Farxan Abokor '23 Recruiting Profile

Being born in the countryside with no schools around and yet being hungry for education was not an easy thing for me to deal with. It became even more difficult coming from a family which valued herding livestock more than education. None of my 15 siblings, mother, and maternal grandmother ever attended school, not because they only lacked finance but because they also believed that education was pointless compared to herding livestock.

One afternoon, while shepherding our livestock, I met a person carrying a plastic bag filled with books. I did not know who he was, but he told me he came from Burao to visit his mother and he is looking for her house. 

After we had a little conversation, he realized that I am illiterate. However,  I mastered herding camels. He encouraged me to come to the village during the evenings to learn the basic foundations  of Math and Somali. After all day herding livestock, in the evenings I used to go straight to the village with no rest at all because I personally value education.

No matter the magnitude of the  risks that laid out there , I strived to meet my teacher regularly to obtain  education and instill more knowledge in my brain. Unfortunately, after two months my teacher went back to Burao-the second capital city of Somaliland. However, my hunger and passion for education drove me. 

 After countless tries, I was able to convince my mom to move us to the city. Unfortunately, I did not attend school yet because my family could not support me financially. However, my hunger and passion for education drove me  to reach out to as many schools as possible to ask for help and see whether they could offer me a position at their school. Unfortunately, most of the schools rejected my request for scholarships. This forced me to give up in the end because no one listened nor cared about my  concerns.

After a fruitless search for education sources my family's financial circumstances forced me to look for a job of any kind, and support the family. Unfortunately, I could not find any job at all.  I used to go to one of my neighbors to teach me a little English and Math.  After two years I started attending an American boarding School which was based on the main courses taught  in English. It was very challenging, but now after a lot of hard work, I have become fluent in English in which I communicated with my foreign teachers well.

By attending American boarding School, one of the best schools in the Horn of Africa did not only help me to be educated, but also it shaped my leadership as well. For instance,  I was elected as a Student Council in my first year of upper school, where I used to manage all the extracurricular activities. I held competitions for the entire school, and this was really a great opportunity for me to lead a group of people. On top of that, I had been  a Proctor for three years where I  supervised the daily campus clean-ups and led my classmates and other students by example. I help new students understand and speak English better, by pushing and keeping them speaking English even when they are in their dorms among their Somali friends. 

Finally, in the future, kindled by my experience and future responsibilities, I want to major in education to develop spaces for children who are experiencing what I have gone through. I am doing this because I know so many intelligent children that did not get any opportunities at all because of their families’ lack of finance. So attending college will push me toward my goals. Lately, after completing my education journey I will be back to my own country to build schools in the countryside, and educate intelligent children who have never been given any opportunity.