When Ali Scego returned to Somalia after living in the United States for 32 years, he could barely recognize his house. Mortar shells and bullet holes radically remodeled it.
The Green River Community College coordinator left Somalia in 1981 on a student visa with the goal of getting an education in America and then returning to the America later with a college degree. As the nation slowly spiraled out of control, his plans were delayed until this last June, when he spent nine days in Mogadishu and six in Nairobi.
Scego, along with 150 other Somalis from throughout the world, returned to their homeland as advisors for the National Education Conference for Somalia to help the nation recover from almost two decades of strife and conflict.
“When we went there, you know the idea was having Somalian people solve Somalian issues” Scego said. “It was sponsored by UNESCO and UNICEF but they were there for technical assistance. Somalis were supposed to be coming up with solutions for Somalis.”
As the workforce program advisor at Green River Community College, Scego was asked to advise Somalia’s education minister Dr. Maryam Qaasim on ways to re-engage the Somali youth between 13 and 21 in school.
Civility has slightly returned to the war-torn African nation in the past seven years thanks to the help of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). The 17,000-member force has helped maintain the peace and stability necessary for a permanent federal government and is a coalition of soldiers from nations such as Sierra Leon, Burundi and Rwanda. That doesn’t mean that the area is completely safe. Scego was escorted by private security guards wherever he went in Mogadishu.
Scego’s professional experience focuses on vocational training at the high school and junior college level, so he joined the committee to help develop the Somali youth.
“During the civil war groups migrated and then you have a brain drain,” Scego said. “So even if you salvage some institution then you don’t have capacity or people to come work there.”
The goal, said Scego, was to get them away from the militias and into schools, but it was difficult to do when public institutions were in complete disarray, often being used as refugee camps.
The challenges that Scego and his team faced were twofold. To start, the team had to assess the problem that most Somali youth — a “lost generation” as Scego refers to them — had no education whatsoever.
“Those kids, the only thing they learned in the last 20 years was how to shoot,” Scego said.
The team’s suggestion was to start with a literacy survey for Somali youth to find out which ones would need to return to school to simply learn to read and write. For those that weren’t illiterate, Scego said that they would be referred to vocational and technical schools to start developing practical industry skills such as fishing, farming or manufacturing.
While the warlords and feudal governments of the past twenty years are in decline, the nation faces new challenges that any budding democratic system will face, including how to shape the laws and correctly demarcate territorial lines in the nation.
The government will undergo some reorganization in the next few months, Scego said, so he’s waiting to see how effective the conference’s plans will be. Scego said that the trip helped him refocus his efforts to act local, but think global.
“What I can do in Somalia may be limited, but there’s a lot I can do here by building the bridge between Somalian’s community here in Green River.”
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