By Amita Sharma
Published September 28, 2010 on
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It was 2 o’clock in the morning back in 1988. Amina Farah was about to go from a middle-class mother with a house and a job at the Central Bank of Somalia to refugee. Civil war had just erupted. The dark of the morning lit up with firefights. The air choked with smoke. And Farah says she had no choice but to grab her four-year-old son and run.
“You saw the children sitting with dead bodies,” Farah said. “You saw injury. You saw no food and no hospital, no light, no doctor, no hygiene, no water.”
Farah traveled by foot with thousands of other Somalis to Ethiopia in scorching heat. Each day of the month-long journey she thought would be her last. Farah tried to prevent her young son from succumbing to dehydration — at times she gave him her saliva.
“Several times I thought he was dead,” she said. “I just put him down. And then I remember the guy told me Amina one time he told you he is alive.”
Today, that boy is 25 years old and works at a golf course in Temecula. Farah is now 47. She has two other children, a 22-year-old son in the U.S. army and a 16-year-old daughter in high school.
“I am so happy. The peace for my children and for me that was the first thing I was looking for.”
Farah moved to San Diego with her family in 1997. She was part of a huge influx of Somali refugees in the 1990s. When she arrived, she enrolled in school, got a job as a teacher’s aide She’s working on a bachelor’s degree in social work and she is now doing what she believes is the most rewarding work of all. She is a case worker at the International Rescue Committee in San Diego.
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