Muno walked a half-hour to school. She ate just two meals a day, on food that was delivered twice a month by the UN’s World Food Program.
After her family fled the civil war in Somalia when she was two years old, Muno Osman grew up in refugee camps in Kenya. Even so, she says, she was “very, very lucky.” The reason: her parents supported her education.
By secondary school, a lot of classmates had dropped out. “Some couldn’t buy the books,” she explains. “Some had to get married for economic reasons. Some didn’t have enough support from home.” But Muno’s mother ran a small produce market to help pay school expenses.
Muno walked a half-hour to school. She ate just two meals a day, on food that was delivered twice a month by the UN’s World Food Program. And the school had limited resources for things like science.
Even so, she succeeded. She remembers waiting for the results of her final exams, which were written by every senior student in the country. “You wait for two months and I was very, very anxious, because if I didn’t get a scholarship, I would still be hanging around in the camp.” When the results arrived by text message, Muno says, she didn’t know whether to read them or not.
But she did well, winning a scholarship from the World University Service of Canada (WUSC).
She loved reading and wanted to be a writer. But she also wanted to work for a humanitarian agency after seeing agencies around the camp. So she applied for English and International Relations, and wound up at the University of Toronto.
“I considered myself very good in English, coming from an English school with a B+ in my final exam, but it was hard for everyone to understand me and for me to understand people,” she says. She could grasp textbooks, but writing exam questions based on lectures was difficult at first.
That made her rethink a writing career. “I didn’t do well in written English and what language was I going to write in?” she laughs. “And I learned that International Relations wasn’t humanitarian work. I didn’t know at first that it was Social Work I really wanted.”
But after a couple of years in Toronto, she transferred to Carleton’s Bachelor of Social Work program, registering here last fall. “I was very lucky to transfer all my credits,” she adds. And now she’s getting to practice outreach to others.
This term she’s in a required field placement, attached to the Somali Centre for Family Services four days a week. She helps out with language classes for seniors, teaches life skills to youth, and generally assists newcomers, such as helping them find jobs or accompanying them to appointments.
She also volunteers with the WUSC program at Carleton, as part of a group that welcomes new waves of students to campus from the world’s refugee camps. “We take them to the bank, show them where their classes are, show them how to use the website,” she says, adding that it has been a learning experience for her, too.