"Scholarship" للاجئ صومالى، مدعاة فخر للسودانين أم باعث للتساؤلات!!

Quote: Among the wooden shacks and corrugated tin huts that line the dusty streets of Dadaab, shops peddle all manner of electronic goods and services. In one of these huts, a young man sits at a computer updating his Facebook status and keeping on top of his emails. Moulid Iftn Hujale is getting ready to leave Dadaab for the first time since he came from Somalia in 1999. He recently won a scholarship to study journalism in Khartoum, Sudan but it has been a long struggle. His arrival in the camp was one of the lowest points in his life. "Our father died of a prolonged sickness, we could not take him to hospital, we fled from where we lived and were separated from our mother." Arriving at the camp without his parents he faced stigma from people who assumed he and his siblings were orphans or abandoned children, born out of wedlock. "But there we found peace, there was no gunfire and there was some sort of tranquillity," he says. He was able to go to school and focused his energy on his studies. Three years later his mother made it to the camp. It was a dramatic moment, he remembers. "My younger sister came to me in the school. I could tell that she had good news and immediately I saw my mother running through the main gate." "My mum's tears were like water flooding and made my uniform wet." Walking around the school where he spent his childhood he points to the trees under which classes were held. "When it rained we could not learn under these trees.. We used to go home." Now there is a huge tent to shelter children in the rain. Mr Hujale is one of the few to head to university from Dadaab, but even with his good fortune the reality of being a refugee sometimes dawns on him. "Living in Dadaab you can never forget that you will always be defined as a refugee," he says. "If you are a degree-holder and living as a refugee in the camp, you can't get a job outside because you are a refugee. If you work in the camp you get paid very little money. It cripples our potential."