{"id":265,"date":"2011-07-01T18:18:52","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T18:18:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/?p=265"},"modified":"2017-05-24T16:01:59","modified_gmt":"2017-05-24T16:01:59","slug":"faiza-abbas-mahamud-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/2011\/07\/01\/faiza-abbas-mahamud-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Faiza Abbas Mahamud ’11"},"content":{"rendered":"

By STEPHANIE WEISS<\/p>\n

A life that defies definition<\/p>\n

\"FaizaFaiza Abbas Mahamud moved a lot when she was young. First her family moved from war-torn Somalia to Kenya. Then the family moved four times in Kenya, including living at one time in a refugee camp.<\/p>\n

All the moving meant Mahamud wasn’t able to have one set of friends with whom to spend time, connect, and grow up. But she did have one constant\u2014a dictionary.<\/p>\n

“As a child, textbooks had to be purchased. We couldn’t buy books, but we always had a dictionary. I feel like this is a tradition in our home,” she said.<\/p>\n

The moving stopped in 2004 when Mahamud’s family came to Minnesota.<\/p>\n

“My aunt put her life on hold to help us,” Mahamud said. “Aside from God, if it weren’t for my mom’s youngest sister, it would be hard for us to have a stable life.”<\/p>\n

Mahamud graduated from Roosevelt High School in 2007, then enrolled at Augsburg College. She went back to Kenya during 2010 as an exchange student to work for a United Nations agency in a variety of roles, including as a premarital counselor.<\/p>\n

“When I went back to Kenya, I was a totally different person,” she said. “I wasn’t the girl who wanted to get away from this country. Where is home for me? When I was in America, I would say \u2018I’m going home.’ When I was in Kenya, I kept calling Minnesota home.”<\/p>\n

Mahamud, now a U.S. citizen, graduated in spring 2011 with majors in English and women’s studies and with a minor in chemistry. She’s now exploring options for graduate school but isn’t ready to confine herself only to the United States.<\/p>\n

“I want to be in Africa to help women who don’t have that second helping hand like my aunt,” she said. “I want to be in a position to make a difference in the lives of women and children.”<\/p>\n

And she still needs to finish reading the dictionary.<\/p>\n

“I spent so much time reading and using the words I learned,” she said. “But there are so many words I haven’t gotten to.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By STEPHANIE WEISS A life that defies definition Faiza Abbas Mahamud moved a lot when she was young. First her family moved from war-torn Somalia to Kenya. Then the family moved four times in Kenya, including living at one time in a refugee camp. All the moving meant Mahamud wasn’t able to have one set <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured-stories","tag-summer-2011"],"wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7903,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions\/7903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}