"Ireland has made me who I am"
"Ireland has made me who I am"
“When I first came, I got the feeling that no-one had much interest in me here” says Nadia Said. A Somali refugee, she had little english, and knew no-one in her new home. But “I couldn’t lose hope. I was willing to improve myself every day”.
Nadia first embarked on a series of exams to get her into secondary school. She passed, entering Margaret Aylward Community College in Whitehall, Dublin, where she sat the Leaving Certificate. “It was still hard though” she recalls, when looking back on her time there.
Determined to succeed, she worked with a Zambian nun to improve her English. “She came to school and for 2 hours every day, taught me English”. Not only did Nadia’s English improve but the nun also instilled confidence and self-belief in the young girl, “she helped a lot. She said, “never give up”. She made me stronger”.
But it wasn’t only the language barrier that Nadia had difficulty with at first. Irish food was another obstacle she had to overcome. As a member of the Bajuni tribe of Southern Somalia, fish was a big part of her diet, and indeed her life, prior to her arrival in Ireland. The Bajuni are traditionally fishermen and as such, the lack of fish in the Irish diet took a good bit of getting used to.
But as Nadia became more settled in Ireland, she soon discovered where the foods she once devoured were available. “Most of our food I find in halal shops” as there are “a lot of similarities with Arab food,” Nadia says. She now enjoys produce such as Bodo-Ugali, pilau, chapatti, mandazi, on a daily basis.
The Zambian nun’s motto of “never give up” remained with Nadia as she went through adolescence. Her secondary school years weren’t an easy experience and she was often on the receiving end of racist and xenophobic insults. But she successfully completed the Leaving Cert and later went onto Inchicore College to study Business Management where she is currently in her final year.
After recently completing a work placement with Fyffes, where she “worked with an accountant” and learnt “how administrative systems work”, she hopes to go on to university in September to continue her study in Business. Nadia is grateful for the opportunities that were available to her, especially when she considers what might have been had she never got out of Somalia.
“If I was back in Somalia, I would just have had babies. At 14 you have to marry and start giving birth,” while she adds that “here education is open to everybody. Even as an asylum seeker you can do up to Leaving Cert, many people in the world don’t even get that”.
Indeed, of an estimated 1.7 million school aged children in Somalia, only 710,860 get to attend primary school. 42% of the school going population. Of that figure, only 36 per cent are girls according to UNICEF. Nadia is acutely aware of this. “The best opportunity in Ireland is education”, she says.
Part of Irish Society
After recently obtaining full Irish citizenship, Nadia is now in a position to reflect on her journey from Somalia and her experiences in Ireland. From learning a new language to studying Business in college, she has come a long way from the nervous young girl lonely and alone.
“Ireland has made me who I am”.
