It Takes a School Read online

  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 country.

  Top graduates of the Sheikh Secondary School were being admitted to universities in England on full scholarships. However, during Billeh’s third year, in 1960, Somaliland gained independence and the British left the country. Fortunately for Billeh and his classmates, USAID (United States Agency for International Development) stepped in and offered them scholarships to American colleges.

  Thirteen students from Billeh’s graduating class matriculated to American universities, and he was one of them. No kid from Sheikh School had ever gone to college in the United States, so this class had an extraordinary opportunity. Billeh had never been out of the country, let alone on a plane. The honor of being one of the chosen few was a huge deal in Erigavo. Billeh had gone from nomad to scholar and, in so doing, elevated the status of his mother, too. She was no longer viewed as simply a nomad; she was now the mother of an educated young man who had made it to the United States.

  Billeh went first to Kent State in Ohio, then transferred to Boston University, where he met Marjorie Starr, an American woman from Worcester, Massachusetts. A contingency for his educational subsidy was that he return to Somalia after graduation to work for a year, which he did. He then returned to the United States to complete a master’s degree in political science at Syracuse University. That’s when he married Marjorie, who had a brother, Alan. Alan married a woman named Susan, who gave birth to me.

  2

  SOMALILAND ROOTS

  Billeh and his family lived in Brooklyn, New York, and although I grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, several hours away, our families were always together on holidays. He called me “Señor” for as long as I can remember, which even as a little kid made me feel special despite having no idea what it meant. I just knew he liked me by the way he said it, and that I was the only nephew with that title. In the summer, we’d often vacation with Billeh and his family, too. My mother and her sister-in-law, Marjorie, would rent various houses in different New England spots. In ninth grade, my parents got divorced, but the two women continued the tradition, even though my father no longer came. By my late teens, the rental was always a modest shared cottage in the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts.

  Back then, I could kick back and relax, so these were wonderful times. While I swam, canoed, and husked corn, Uncle Billeh would stand on the dock fishing for hours at a time. Sometimes I’d see him smiling as he fed fish out of his hand. At the end of the day, I’d realize that he never actually caught anything to keep. He was such a gentle soul that everything would be released, and for all I know he had bait but no hook, just feeding them by line. Nights would often be spent playing his favorite Somali card game, which quickly turned into my favorite, too. The game was complicated, bizarrely based on 187 points, and a player could be your ally one minute and your enemy the next. My mother’s twin brother, Eli, often joined us, with the three of us locked in intense battles. At the end of one game, Eli complained that Billeh handed me the win with poor play. The complaint was fair—he had definitely handed me the game, which otherwise would have gone to Eli. But it wasn’t poor play. I was family and a Somali man takes care of his family.

  Everybody knew that Billeh worked for the United Nations, but we didn’t actually know what he did there. When asked, he would say that he “deployed his experts to the field,” but nobody had any idea who these experts were, what they did, or where this field was. I once went to a party for his promotion to a P5, but that didn’t explain much, either, nor did Billeh help. “What does it mean to be a P5?” was answered by, “I’m no longer a P4 and am now one step below a D1.” A Somali American who worked a mysterious job might sound like a CIA agent, but anyone who knew Billeh knew that this was not possible. He just led a quiet private life.

  It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I learned more about Uncle Billeh’s birth country. I was at a summer party in the Berkshires hosted by one of his UN colleagues, and the guests were talking about Somaliland. While the hostess knew it well, she and Billeh seemed to be the only two who did. Somaliland definitely needed explaining, even to those people worldly enough to know Somalia. Apparently, it held its own separate democratic elections, yet it was still considered an autonomous region in northwest Somalia. Billeh lamented that his peaceful country wasn’t being recognized as an independent nation. Without this international recognition, Somaliland suffered economically, unable to secure international loans, have a seat at the trade table, or attract foreign private investment. This left the people in poverty and the education system in havoc. The days of potential scholars being prepare
d for global education were over. Someone like Billeh would not have access to proper schooling and would therefore be unable to launch to a university-level education overseas.

  To those at the party, Somaliland’s problem was as simple as having the wrong name. If Somaliland wanted to be considered separate from Somalia, a country defined by international media coverage of the Black Hawk Down fiasco, which generated a book and a major motion picture, then you didn’t use the same first six letters “S-O-M-A-L-I.” It was hard to deny this branding issue, but I left that night with a different thought. Before the party, Billeh had been my gentle, intensely private uncle. Now that I saw how the hostess, Billeh’s old colleague, looked at him and treated him, I viewed him in a new light. She had such great respect for Billeh and his potential role in improving his country’s prospects that I saw him in greater depth, now recognizing this whole other “world-player” side to him.

  In the following decade, while my personal career ambitions consumed my focus, my uncle’s dreams for the people of Somaliland were never far away.

  3

  FROM HEDGE FUND MANAGER TO HEADMASTER

  On the outside, I looked nothing like a hedge fund manager. My wardrobe was from Target, and it wasn’t that long ago that I replaced my used car, which was valued at less than my junior partner’s Bugaboo baby stroller. I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and even though my apartment was in a renovated Victorian not far from Harvard Square, it was a one-bedroom rental. I’m not denying, however, that it was a major upgrade from the basement apartment I had recently shared with a roommate, which had the entire building’s plumbing alerting me when anyone flushed.

  Before I was my own boss, I worked for a hedge fund in New York City. There was a dress code, and I did my best to comply, but I often took off my shoes and went barefoot in the office to be more comfortable. The bosses accommodated me because my ideas were also different, and they liked those. Once I had my own fund, I frequently went to the office in sweatpants and a T-shirt.

  I became a hedge fund manager because I was highly ambitious and I loved analytical pursuits. I joined the investment world right out of college, knowing how much I enjoyed solving investment puzzles that required my brain. I looked at complex situations and then broke them down to their essence. Much of my childhood had been a quest for complexity—baseball stats, tactical video games, board games, and inventing my own entertainment because the board games weren’t complicated enough. Before I’d entered college, I had created and marketed an analysis of the top high school basketball players in the country. Analyzing a player’s prospects was an exercise in breaking down a series of complex factors. Naturally, I loved it.

  I went to college at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where I majored in economics and took a few finance and accounting classes at Emory’s business school. Economic concepts came easily, and the finance concepts even more easily, so when a few internships introduced me to the world of banking and investments, I was completely sold. I’d get to use my brain analyzing the most complicated situations; the money would be a scorecard; and if I made enough, then maybe I could stop feeling pain at the prospect of splurging a dollar for a candy bar.

  By twenty-seven, I was running my own investment firm, Flagg Street Capital, named for my beloved elementary school. I was in Stockholm, Sweden, talking to a room full of potential investors when one asked me, “You’re bright and enterprising. What will you do when you get bored with this?” Such a question presumed a success I didn’t at all take for granted, which perhaps threw me off. I answered without thinking. “I will help start a new country in Africa.” This generated more laughter than dollars.

  Now, at thirty-two, I was nowhere near as wealthy as my hedge fund friends, but my savings allowed plenty of opportunities for enjoying my life. By most standards I was a huge success, but in my judgment I was a failure. I’d expected to become one of the elite performers on Wall Street, the next Warren Buffett, but undeniably I was not. I had my clear strengths in analysis, but I also had weaknesses. Sometimes, I allowed emotions to infringe on decisions. The hedge fund industry was an ultracompetitive world of intellectual superstars, many of whom had and most likely would continue to surpass me. I had not become the best, and the money was no consolation.

  I decided to close Flagg Street Capital, give back all our investors’ money, and put my talents to a different use. The years since college had done nothing to lessen my ambition and ease my need to create something truly special.

  How cliché is the story of the successful businessman who makes a lot of money, feels guilty, and suddenly grows a charitable heart? Well, that wasn’t me in any respect. I didn’t feel guilty; I was just unsatisfied with my meager accomplishments. Nor did I suddenly grow a heart. My mother had instilled in me a large one. For better or for worse, I was endowed with an often-painful weight of empathy. I’ve felt it for as long as I can remember, and I’m sure that’s because it started in my early childhood. In fact, I trace it to the most influential events of my life, which actually took place before I was born.

  My mother grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, with her two brothers as well as her parents, Ethel and Irving Dunn. Ethel was one of six children, along with Mae, Annie, Max, Henry, and Eva. While I would never meet any of them, they defined my childhood. In 1964, twelve years before I was born, Irving Dunn, her father, died of a heart attack. Four months later, my mother finished her piano recital to find that her mother, Ethel, had died while she was playing. Thus my mother was orphaned at sixteen.

  In the years that followed, Mom’s aunts and uncles died off in rapid succession. A story my mother told me when I was young summed it all up pretty well. Just a handful of years after being orphaned, she was studying at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, the town where she would meet and eventually marry my father. She was at my father’s house one night during their courtship when she was told her brother Bill was on the phone. She picked up the phone, terrified. Bill started the conversation with “Don’t worry, it is only Uncle Max.” Only Max! As in, this time it was only Max who died. He was an uncle whom my mother truly loved. But Bill wasn’t being cruel. His saying, “It is only Max,” was because he didn’t want her to think that something had happened to their brother, Eli.

  Then there were the letters. My mom wrote letters to my older sister, Beth, and to me, so if she suddenly died, we wouldn’t be left without a good-bye from her. We wouldn’t be fated to the sadness she still bore decades later after so many sudden deaths with no good-byes. Unfortunately, she told us about the letters when I was still very young. She believed if she were to die, these letters would be comforting. But I was a child, and this was a real miscalculation. I didn’t want to think about a letter if she died, because that made me think about her dying. Even as a child I’m sure I saw that the letters were an expression of my mother’s own pain.

  To the young son who saw his mom cry for loved ones, the heartbreak of her losses caused a permanent scar that’s still as sensitive as an open wound. I can barely stand to write the story even now. The world has so much death and loss and pain and sadness. At the same time, the world has people like my mother, who balanced her heartbreak with an optimism she shared with me and with others lucky enough to know her. She is driven by heart—damaged no doubt, but also 100 percent committed to live to her fullest, even if that means risking more pain. More than anything else, even in my youth I realized that my mother was vulnerable, people were vulnerable, and the more vulnerable, the more human they were to me. When I see their vulnerability, I project my own fears for them; I project their sadness.

  With Flagg Street Capital closed down and nothing holding me back, I wanted a project that satisfied my ambition and engaged my empathy. Somaliland was never far from my mind; and in its postwar condition, it certainly needed help. So I called my uncle Billeh.

  We decided to take a two-week trip to his homeland. There we met people he knew, and I committed to starting a gr
eat school to develop the future leaders of the country. It was an ambitious goal but also one in which I’d be helping children who desperately needed an opportunity.

  It is not lost on me now that helping needy teenage kids, many of whom have suffered terrible tragedies, was an expression of the sad little boy in me trying to help his own orphaned mom.

  4

  MODERN-DAY NOMAD

  Forty years after Billeh attended Sheikh Secondary School, and forty years after Somaliland gained independence from England and merged with Italian Somalia to form the Somali Democratic Republic, a boy named Mubarik Mohamoud was running away from his nomadic lifestyle and would soon enter my life. Many parts of the world had seen enormous progress, men had walked on the moon, and computers were now in nearly every American household, but the region where Mubarik lived had been static for centuries.

  Mubarik rarely encountered people outside of his own nomadic tribe, so he knew nothing of progress. He was born in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia. While Ethiopian by name and national border, inhabitants of this territory consider themselves to be Somali, even if they’ve never set foot outside Ethiopia. He knew nothing about electricity, technology, or space exploration. He didn’t know that Somalia went through a military coup and that Somaliland was now fighting to regain its independence. What he knew was herding.

  By the time he was five, Mubarik was already shepherding the family’s one hundred goats. His job was to graze the goats while keeping predators away. The idea was to run and shout at any animal that approached. When he got older, he was entrusted to graze the camels. He once had a close call with a cheetah, but when the encounter was over, he had scared the cheetah more than the cheetah had scared him. From sunrise till dark, he ran and jogged with the herd, developing a stamina for long-distance running, which would turn into a pastime. On the rare occasion that he saw a truck crossing the desert, he thought it was some kind of animal running quickly. He could hear it coming from miles away, and he could see people riding on it. He immediately assumed it must be some sort of high-speed camel. Camel … truck … same animal. Why don’t we have one of those? he thought to himself. He’d see them only occasionally, and each sighting left him in awe. Eventually, he learned that these were man-made vehicles going places. He started to wonder where they were going and where else there was to go that he hadn’t yet discovered.