Joy mixed with sadness on return visit to homeland

SALAH Abdisamad, who has worked with SASCA on various projects, recently returned to Somalia to help set up youth and community initiatives.

Salah, who is an associate lecturer at MMU, here recounts his experiences:

At Kismayo, a relatively peaceful town, I had mixed emotions about returning after 27 years, happy in one way and sad in another. Happy that I was able to go back to the city of my birth and visit my old neighbourhood and see some childhood friends after all this years. But also sad to see the devastating consequences the 21-year-old civil war had on the city and the people.

Somalia has just come out of a civil war that went on for more than two decades and as a result needs a huge reconstruction effort including peace and reconciliation, education, health and livelihood programmes, to mention a few - work that only developed countries and organisations with the biggest resources can tackle.

After talking to the local people and the leaders of the regional government in Somalia, some of whom are school friends of mine, I think the following programmes are the most needed:

 Poverty reduction programmes –short and long term

 Health and nutrition programmes –Immediate, medium and long term

 Education – general primary education and children with special educational need

 Livelihood programmes – long term

 Youth empowerment – including de-radicalisation programmes

 Capacity building – for the local institutions and civil society in general

 Empowering women – including campaigns to end female genital mutilation (FGM)

Even then it won’t be easy. While in Kismayo, my colleagues in Manchester and I managed to set up a football team