women-from-somalia

"I came from a culture where women didn’t work so to watch this young woman finish university and get a job at the ATO was inspirational. I wanted to be exactly like her."

"The process I used to memorise the Koran in the village where I was born, was exactly the same as the process of software programming that I used when I was at Latrobe University."

"My mother was pregnant every year, or she had a baby. In the end, she had 16 children."

"The village where I was born was very desolate, dusty, we had water in the wells."

"When I’ve had setbacks, I’ve always been able to put them in perspective. I always make sure no matter what that I am on top of my brief and I understand my space. But I do want to see things change to a point where women can genuinely play on a level playing field to men."

"It is crucial that a board be made up of people whose thinking is informed by different experiences, backgrounds, and areas of expertise, this diversity allows the board to help the business to come up with better strategies, to ask better questions and to better reflect the diversity of its customers."

"I had one programming elective and I fell in love with it. A lecturer at the university said you’re obviously good at programming, just follow your passion."

"Addressing gender-based violence should be the rule and not the exception."

"[W]e should focus not only on ending all forms of violence and discrimination against women and girls in Kenya, but on being proactive about making the country a more just society for all."

"We have seen that more proactive actions from state actors happen when the country’s leader steps up and declares action against gender-based violence."

"They have created a man – no, a Frankenstein’s monster – and branded it with his name before setting it loose."

"....the weapons were pens, books, chalks and blackboards, the heroes simple teachers."

"Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say."

"It is the kind of place where human skeletons might sink into the soil undisturbed and unmourned."

"In her orchard the trees had been born from deaths; they marked and grew from the remains of the children that passed through her. She never picked the fruit that fell from them, believing it a kind of cannibalism, but out of those soft, unshaped figures had grown tall, strong, tough-barked trees that blossomed and called birds to their branches and clambered out over the orchard walls to the world beyond."

"In the centre of the city where the alleys narrow at points to the width of a man’s shoulder blades, you can walk as if in a dream, never certain of what might appear after the next bend:..."

"The place has enchantment, mystery, it moves backward and forward in time with every turn of the feet; it is fitting that it lies beside an ocean over which its soul can breathe, rather than being hemmed in by mountains like a jinn in a bottle."

"Standing there, shoulders sagging, in the Law Courts, in Cardiff, in Bilad al-Welsh, he feels the blows of their lies like a man shot with arrows."

"They're doing this because they haven't broken me. If I had lost my mind and sat weeping in my own shit, maybe then they'd be happy to send me to a madhouse like they did with Khaireh."

"....I stand and claim my innocence so they have to finish me to protect themselves. Their lies and evil end with me."

"They say we got you by the balls, darkie! We own your land, your trains, your riv­ers, your schools, the coffee grains at the bottom of your cup. You see what they do to the Mau Mau and all the Kikuyu in Kenya? Lock them up, man and child."

"...look around you, this is the jungle, you got bushes and trees everywhere, in my country nothing grows."

"You are a perpetual motion machine."

"This shop is my life, and if I had just sold it in '48 what good would that have done? A widow, a spinster, and a little girl, jumping from home to home and job to job."

"They walked so I could run, and I will run so that the next generation of Somalis can soar."

"[In Somalia] it’s considered weak or even ungrateful to ‘complain’ or speak of the trauma that one has encountered."

"Instead, people are encouraged to be thankful to have survived and are expected to simply move on"

"The concept of mental health and wellbeing are not ones that are mainstreamed, and that's what we are trying to make a culture around – not just for beneficiaries of the different services and programmes that we offer but also for frontline workers"

"A society that holds governments to account, and preaches and advocates for its own peace, is what gives me the most hope, and we're starting to see that."

"Peacebuilding is a long-term investment, and we’re just at the beginning"

"Peace is Possible when women have a Power"

"Over the years it has become very clear to me that a range of actors in Somali society want to sweep sexual and gender-based violence issues under the rug."

"Women human rights defenders in Somalia are reprised against, threatened, unlawfully arrested, privy to sexual and gender-based violence, kidnapped and even killed as a result of their work."

"Traditional practices that go hand in hand with gender-based violence is an issue that women human rights defenders have met with unified opposition."

"To achieve success in creating more peaceful, just and inclusive societies, we must create a world, an environment where every girl can choose her future"

"I’m a fighter. I’m the kind of person that for better or worse runs towards a problem and tries to solve it even if it’s in a burning house."

"Human rights, now more than ever, are very much on the political agenda in Somalia. However moving beyond the proverbial international commitments and declarations has not yet been realized."

"So if you want to change the world, you need to first know and search within yourself with deep humility, zero egos, and profound clarity."

"When considering how to engage and empower women for countering violent extremism, policy makers must understand the varied roles women play in this space."

"There are a lot of young women now occupying spaces and challenging stereotypes every single day, from sport to technology to business to leadership, and all of this is necessary."

"And with more and more women present in these spaces, it is creating an atmosphere and acceptance for more to join as well."

"It's encouraging to see that women are fighting against so many different barriers to participate because they know what their participation means for other girls that are marginalised."

"We as artists are responsible if something wrong is taking place in our society. It’s very important for us to speak up, even though we may have to do it with a double tongue. We have to speak out for our people."

"Words are sublime, and in books we may commune with the dead. Beyond this there is nothing true, no voices we can hear."

"The Feast of Birds is dedicated to Avalei, the Goddess of Love and Death, of whom my master had said: “Not all that is ancient is worthy of praise.”"

"Someone tell me why my road is eternally strewn with ashes."

"The truth has its own virtue, which is separate from its content."

"“A book,” says Vandos of Ur-Amakir, “is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.” Fanlewas the Wise, the great theologian of Avalei, writes that Kuidva, the God of Words, is “a taskmaster with a lead whip.” Tala of Yenith is said to have kept her books in an iron chest that could not be opened in her presence, else she would lie on the floor, shrieking. She wrote: “Within the pages there are fires, which can rise up, singe the hair, and make the eyelids sting.” Ravhathos called the life of the poet “the fair and fatal road, of which even the dust and stones are dear to my heart,” and cautioned that those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward. “For they have gone into the Pit, into which they descend on Slopes of Fire, but when they rise they climb on a Ladder of Stone.” Hothra of Ur-Brome said that his books were “dearer than father or mother,” a sentiment echoed by thousands of other Olondrians through the ages, such as Elathuid the Voyager, who explored the Nissian coast and wrote: “I sat down in the wilderness with my books, and wept for joy.” And the mystic Leiya Tevorova, that brave and unfathomable soul, years before she met her tragic death by water, wrote: “When they put me into the Cold, above the white Lake, in the Loathsome Tower, and when Winter came with its cruel, hard, fierce, dark, sharp and horrible Spirit, my only solace was in my Books, wherein I walked like a Child, or shone in the Dark like a Moth which has its back to a sparkling Fire.”"