Thank you for your compassion, brother/sister noonespecial. Or as we say in Somali, "mahad sanid". Thank you.
We have an infant government in the making. It's not much, but it's ours. We had a U.S. puppet of a prez fighting al-Qaeda supported Jihadis for the last two years. But as soon as W left office something nice happened: the puppet government stepped down after the end of its term, and the "terrorists" put down their weapons and actually participated in elections. Now we have something unique: an Islamist president who wants to reach out to the opposition; almost everyone is happy for it, it's really cute. Both were hardliners til Obama came to office; the warlords lost the guarantee of a U.S. funding, and the Islamists lost the existential adversary in George W Bush. So now they're talking. They are making something that will benefit the Somali people everywhere and make the world proud.
I, myself, have no interest in following their experiment. I'm an American now. I have a home, a country, friends, and a little thing going on for me that I want to keep. My sympathetic understanding of the pirates' issues, thanks to my linguistic affinity with them, is not enough to keep me interested. I might be Somali, but Somalia's problems are not exactly mine. I can go there today, but I'm ruined for it, I'm the "American guy" now. I hope those still there can turn it around into something pleasant.
We have an infant government in the making. It's not much, but it's ours. We had a U.S. puppet of a prez fighting al-Qaeda supported Jihadis for the last two years. But as soon as W left office something nice happened: the puppet government stepped down after the end of its term, and the "terrorists" put down their weapons and actually participated in elections. Now we have something unique: an Islamist president who wants to reach out to the opposition; almost everyone is happy for it, it's really cute. Both were hardliners til Obama came to office; the warlords lost the guarantee of a U.S. funding, and the Islamists lost the existential adversary in George W Bush. So now they're talking. They are making something that will benefit the Somali people everywhere and make the world proud.
I, myself, have no interest in following their experiment. I'm an American now. I have a home, a country, friends, and a little thing going on for me that I want to keep. My sympathetic understanding of the pirates' issues, thanks to my linguistic affinity with them, is not enough to keep me interested. I might be Somali, but Somalia's problems are not exactly mine. I can go there today, but I'm ruined for it, I'm the "American guy" now. I hope those still there can turn it around into something pleasant.
- Mahmud of Arlington, Virginia.