I've been a sometime educator to a steady stream of Somali immigrants into my city whose ongoing diaspora suggests you shouldn't read too much into the above essay. Some of the claims in that essay are just surreal distortions of reality (like that the violence in Somalia largely vanished in 1994 -- actually, most stability that there has been is to be found within the regions controlled by the transitional federal government around Mogadisho-- outbreaks of violence and warlordism are not things of the past here.

It's jarring to contrast this account of relative prosperity compared to the Barre government with those of my more recently-arrived students, one of whom had an unborn child literally sliced out of her womb with a bayonet five years ago, or the one who lost an arm to random gunfire sometime in the last three, or the teacher who held on for a decade and a half in Mogadisho before finally fleeing in the face of warlord crossfires (even under the aegis of what passes for a government). There are hundreds of these people in the ESL classes I taught alone.