From Somalia to the Senate, advocating aid

When Abass Mohamed '09 urged the Senate Appropriations Committee to send more food aid to refugee camps yesterday, he spoke not only as a concerned student, but also as a former Somalian refugee.

"Refugees are a different category of people," Mohamed said in an interview before he testified. "They are in a situation which is beyond their control."

When Mohamed was 10, civil war forced him and his family out of their hometown of Bu'alle, Somalia, and into exile in Kenya. In Somalia, the family was middle class and Mohamed's father worked for the government.

But in Kenya, the Mohameds lived in the Dadaab refugee camp in the country's northeast corner. During their first year in the camp, there was no school for Mohamed to attend: The refugees were focused on getting food and water. Most of Mohamed's extended family still lives in the camp.

The refugees in the Dadaab camp are unable to grow their own food because of the terrain and tight construction of the camp. Instead, the World Food Programme (WFP), a U.N. agency formed to fight hunger, distributes rations twice monthly. The United States is the largest donor to the WFP, funding between 40 and 50 percent of the program.

Speaking before the Appropriations Committee yesterday, Mohamed described his personal experiences with starvation, emphasizing the importance of food aid, especially school programs that give children extra meals. His younger sister, who still lives in Dadaab, is currently part of such a program.

Mohamed also urged the creation of training programs to help refugees with the transition they will face when they return to Somalia.

Other witnesses testifying before the committee included James Morris, the executive director of the WFP, and Mark Keenum, the under secretary for farm and foreign agricultural services at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Mohamed is "well known all over Kenya because he was such a spectacular success," WFP spokeswoman Jennifer Parmelee '80 said yesterday just after leaving the hearing.

A staffer in the subcommittee office said members first learned about Mohamed while on a fact-finding mission to Africa in October. "We were told about Abass ... about how he had a full scholarship to Princeton," she said. "As we were planning our hearing, we thought he would be a good person to testify." The staffer could not give her name because of Senate press policy.

Though "teachers were very few, resources were scarce," in his makeshift Dadaab school, Mohamed said, he sat for exams in English, chemistry, commerce and Swahili. His combined scores were the eighth best in Kenya for that year.

The next year, Howard Adelman –– father of history professor Jeremy Adelman and a Wilson School visiting professor at the time –– traveled to Kenya to conduct a study. While there, he met with Mohamed about the possibility of further education and later sent him a Princeton application.

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Ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) professor Jeanne Altmann, who was also conducting research in Kenya at the time, interviewed Mohamed and another student in Nairobi.

Altmann had intended the interview to be about the University in general, but the two students "had all of their application materials complete," she said. "I ended up carrying their application materials back [to Princeton] for them."

Upon graduating from secondary school, Mohamed began teaching at his high school before even applying to Princeton. The humanitarian organization CARE hired him to teach math and chemistry to the students who had just recently been his classmates.

Once Mohamed was accepted to Princeton, he had difficulty getting to the United States because his refugee status left him without a passport. He had to apply for travel documents from the United Nations.

Now 25 years old, Mohamed arrived at the University in the fall of 2005. "I came from a world of scarce to a world of plenty," he said. "It was like coming from one planet to another."

Kithinji Muriira '08, a friend of Mohamed's who is from Kenya, said that "it took [Mohamed] a while to adjust, but once he did, he was all over the place." At Princeton, he plays soccer with friends and works in Wilcox Dining Hall and Mendel Music Library. He plans to declare a major in EEB this spring.

Mohamed said he plans to return to Africa after graduation. "Eventually I'll be back home in Somalia helping in reconstructing that country," he said.