Student life

Refugee camp to medical school

In a Kenyan refugee camp, Mohamed Abdihalim didn’t have to worry about the war in Somalia, so he could concentrate on school.

When he completes his medical education, Mohamed Abdihalim hopes to practice in the United States and Somalia. Photo by Tim Rummelhoff

Mohamed Abdihalim was nine when he and his family fled their home in Mogadishu, Somalia because of civil war. Months later, they moved again, just across the Kenyan border. “After the first two years, even that place became too dangerous, because the militia would make raids,” Abdihalim recalls. “It was a scary time.” So the family moved again, to a United Nations refugee camp deeper inside Kenya.

Abdihalim came to Minnesota in 1999, at 17. Despite spending almost half his childhood in refugee camps, he says, “I consider myself lucky.”

In the camp, Abdihalim explains, “I didn’t have to worry about the war. I could concentrate on school.” At school—a tent without chairs, tables or electricity—he learned among other things to speak English.

For a time, the camp had one hospital and one physician. When physicians from the organization Doctors Without Borders arrived, the Somali doctor suggested that Abdihalim work as a translator. The doctors treated people no matter what tribe they belonged to—they didn’t even ask. For a Somali teenager, it was, Abdihalim recalls, “an eye-opening experience.”

The contrast to Somalia was striking. “The war [in Somalia] is a tribal war, Abdihalim says. “What got me to the camp was tribal warfare. You could not walk in a Somali city without being asked, ‘What tribe are you from?’ by a gunman. If you’re from the wrong tribe, in the wrong city, you would get robbed or killed. Tribe was everything.”

An aunt brought Abdihalim to the United States. After graduating from high school in Minneapolis, he attended the University, majoring in biochemistry. He graduated from CBS summa cum laude in the spring of 2005 and started at the University of Minnesota Medical School in fall 2005.

Soon afterwards, Abdihalim became the first University of Minnesota student ever awarded a scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which was started by the real estate, media and sports mogul, who died in 1997. A high school dropout, Cooke once described himself as an “indomitable optimist.”

Competition for the scholarships is intense. More than 1,200 individuals from across the United States applied for graduate school assistance last year, with about 75 receiving awards of as much as $50,000 annually. For Abdihalim, who has another small scholarship, that amounts to about $40,000 per year.

Abdihalim just started his second year of medical school, after a summer of helping a researcher at the Mayo Clinic. His dream is to spend several months of each year working in Somalia. He is still inspired by the physician who first took an interest in him more than a decade ago, and started him working as a medical translator. “I feel this sense of responsibility, to patients and to my community,” Abdihalim says, “to give back.”

—Frank Clancy