Al-Qaeda, she lost her job after all Muslim NGOs were closed.
She also acquired other trainings such as juice processing, leather and all sorts of detergent making.
These are the skills she is now offering to women for in Garissa County.
So far, about 60 women have been trained with support of Garissa County government.
They have learnt different skills on making fresh juice from the locally available fruits such as mangoes, pawpaw, lemon, banana and watermelon.
Source: Standard Digital