Great News Mashallah.....................

[Luq_Ganane]

City’s 1st Somali Bantu refugee to graduate


By Krista J. Stockman
The Journal Gazette


Cathie Rowand/The Journal Gazette
“When I came here I said, ‘You have a chance to learn something,’” says North Side senior Abdiaziz Moburuk, who tonight becomes the first Somali Bantu refugee in the city to graduate from high school.

Abdiaziz Moburuk will join 1,846 students graduating from Fort Wayne Community Schools this week when he walks across the stage at Memorial Coliseum tonight.

The event is a long way from Somalia, where he was born 21 years ago, and from the refugee camps in Kenya, where he spent 12 years of his life.

In the three years since he came to Fort Wayne, Moburuk has grown from a teenager who didn’t know what an elevator or a paycheck was to a married father of one preparing to study international studies at Manchester College in the fall.

When he receives his diploma tonight from North Side High School, it will not only be a milestone for him but for an entire community who came to the United States seeking a better life. Moburuk is the first of the Somali Bantu refugees in Fort Wayne to graduate from high school.


He is a quiet, unassuming student with a short beard and dark, almost black eyes. He is proud of what he has accomplished at North Side, and North Side is proud of him.

“It’s a celebration for us, too, because we work with a lot of refugee groups,” English as a Second Language teacher Maureen Reidenbach said.

“We’re thrilled for him because he’s the first one. We’re proud of him. We know his background, and we know how hard he’s worked. He committed and devoted himself to doing as well as he has done.”

Moburuk has no trouble recalling the day he and his family, including three other siblings now at North Side, came to Fort Wayne: It was March 12, 2004, just a day after he arrived in the United States and a week after his family was notified that they had been accepted into the country.

He was 18 when he arrived in Fort Wayne, a dozen years since his family fled Somalia when he was just 6?years old.

“I was young. There was fighting,” he said, his accent instantly giving away that he comes from somewhere far from the Midwest.

He doesn’t remember much about Somalia, but he knows his family had to leave. For nearly 15 years, the country on the eastern side of Africa was the site of fighting between warring clans. Thousands of Somali Bantus fled their homeland where they were a persecuted minority.

They escaped to refugee camps in Kenya, where life wasn’t great, Moburuk said.

“There was jobs, but not like good jobs,” he said. “My people used to go to the forest and cut the trees and build the houses.”

But in the forest, there were people with guns. Food was scarce. And there wasn’t enough security, Moburuk said.

He is quiet when he talks about the fighting and the danger in Somalia and Kenya. Images of people being killed, including his friend’s father, will never leave his mind, he said.

Moburuk went to school, but he didn’t learn much, he said. The headmaster hired his friends and relatives, and they weren’t skilled as teachers, he said.

It was much different than his experience at North Side.

“We used to sit on the floor,” Moburuk said. “The teachers were not good teachers. If you ask them a question, they would say, ‘Don’t ask me,’ because they don’t know.”

In 2002, the Moburuk family moved to a different refugee camp in Kenya, but some of the same problems persisted, he said. The family had corn and oil, but no way to cook the food unless they traded food for charcoal with those living in the nearby forests.

His family didn’t have much money, so he had to work. One of his first jobs was to transport people on a bicycle. Later, he worked teaching young children.

When he arrived in Fort Wayne, there was much he didn’t know. He knew little English. And he laughs when he recalls how he didn’t know how an elevator works or that his paycheck was worth money.

“The first year (in school) was too hard for me, even the math class,” Moburuk said. “I got F’s.”

His second year he did better, getting B’s and C’s. And by his third year he was doing well, even taking an Advanced Placement math class for a while. He dropped the class because he got married and his wife had a baby. Taking care of his daughter and getting his school work done proved to be too much at times.

Even during the times he struggled the most, however, he knew he couldn’t quit.

“When I was in Africa, my people, they don’t know education,” Moburuk said. “I saw how education was important. I’ve seen how the teachers were. They didn’t know how to teach. I just told myself you should learn better than them.

“When I came here I said, ‘You have a chance to learn something. You have to learn something right now.’?”

Reidenbach said Moburuk’s appreciation of education is different from that of many of his American peers.

“He knows what it’s like to not have the opportunity,” she said. “He knows what it’s like to have the opportunity for an education and the life that an education can give you. He intends not to waste any of that.”

This fall, Moburuk will start classes at Manchester College. His wife, Hindiyo Hassan, will continue at North Side, where she just finished her sophomore year. When he finishes at Manchester, Moburuk hopes he can work with new immigrants and refugees and help them adjust to the new world where they are living.

kstockman@jg.net

Source: Journal Gazette, June 06, 2007

[Warya_dude]

Like it is something special for a Somali Bantu to graduate?



21 and just graduated high school?

You racist piece of shit!

[Luq_Ganane]

LMAO. Nacas yahow, look at the title. It said "First Somali Bantu in the CITY to graduate". Its obvious your reading comprehension is at an alarmingly low level. Xayawan Waxid.

[Naaima]

Salam alaikum

mashalah our brother doing such good work ..pftt STOP CALLING THEM BANTU, somali are somali

[Dhaga Bacayl]

We’re talking about this people like they’re NOT supposed to be here.

Graduating from high school is expected of them and go further in life.

Naima,

Calling them Bantu isn’t an insult. That is her ethnic and they embrace that.

[*HannaH*]

Who gives a damn about Bantu people. I use to feel sorry for them , but they hate us with a passion. Plus they are some arrogant a-holes.

[AbdiWahab252]

Bantu produced some of the most educated Somalis ever.

Plus they are the ONLY Somali qabiil that selects highly educated men to lead them.