Abdi Ali is late, which is something Abdi Ali doesn’t like to be.
He tried not to be late. He texted his friends an hour ago, reminding them they’d been invited to dinner that night at their adviser’s home, confirming they’d meet in front of Higley Hall at 4:30–precisely 4:30–so they could all walk together down the hill into Granville. Ali had to plan ahead. He couldn’t possibly go directly from class to Higley. There had to be enough time for him to stop, first, at his dorm room in Beta House, to change out of the shirt and argyle sweater vest he’d worn all day. He slid into a crisp dress shirt, then a black suit coat. He brushed his teeth.
“You have to respect the people who are inviting you,” he says. “She knows we’re college kids. She doesn’t mind. But I have to honor her.”
For Abdi Ali, honoring his hostess–Lyn Robertson ‘70, associate professor of education and women studies– means dressing appropriately. And fresh breath. And arriving at her doorstep on time, which is why he’s walking fast, up the sidewalk beside Olin, around Herrick toward the front steps of Higley where his friends are meeting. He doesn’t call them his “friends.” He calls them his “posse,” because that’s what they are: all 10 of them on full, four-year rides thanks to The Posse Foundation, which finds high-school students with huge potential who might not get to college, and gets them there with scholarships from schools like Denison. Ali and his posse came to Granville from Boston barely two months ago. Robertson is their Posse adviser, meeting with the group every week to help them adjust to life far from home, far from the city, far from the subway system that could have transported them from campus to her house in two seconds flat.
When Ali gets to Higley, only two members of his posse are there. He looks at his watch. He looks at it again. He pulls out his cell and calls a few of them to make sure they’re on their way. As it turns out, Ali isn’t late at all. He’s only late on Abdi Time, which means he’s late to arriving early. Being early ensures that no one will be disrespected– not his posse, not his teacher. And being respectful is the name of Abdi Ali’s game, an impressive moral code for anyone, especially a first-year student.
But Ali isn’t just any first-year student.
In 1991, when he was 2 years old, the civil war exploded in Mogadishu, Somalia, where his family lived. His mother and seven siblings ran for their lives. For years, they were homeless. Then they settled in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, where Ali suffered from malaria. Finally, three years ago, his family emigrated to Boston. Once there, Ali could have ended up on an entirely different path. Most people would have expected as much– a kid who had seen devastating atrocities, who had lived through such poverty, should have come out the other side certain that the world owed him something, because, in a way, the world did.
But not Abdi Ali. He worries, instead, about what he owes the world. He worries about whether he’s volunteering enough, helping enough, doing enough public service. He worries about whether he’s being respectful enough-–not just to his family and friends and teachers. To everyone. Even the security guard at the airport who detained him because his name was “on the FBI list.” Even the student on campus who asked one of his posse, an African American, if he was at Denison “to play basketball.”
“I believe, in general, human beings are wonderful as long as you treat them well,” he says, sounding more like a prophet than than a biology major with a penchant for horror flicks and Pumas.
Even so, it was a lesson Ali had to learn.
___
It’s a blessing that Ali can’t remember it–that day in 1991 when his life changed forever. Before that day, his family was healthy, happy, well-off. His father’s import business had afforded them a big house in Mogadishu. They had several cars. His mother had beautiful jewelry. Then, the coup began. Rioters charged through the streets with guns, shooting everyone aligned with the government, murdering them in front of their neighbors, their colleagues, their children. His father was killed.
“They killed as many people as they could,” he says. When the insurgents broke into their home, his mother bargained for her children’s lives, offering up her jewelry, the cars, the house. Miraculously, they let them all go.
She and her eight children–the oldest was 15; the youngest, Abdi and his twin brother, were 2–set out on foot, walking to the nearest town, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Before long, they heard guns firing in the distance, coming closer, coming after them. So they ran to the next town, and the next, meeting up with the rest of their extended family along the way, ending up on the banks of the Indian Ocean with thousands, all of them trying to figure out a way to sail to safety in Kenya. Coastal fisherman were selling spots on their boats, and Ali’s grandmother bought them passage on an enormous ship, overloaded. At the last minute, she decided she’d made a mistake.
“We can’t take this boat,” she said. “It’s going to sink.” She herded everyone off the boat and onto a smaller vessel just big enough to fit her clan. Then, she prayed: “God, I have all my family with me at this moment. I have nobody else. I ask you not to let us all die at once. Please.”
They spent five days at sea. On one of them, Ali’s family watched as the boat they’d first boarded sank. His brothers and sisters pulled as many people as they could onto their boat, and watched as so many others drowned. They debarked in Kenya, a foreign land with a foreign language, with no place to go, nothing to eat, running from the Kenyans who were trying to protect their homeland from the onslaught of thousands of refugees.
Ali’s family hid in the woods along the coastline with other refugee families. Parents foraged for food in the woods, dragged branches on their backs in order to build lean-tos where their children could sleep shielded from the rain. Eventually, the United Nations set up a refugee camp in the Kenyan city of Mombasa, and Ali’s family went there, living now in a hut with a roof made of mud and palm branches. The camp was surrounded by a barbed wire fence to keep the refugees safe from the locals who, in the middle of the night, would pour gas on the huts and set them on fire. When the refugees would run out through holes in the fence, they’d be shot. Luckily, Ali’s family persevered. He watched the mothers wake up at 4 a.m. and walk to a nearby town, dangerous as that was, to buy vegetables to then sell in the camp. After cooking meals for their own families, they’d cook for the camp’s orphans using the rations brought in by the United Nations.
In 1995, the U.N. transferred Ali’s family to another camp, this one in Ethiopia. Once again, they were faced with a foreign land and a foreign language although, here, they had a more stable home to live in. Ali’s mother got up before the sun rose and walked five miles to work in the nearest town.
Ali’s older siblings spent the days watching the younger ones, careful to stay indoors where they were sure to be safe. His brothers and sisters read to them from books his mother brought from town. His siblings showed them simple math calculations and wrote out the letters of the English alphabet, which they’d learned at school in Somalia before the coup, and taught the kids to pronounce them.
When Ali was nine, his mother allowed him to walk with her one day to the town where she worked. He was amazed by everything, but mostly by the groups of kids walking around with notebooks.
“They’re going to school,” his mom explained.
“Can I go too?” he asked.
“Hopefully, one day, you will go too.”
For Ali, “one day” couldn’t come soon enough. He asked his mother to help him write a letter to the school’s headmaster, asking if he could enroll. His mother dropped the letter off at the school, and Ali waited and waited, but he never heard back. He decided to go see the headmaster in person, walking into town with his mother a second time. He asked the headmaster why he never replied.
When Abdi stepped off the plane in Boston, he was astounded–first by the diversity and, second, by the cold. His family–all of them– moved into a small apartment in East Boston. Within days, he and his brother were standing in the guidance office at East Boston High School, signing up for class.
“There are several reasons,” the headmaster said. “First of all, the school is five miles from your camp. It’s too far.”
“I will be here on time every day,” Ali answered.
“Second, you’re not a citizen. You’re not Ethiopian.”
“I don’t know who I am right now,” Ali told the man.
The result of that conversation would come to define him. The headmaster agreed to enroll Ali in third grade. He defended him when his teachers refused to teach him because he wasn’t a citizen, when other students teased him. And, with that, the headmaster taught young Ali the value of treating people well.
Every morning, Ali and his mother walked the hour and a half to town and, every morning, Ali arrived at school early. Every evening, they would walk home again together. Ali struggled to do his homework in the limited lamplight and ironed his yellow and blue uniform by keeping it folded under his pillow at night so that, as his mother advised, he could represent himself with dignity.
He was 12 years old when the malaria hit him. There was no medical facility where he could be treated, not even in the town where he went to school. Ali was so weak, he could barely stand, but, still, he had to walk, holding onto his mother, to a bus that would take them to a Red Cross clinic. The trip took eight hours. They waited another day to see the doctor. On the journey back home, Ali asked his mother, “How do I become a doctor?”
Maybe it was because he’d heard stories of his family saving the drowning refugees, or maybe it was because he’d watched the mothers in the refugee camp help the orphans they lived with, but Ali seemed to have come up with a karmic equation to live by. Since he was fortunate enough to go to school, he’d respond by setting up a school at the refugee camp. Since he was helped by a doctor, he’d volunteer at the clinic that was set up, soon after, in his camp and then start counseling those in his village who were suffering from HIV/AIDS. That part worried his mother. The disease was so devastating and so misunderstood.
“Mom,” Ali said, “you told me God loves people who help.”
“You’re right,” she said. “God loves people who help.” In the fall of 2006, thanks to a refugee relocation program and money raised by his grandmother, Ali’s family got the help it needed to finally get out of Africa. When he stepped off the plane in Boston, he was astounded–first, by the diversity and, second, by the cold. His family–all of them– moved into a small apartment in East Boston. Within days, he and his brother were standing in the guidance office at East Boston High School, signing up for class.
As guidance counselor Jo-Anne Themo sat behind her desk, making out Ali’s 10th-grade schedule, he sat on the other side, writing furiously in a notebook. When she handed him his class list, he handed her a note.
“It was an essay,” Themo says. “He’d been sitting there, writing an essay about how grateful he was to be in the United States and to be getting an education. I couldn’t believe it.”
Ali couldn’t believe it either–all the different subjects he could take, how small his classes were, the fact that he could actually raise his hand and ask questions instead of merely being lectured to, as was the case in Ethiopia. And, then, there were the books.
“I have a textbook I can take home?” he said. “Are you kidding me?”
Ali spent his first year studying like mad, listening to National Public Radio to hone his English, struggling with what he found to be the hardest part of American education–writing the 500-word essay. Five months after he started at East Boston, he was already tutoring other students in math and science. But that wasn’t enough for him. So, the fall of his junior year, he began mentoring students at a nearby middle school. But that wasn’t enough. So he volunteered at Massachusetts General Hospital, translating for families who spoke only Amharic, Arabic, or Somali (because he was fluent in all three), and visiting with patients.
The following year, his junior year, Ali landed a paid internship at Mass General, working in the HIV-AIDS research laboratory. His colleague, nurse Chris Shaw, was astounded by Ali’s maturity. Not only did he do loads of translating, but he registered patients for follow-up appointments, and helped them understand why those follow-up appointments were necessary and part of their treatment. For Shaw, though, the most remarkable thing about Ali was what he was doing when he wasn’t at the hospital–marching for women’s rights, for gay rights, for any group that Ali viewed as being persecuted, or campaigning door to door for Barack Obama despite the fact that he wasn’t yet a citizen and couldn’t vote.
“He would come in for a shift,” Shaw recalls, “and I’d ask him, ‘Abdi, what did you do today?’ And he’d say, ‘I had a meeting with the mayor.’ And I’d be, like, ‘Come on.’ And he’d say, ‘No, really. I did. I have these photos.’ And he’d whip out his camera and show me photos of him driving in the mayor’s car.”
Shaw wasn’t surprised that Abdi Ali’s story was making its way into Boston’s upper echelons. But Ali was. When he got the call from the mayor’s office–would he speak in historic Faneuil Hall as part of the city’s Fourth of July celebration about what it means to him to be an American?–he answered immediately: “Okay.” Then, he hung up the phone, and thought, What did I get myself into? I can’t do that! It didn’t help when the mayor’s office sent him an e-mail to confirm, listing all of the people who have spoken at the event in the past: Governors of Massachusetts, mayors, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Quincy Adams, JFK. Are you kidding me? he thought.
There were at least 300 people in Faneuil Hall when Abdi Ali took to the podium on July 4, 2009, dressed in a black suit with a striped tie and a light blue pocket square, standing beneath a giant painting of Daniel Webster with the words “Liberty and Union, Now and Forever,” engraved on the frame. His mother, grandmother, and seven siblings sat in the front row.
“The possibilities in this country seem endless,” he said to the crowd. “I will hold with a tight grip every opportunity that comes my way.”
The audience gave him a standing ovation.
___
There’s an award hanging in Ali’s dorm room in the Beta House. It’s from one of his high school friends. She made it herself: “The Most Caring Award goes to Abdi. You are a person with a beautiful heart. Your ability to put others before yourself is amazing. Your heart is stronger than anything.”
Ali is proud of that. He’s so proud that he brought it with him to Denison, that he hung it up on his wall next to his schedule of meetings for the Muslim student group, and the bus schedule, and the quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived–that is to have succeeded.”
But, truthfully, Ali doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand why people tell him that he inspires them. Why Chris Shaw, his colleague at Mass General says, “He made me think, ‘I could be doing more.’” Why his Posse friend, Faith Simunyu, says, “I don’t think he’s scared by anything.” Why his adviser, Professor Robertson, says, “I feel privileged to know him.”
“I don’t know why I inspire people,” Ali says. The trouble for Ali is that he knows, firsthand, what it feels like to be inspired. He learned that lesson not long ago, but it’s the one that matters most to him, the one that reminds him every day to look ahead, to work harder, to do more.
When he was volunteering in Boston, he spent a lot of time with one patient in particular. She was a permanent resident at Mass General, born with shrunken limbs, which meant she needed help doing things as simple as shifting her body in bed. Ali found that the two had a lot in common–they both loved animals and music and watching tennis on TV. Since they both liked kids, Ali would often wheel her bed down to the children’s ward so they could play with the children there who suffer from autism. Her advice to him as he headed off to Denison were the words he’s chosen to live by: “Never give up.”
“She is an inspirational person,” Ali says, walking up the steps to Lyn Robertson’s front door at 5:00 sharp, smelling the cinnamon in the Somali dish she cooked in his honor. “Me? I just do what I feel I’m supposed to do.”
Vicki Glembocki is author of the memoir The Second Nine Months. She writes regularly for Parents, Reader’s Digest, and Philadelphia Magazine.