soodhawoow

soo dhawoow means welcome, but literally translates to come closer. This blog invites you to come get a closer look at Somali culture. In particular this blog strives to focus on Somali women and our contributions to our communities both back home and abroad

[somaliwomen]

I love how beautiful Somali women look in the guntiino (a traditional dress) I also love how diverse of a people we are which is something people underestimate

[somaliwomen]

Members of the Somali Bantu Women's Cooperative at work in San Diego. 

Three years ago Hajia Kangame and her family were admitted to the U.S. as political refugees. They settled in San Diego, where Kangame launched the Somali Bantu Women's Cooperative, a startup handicraft business that employs 16 women. Kangame's goals right now are modest, "If we succeed," she says, "maybe my children can go to college, and my family can be happy."

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it’s so sad how somalis everywhere are facing troubles and adversities. may allah help them all and forgive those who have passed on

[somaliwomen]

ina lillah wa ilahi rajun

A Somali woman has died in the course of Kenya’s anti-terror “Operation Usalama Watch,” making her the first known casualty of the 2-week-old, door-to-door operation. She was one of as many as 4,000 people detained without warrant, in an operation that Kenyan officials say will reduce terrorism by returning refugees to refugee camps in the north of the country, and deporting illegal immigrants.

The gravediggers did not know the name of the woman they buried. A cemetery manager referred records inquiries to the police, who did not confirm the name. Multiple sources yesterday named the woman as Seynab Bulhan, a 40-year-old who had spent as many as eight days in Kasarani, the stadium where police hold “suspects” until the government can confirm the authenticity of their residency documents or refugee papers.

Keep in mind being Somali is enough for your residency and refugee status to be labeled as suspect leading to your detention.

Bulhan was from Eastleigh. She would have been one of at least 1,100 people detained at the stadium in Kasarani before being adjudicated as illegal and scheduled for deportation.

Please Pray for her and for all Somalis scurrently being held in detention by Kenyan authorities

[somaliwomen]

Hi, I haven't been following you for long but I love your blog! but i couldn't find your name

I don’t have an about page yet i’ll make one in a few days when I’m done with exams. even then I don’t think i’ll give out my real name but I guess you guys can just call me SW for now

[somaliwomen]

This isn't my personal blog or anything but I wanted to say hi and let you know i'm a person not a robot or automated blogging software

SOOOO

HELLO Peoples

SOMAALIYAA HANOOLATO

ummm any questions?

[somaliwomen]

Pictures from the Somali Women’s Peace Conference which took place on 30th Nov till 02nd Dec 2011 at Kempinski Djibouti.

The main aim of the conference was to bring together Somali women practitioners, scholars and policy makers to engage in round table discussion on “African solutions” to the current conflict in Somalia, and also to contribute to drafting a comprehensive Somalia security strategy. Also to explore women’s perspective on security, peace and governance issues and increase the role of women in peacebuilding initiatives.

All thirty five participants were women and were representatives from civil society, Diaspora community, members of the TFG (Transitional Federal Government) parliament, NGO (Non Governmental Organization) workers, UNWomen, UNPOS, university lecturers and youth.

[somaliwomen]

While I feel the need to point out Somalia is not part of the middle east this excerpt from  Isobel Coleman's Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East which details how Somali women devised a plan to ensure, in the midst of both a brutal civil war and a droubt, that convoys of food could reach starving people despite rampant looting is worth sharing

It was the summer of 1991, and Somalia was embroiled in a full-blown civil war, a war that tragically continues today. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the fighting, and as drought compounded the already tenuous situation, famine ran rampant. Relief groups struggled to provide aid, but thousands of people were dying by the day. Red Cross efforts to feed the hungry were largely thwarted by widespread looting. Convoy trucks were routinely attacked and robbed by rival clans who used the food to feed their own militias, or to barter for weapons, while the women and children starved. By some estimates, a quarter of Somali children under the age of five perished during the famine.

Somali women, however, rose to the challenge. Loane, a soft-spoken Irishman, smiles remembering how the women of Mogadishu came to him with a plan to get food to the starving people. “They proposed a solution, a practical solution totally in keeping with their local culture. Rather than transporting big shipments of food to large feeding centers, which only encouraged the looting, the women suggested we help them set up communal kitchens in neighborhoods across the city. The Red Cross would supply them with firewood and water, and run a constant stream of small loads of food to them via donkeys. They would immediately cook the food and serve it to the hungry, averting starvation and eliminating the food’s cash value. We thought it was worth a try. Before we knew it, the women had totally taken charge. They set up more than three hundred of these communal kitchens, run by kitchen committees comprised of twenty to thirty women. Each of these kitchens was dishing out between one and two thousand meals, twice a day. They became the lifeline of Mogadishu.”

The kitchens took shape in the rubble of destroyed buildings – what was left of the whitewashed villas that once graced Mogadishu’s palm-tree-lined streets. Even the city’s elegant mosques, a tribute to its historic past as a great trading port, had not escaped the ransacking. Once the Red Cross was on board, the women negotiated with the warlords to appropriate space for their communal kitchens. Some of these kitchens even had links with local schools, where meals provided an incentive for both students and teachers to continue attending classes even during the brutal chaos of the war.

[somaliwomen]

Somali women members of the business community attended a meeting with foreign journalists to discuss the recent liberation of the city from al-Shabab militants and the future of the region's charcoal industry in Kismayo, Somalia. While being free from Al-Shabab is positive to fully be capable of controlling their futures for these women lies with their being able to make use of ports to conduct business.

Since Kenyan troops took this territory from Al-shabab their support Ras Kamboni in Kismayo, and its controversial treatment of a federal delegation sent to Kismayo in May, as well as its alleged role in exporting charcoal illegally with Madobe's forces have sustained tensions in the region.

The charcoal allegation affirms worries that Kenya is seeking connections with local actors to gain influence over the extraction of natural resources in Somalia.

read more about this issue here: http://sabahionline.com/en_GB/articles/hoa/articles/features/2013/08/14/feature-01

[somaliwomen]

Dr Asha Omar, a veteran Somali gynecologist visited Baidoa’s AMISOM hospital to offer her medical expertise in reproductive health. Dr Asha provided antenatal care including hi-tech CT scan services for expectant mothers as well as offered free gynecological consultation, treatment and checkups. Women in Baidoa often have to travel as far as Galkayo or Mogadishu to receive treatment in this feild

[somaliwomen]

Somali women talk as their camels wait for their turn to drink water from a tank near Harfo, 70 km from Galkayo

[somaliwomen]

AINT NOBODY MESSING WITH MY CLIQUE

[somaliwomen]

Zainab Hassan leads the The National Library restoration initiative of the Heritage Institute for Policy Studies in Mogadishu, Somalia. From 2007 to 2012, she was a Program Officer for The Minneapolis Foundation where she led the Foundation’s strategic focus areas of Transform Education of the community grantmaking, and served as key staff and managed special purpose funds. As a writer, poet, and human rights and social justice activist, Zainab has been an active member of the African diaspora philanthropy, and the Somali diaspora civil society.

Hassan is working with the Heritage Institute for Policy Studies, Mogadishu’sfirst think tank, to restore the building and hoping to tap Somalia’s business community and diaspora for funds, along with private investors.

A six-page proposal for the library project outlines the goals for the four-storey building that crumbled along with the rest of the city when Somalia’s government collapsed in 1991. Three floors will be divided by language — Somali, Arabic and English — and carry fiction and non-fiction books, journals, text books and DVDs.

[somaliwomen]

25 newly trained midwives from five regions in South and Central Somalia graduating from the new Mogadishu Midwifery School in Xamar Jajab District of Mogadishu. The graduation ceremony was attended by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Religious Affairs Hon. Ridwan Hirsi Mohamed and several ministers, MPs and senior government officials as well as UN Population Fund for Somalia country representative, Mr. Cheikh Tidiane Cisse and his World Health Organization counterpart Dr. Ghulam Popal.

[somaliwomen]

A Garre woman speaks at a community consultation on the draft peace accord in Hudet, Soomaaliya Galbeed (Somali region of Ethiopia)

Photo by Mercy Corps

[somaliwomen]

Somali women are doing their part in rebuilding the country post civil war Naema Adam is more literally than others.

Naema Adam has set up a brick laying business and is one of the many Somalis tracing their steps back home.

She lived in London for 24 years, having initially gone to pursue her studies in college. The start of the civil war meant she had to stay back in England, from where she completed her university education, got married and had three children. She says her choice of the brick laying business was informed by the visit to Somalia last year, during which she realized the shortage in quality building materials, deciding to move in and fill the gap.

“It was a wild idea for a mother to do this, but I thought it was worthwhile in the end. I had spoken to lots of locals and engineers and I had done some research. I then realized a bricklayer is really needed. Mogadishu is rebuilding, so I decided not to lose the opportunity,” says Naema

She has undoubtedly encountered many challenges, including the high cost of importing machinery. “Another way the government could help is to at least give discount on the tax at the port which would make it easier to import machinery and not products and let the people produce the products within the country,” she appeals.

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Under international law, transferring refugees from the cities to squalid, overcrowded, and closed refugee camps facing a funding shortfall of over US$100 million would also violate a range of their other rights, including the right to free movement, the right not to be forcibly evicted from their homes, and the right to access basic economic and social rights—such as the right to food, livelihoods, health care, and education.

Human Rights Watch, “You Are All Terrorists”: Kenyan Police Abuse of Refugees in Nairobi  (via gaanjibo)