Brilliance Knows No Borders: September 2018
Introducing Abaarso’s 2018-19 Faculty
As Abaarso begins its 10th year, the school welcomes one of the strongest faculty groups that it has seen. 16 of the 25 members of the faculty are returning from last year, by far the largest number in the school’s history. Nearly the full administration is also returning. The photo above shows the 2018-19 faculty during an event with Abaarso alums.
The faculty includes four Abaarso alums, anchored by Najib Ahmed taking the position of Dean of Boys in his second year of teaching at Abaarso after graduating from Georgetown University in Qatar in May 2017. Saciid Bile returns to teach Somali, and Farhan Elmi and Guled Abdirahman join the faculty as well. Farhan graduated from Jacobs University in 2018 and Guled from Westminster College in December 2017.
The rest of the incoming faculty features teachers with a variety of experiences, including starting a primary school program in Nairobi, designing medical robots for a Silicon Valley start-up, teaching English to refugees in Oregon, working as an engineer in the UK, and serving in the Peace Corps in China. The current faculty has lived and taught in countries as diverse as Georgia, Poland, Azerbaijan, China, Korea, Djibouti and Turkey, among many others, before starting at Abaarso. You can learn more about our 2018-19 faculty on the faculty page of our website.
The strength of this year’s faculty gives Abaarso a chance to continue to build its curriculum and teaching methods. Having experienced teachers leading the process of revising curriculum in several key subjects is an opportunity that the school has not had in several years.
Abaarso Alums Win Fellowship to Combat FGM
Abaarso alums Ubah Abdi Ali and Kawsar Amiin Muuse, both from the class of 2015, won a competitive fellowship from the MasterCard Foundation for their project proposal, “Solace for Somaliland Girls”. The social venture project, which includes teammate Claudette Igiraneza from Rwanda, aims to build awareness among the Somali community about the dangers of female genital mutilation (FGM) by using education and empowerment.
“We were mainly inspired by our personal stories,” say Ubah and Kawsar, who grew up seeing FGM first-hand in their communities, as the vast majority of Somali women undergo the procedure. Through research during their high school and college studies, the two young women learned about the negative health effects of the procedure and designed a project to educate and empower members of the community to put a stop to the practice.
Ubah and Kawsar plan to use their project to hold a series of workshops within three regions of Somaliland, bringing young people, community and religious leaders, parents and FGM practitioners together. They also plan to build a social media presence and help school-age students start anti-FGM clubs in schools across the country, in hopes that “making youth and future leaders part of the anti-FGM movement will shield the next generation of Somali girls from FGM.”
Both Ubah and Kawsar, along with their teammate Claudette, study at the American University of Beirut (AUB) through scholarships provided by the MasterCard Foundation. They are two of the six Abaarso alums studying at AUB.