It Takes a School: The Extraordinary Success Story That Is Changing a Nation

PROLOGUE

It is early summer 2011, near the end of our second year at the Abaarso School in Somaliland, Africa. The prolonged winter drought is well behind us, and the rainy season is in full effect, bringing with it the stacked pyramids of juicy watermelons and luscious mangoes for sale on the street corners of nearby Hargeisa. A good rainy season, when the desert blooms and the cattle get fatter, is always critical, but today the environment around me is little more than white noise to my mission at hand. My assistant headmaster has just ended our lengthy phone call with an alarming comment, delivered to me so casually that one might think it was a joke. Unfortunately, the absurdity we are dealing with is no comedy.

Oh yeah, Jon, Harry Lee had blurted out, I almost forgot to tell you, but there was a militia at the front gate. They came to kill you, but it’s cool now.

Harry and I have a wonderful working relationship. He is a twenty-four-year-old American with a Chinese father and white mother, and when he had taken the position at this educational dream project of mine—an English-language boarding school in Somaliland—he had thought he was going to be teaching math courses and maybe organizing the school’s basketball program. He quickly became my expert for just about everything—construction projects, water delivery schedules, program coordination, student life, and now security interface. He seems relaxed with telling me my life has been spared, probably because crisis management is our daily routine and in his mind this one is already behind us. If we are to succeed in this tiny breakaway republic, we have little time to waste. By all official definitions, Somaliland is still part of Somalia, but when a country has been in civil war for decades, national borders have little meaning, no matter what is official. Somaliland operates like there is no Somalia.

I had been walking down a hallway of the main school building when Harry reached me on my mobile. We are always working and often coordinating, and I usually have to take phone calls on the move. Today’s crisis, a gang of angry villagers climbing up to the school’s gate in an old vehicle, isn’t going to slow me down. I know who is behind it and I know he wants us Americans to leave, even though that would destroy the school. The indignation that I feel, that anyone would interfere with the education of these incredible, deserving children, is immediate. These interlopers haven’t struck fear. They have drawn my fury.

It’s not that I discount the risk and danger of being here. We regularly receive security alerts from the U.S. State Department and officials in the United Kingdom, including an urgent warning not long before this that a kidnapping was imminent. In fact, with the recent death of Osama bin Laden, foreign outposts are on highest alert, with retaliation being a huge possibility.

I have been working extremely hard at making the Abaarso School safe from attack. We have a perimeter wall and several guard towers, as well as a sizable security force. Who comprises the security team is in constant flux as we struggle to get it right. Some guards are described as SPUs, Special Protection Units; others are watchmen. The SPUs are police units provided by the government. These guys are armed with AK-47s and have some training, but they have the distinct attitude of working for the government, not us, which they tell us every time we catch them asleep on the job. The private guards or watchmen are usually civilians from the village, and they do not carry weapons. In addition to the sizable disadvantage of being unarmed, such security is more likely to side with the villagers than the school in local disputes, and, in fact, the troublemakers at our gate include some of this former security. Sometimes we have a combination of both kinds of security, but no matter what, the issue of loyalty is always part of the enthusiasm or lack thereof. There are usually eight to ten security personnel on duty, and thankfully, to date, there has not been any need to fire a weapon.

I am all too aware that serious harm or even death is a possibility. I am a non-Muslim, white American in a challenging landscape, which undoubtedly raises suspicions about my intentions. I am a target for many people—jihadists; those Somalia unionists against Somaliland’s secession; fired employees; and even those who view my high-quality school as a threat to their for-profit schools. In 2003, a British couple, both of them educators who had taught in one part of Africa or another for thirty years, was assassinated on the compound of the SOS Sheikh School about one hundred miles east of here. They were gunned down by Islamic extremists who stormed their house as they were watching television in their living room. Two weeks prior to this, the same group had murdered an Italian humanitarian worker. Now there are very few foreigners in Somaliland, and those present rarely interact with locals outside of high-level meetings in offices and hotels. Foreigners are a target, and then here I come, a native New Englander with a vision for making something great, a restless urgency to accomplish it, and no tolerance for anyone or anything blocking my progress. The very fact of my presence, not to mention my style, has already made me some enemies.

Harry had handled today’s showdown well. To their credit, the SPUs on duty did not let the gang of villagers in. As they all stood outside the gate talking, a student who had seen what was going on went to find Harry. As usual, Harry was brilliantly calm and controlled. First, he managed to find our head guard to ask him if the men had guns. No, no weapons, he was informed. Next, Harry peeked out the gate, where he saw a group of eight to ten men crouching in the hot sun, chewing the natural stimulant qat, which is widely used in East Africa.

The head guard spoke some English, so he could translate between Harry and the Somali-speaking band of intruders, which included Shamiis, the daft old lady from the village whose mouth was always green with qat. Harry’s approach was to be as friendly as possible, hoping it would soften the aggression. One of the men said over and over that they had come to kill me, but they would settle for me leaving the country. Harry wasn’t convinced they wanted to harm me, rather just threaten me. With recent events, he was pretty sure that the threat came from a personal enemy, not a more political group. Someone had put them up to this and he knew who it was. Harry concluded the group at the gate wasn’t up for much confrontation, either; chances were they’d received some qat as a payment for creating this disturbance.

It turns out Harry read them right. When the school’s call to Al Asr sounded, he gave them a way out by suggesting they meet again the following day, being pretty sure the group of villagers didn’t want to interfere with a religious obligation. He told them he would relay their threat to me, but he personally didn’t have the authority to make me leave the country or even come out now, and I was a stubborn guy, so I might be hard to convince. He was glad not to involve me, as I have a tendency to be righteous, which would only have escalated things and caused more harm than good. Go back to your village and think about it, he advised them, and they motioned a retreat. Whether Al Asr was the reason or not, they piled into their van and left.

Those behind these threats have no idea who they are dealing with. My time in Somaliland has transformed me into my own brand of extremism. The school’s success is my singular goal, and its failure my only fear. I rarely see my family, speak to friends, or think of anything else. Abaarso students have become my family, and their futures are now my reason for existence. I am never going to abandon Abaarso, not even with a threat on my life, because I can’t conceive of life if Abaarso fails. I am already 100 percent in.

PART ONE

BURNING MY SHIPS

Don’t look back. It is not where you’re going.

—ANONYMOUS

1

MY SOMALI UNCLE

My uncle Billeh’s story began in the village of Erigavo, an old highlands town thirty-eight miles from the Gulf of Aden in what was then the British Protectorate of Somaliland. His given name was Yusuf, but, like many Somalis, he was rarely referred to by his given name. Rather, he was known by a meaningful casual name, in his case Billeh, Somali for crescent moon. The crescent moon represented the new beginning of the lunar cycle, and a new beginning was how Billeh’s mother viewed his arrival. She had given birth to a half-dozen daughters before she gave birth to her first son.

Billeh was one of his mother’s nine children. His father had been in the Camel Corps, a legendary group of mounted police who kept order among the Somali clans on camelback. Billeh’s mother was his fourth wife. In this Islamic patriarchal society, polygamy was widespread. The religion allowed for up to four wives simultaneously, although Billeh’s father had only once been married to two women at the same time. There were advantages to an expansive family, as the number of wives a man had directly impacted the number of children, and children ultimately translated to a family’s power. Billeh’s father had fifteen children, who have multiplied to an extended family of more than two hundred.

Billeh was the first son to this wife, a revered position in Somali society. When he was born, clansmen came from far and wide to celebrate his birth, which, after six girls, was considered miraculous. Two more boys followed, but Billeh was the honored firstborn son.

Billeh did have a second part to his name—Osman—which was his father’s first name. Nobody had a family name in the American sense. Osman told people which father he came from and the rest of his name comes from his paternal lineage. The limitation on the number of names depends purely on how far back one remembers. For example, I might say, Mohamed is a tenacious little ball player. If someone asked me, Mohamed who? I could respond, Mohamed Saeed. Oh, you mean Mohamed Saeed Abokor, the one from Berbera. No, I’m talking about Mohamed Saeed Abdulkadir Hashi. Of course! Mohamed Saeed Abdulkadir Hashi Elmi Duale is a tenacious little ball player.

The longest name Billeh knew for himself was Yusuf Osman Abdi Mohamed Mohamud Ahmed Omer Deria Adan Mohamed Abulla Hamud Osman Saleh Musa Ismail Areh Said Garhagis Sheikh Isaaq Ben Ahmed. By Sheikh Isaaq we should be back six hundred years. Along the way, Billeh might have missed a few patriarchs, but he knew that somewhere around AD 1500, he came from Musa, who came from Ismail, who came from Yoonis, who came from Sheikh Isaaq. That’s how he knew he was from the Musa Ismail clan, which is a subclan of the Garhagis, which ultimately is a subclan of the Isaaq, one of the five original major Somali clan patriarchs.

In 1947, when Billeh was four, his father died, leaving his mother and all of her children to fend for themselves. He and his younger brother went to live with their eldest sister, who had a permanent house in Erigavo village. His mother and the other children settled at a little farm three miles outside of town, although, being nomads, they were often moving with the livestock. The following year, Billeh had his first go at education at a Quranic school for the youngest children in the area. These schools existed pretty much wherever there was a religious scholar willing to teach Arabic and the Quran, and Erigavo had a number of such schools.

The day Billeh’s mother signed him up, she came in from the farm and took him to a park, where a group of children and their parents were lined up in front of a man who was seated on a small folding chair. Billeh’s mother pointed to the children and told him that the man was an official from the government, and the reason he commanded such a crowd was he was offering the chance for an education. She said education brought with it respect and power, and Billeh would never regret being in school. She pushed him toward the end of the line, and the next thing he knew she was gone. He didn’t see her again for a long time. But he still credits his mother who, with that one push, changed the direction of his life. He says if not for her, he would be a nomad today.

After the Quranic school, Billeh went to a small public elementary school that taught English, Arabic, and other subjects. Somali was not yet a written language, so it could not be a language of instruction. Classes were held in a tent, as there was no proper school building. There was a small tuition, which Billeh had to earn. He made money by selling kidar, a round flatbread about the size of a palm and made of sorghum. His sister would get up each morning at four a.m. to make it, and then Billeh would sell it at the coffee shop next door before going to school.

In this area, public schooling went only to third grade. The few children who wanted to continue their education had to choose from a handful of intermediate schools spread around the country, but far from Erigavo. Billeh took a standardized test administered to all third graders across the country and gained admission to the most respected school in Somaliland, Sheikh Intermediate School, a British-run boarding school for boys, where only the top scorers were admitted. After his acceptance, Billeh had to figure out how to physically get there and how to pay the private school tuition. The only way there from Erigavo was to hitch a ride on a truck following a desert track to Burao, then make his way forty miles northwest to Sheikh.

For tuition, his mother made a great sacrifice and sold some of her livestock. She diminished her herd of sheep for the sake of Billeh’s education—it was that important to her. A first cousin of Billeh’s, married to an English woman and living in Durham, England, sometimes sent him twenty pounds sterling to help with school fees. That’s what Somali families did, they took care of each other. The clan support system was and still is the hallmark feature of Somali society.

The school had just opened when Billeh arrived. The teachers were former British army officers or Indian, a legacy of British colonial rule. After four years at the intermediate school, Billeh went to Sheikh Secondary School in the same town. With its elegant, two-story stone buildings in British colonial fashion, it was hailed as the most beautiful school from Berbera in Somaliland to Beitbridge in Zimbabwe, two thousand miles south. The headmaster, Mr. Richard R. Darlington, had been in Somaliland for years. He was a captain in the Somaliland battalion that saw action in Burma in World War II.

Billeh adored Mr. Darlington, who wore his glasses on the tip of his nose. The older kids didn’t relate to him much, but Billeh saw him as a father figure, in part because Billeh had lost his own father and in part because he appreciated how Mr. Darlington prepared him for the world. Mr. Darlington taught the kids etiquette, such as how to use a fork and knife. Somalis didn’t use utensils at home; everybody ate with their hands. Mr. Darlington wanted the students to know how to use silverware in case they went on to higher education outside the