by Pamela D. Knudson
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| Somali students Fardosa Ahmed (left), Mahad Sanweyne and Sara Gabere |
“In the back of my mind, I consider myself a trailblazer,” says
Fardosa Ahmed, a junior in the Clinical Laboratory Science (CLS) Program at the UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “I’m doing this not just for me, but for my family and my community.”
Ahmed is one of 20 Somali students pursuing bachelor’s degrees in clinical laboratory science at UND. Most have come from Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN, but their journey really began a half a world away, in East Africa.
From her native Somalia, Ahmed moved as a child with her family to Kenya and, later, to the United States, where she settled first in San Diego, CA, and later in the Twin Cities. She and other Somali students tell a similar story of fleeing their homeland in the early 1990s when their country was embroiled in civil war.
In 1991, “people fled Somalia to many other places,” says Ahmed, who was only six when she and her family resettled in Kenya. In 2001, she went to live with relatives in California.
But friends in the Twin Cities kept urging her to come to Minnesota where “they promised a good life,” she recalls, so she ventured to another new area, the Upper Midwest. Today, she is grateful to them, she says, although she found cold weather “is a challenge” and she’s “very homesick.”
Sara Gabere was only five years old when her family fled Somalia for a new life in Ethiopia. After high school, she moved to Sacramento, CA, where she studied at Sierra College, the first of many schools she’s attended, and later moved to Minneapolis.
At the University of Minnesota, when she applied too late to enter the CLS program there this past year, a counselor recommended other good programs she might consider.
“She said UND’s was the best program,” Gabere recalls.
She and Ahmed decided to visit UND, and talk with Ruth Paur, Ph.D. (MSMT ’93), director of the CLS program, who “really analyzed” the students’ situation “in a good way,” Ahmed recalls.
“She helped me to see that I’d be able to do it. I felt more comfortable; I felt at home… I felt welcome to attend.”
Mahad Sanweyne, a native of Somalia who lived in Uganda before coming to the U.S. in 2004, was also planning to attend the University of Minnesota when “somebody special to me found out about UND and advised me to come here,” he says. He did, and he’s happy with his decision.
