Fatuma and her story of resilience and determination in the face of despair

By: Abdikadir Okash (@abdikadirokash)

WAJIR—Whoever came up with the phrase “disability is not inability” must have had this lady—Fatuma Yussuf—in mind. She was rejected, ejected and looked down upon due to her fate, but decided to soldier on despite the disappointments.

When she was at the age of two, Fatuma’s body was completely paralysed after her grandfather, who at the time was a quack operating as a veterinary doctor, injected her on the wrong vein after which she lost sense of the leg she received the jab on, and later the whole of her body.

Fatuma at her office in Wajir County. (courtesy)

Fatuma, who is now a nominated member of Wajir county assembly, joined a Catholic-run mission school at the age of six after she regained sense in most parts of her body, apart from the left leg which she now uses caliper to support her body on.

She says she experienced the happiest period of her life at primary school run by the catholic nuns.
“I virtually had everything I needed out of life: shelter, food, clothes and fees,” she said as she reminisced of the good days gone by.

She then joined Wajir Girls Secondary School for her O levels where she came face to face with the ugly side of life.
“The sponsors withdrew their support because they said I came of age,” she narrated.

And life away from the tender hands of the nuns, which she was accustomed to since she was five, was not getting any easier. After she left the mission school, which also served as a boarding facility, Fatuma and tens of other girls were rereleased into the community whose norms they were expected to adapt to. Just like her, the girls had had no any sort connection with their families.

“The adaptation part became really a problem. We had to identify ourselves with our clans unlike at the boarding where we were all ‘just girls’. We started to cover our hair because we began coming into contact with strangers of the opposite sex for the first time,” she added. The only male figure in her circle, she recounts, was the Dugsi (Quran school) teacher.

At form two, her school fees run out and she was missing a lot of stuffs teenage girls of her age needed most, while finding it hard to get a footing of the new dawn.

“My family dragged their feet on paying my schools fees because they said I was a girl,” she painfully remembers.

She said she felt valueless. She went back to her former sponsors—Analena Foundation—and explained her ordeal.

“That’s how I completed high school,” she said while lost in her thoughts, perhaps wondering why life had to take that painful route.

Now that high school was over, there was a new task: college education.

To go to college, she had to dust off and roll up her sleeves.
“I started a small kiosk at COC area of Wajir. It was from the proceeds of that shop that I joined Nairobi Institute in 2004 where I studied Certificate in Community Development because that was really what I wanted to do,” she said, adding that past experience had informed her choice of college course.

“While in high school at the height of my ordeal, a disabled man was knocked by a car at the roundabout next to the former District Commissioners office in Wajir. The head of the area police force came to the scene and was told that the victim was a disabled fellow. He said: ‘Why is he walking around when he’s disabled,” she narrates.

That encounter, she says, shook the core of her conscience and she decided to advocate for the rights of people with disability.

She formed Wajir Disable Office, an orgernisation that gave voice to the disabled persons in 2001 and remained at the helm as chairlady until 2003 when the orgernisation was absorbed under a national NGO that serves a similar mandate.

She then joined Wajir Paralegal Network as a gender officer and later switched to MERLIN as a community mobiliser.

In 2013, Fatuma joined Wajir County Assembly as a disabled nominee. She stated that, through her efforts and lobby, 18 disabled persons secured employment opportunities in the county, adding that more people with disability would get a job through affirmative action.

“I also tabled a motion in the county assembly seeking to make the county facilities a disabled friendly areas fitted with ramps and other friendly infrastructures,” she said.

Fatuma confirmed that she rejected the post of being the chairman of the assembly committee on disability “because I want someone else to feel what the disables feel in their day-to-day life.”

Fatuma with her husband Ahmed Ali and daughter Shamim (courtesy)

Fatuma, who is married to Ahmed Ali Abdille alias Hani, said her engagement with her husband and their union was not devoid of trial and skepticism.

“People started talking behind my back, saying I would not be able to conceive because I was disabled. Imagine I had turned down any form of help and sympathy after I had given birth to my daughter, Shamim in order to prove my skeptics wrong, and to show them that though I was physically disabled, I was an able mother,” she recollected while suppressing a visible sense of anger written on her face.

Her message to that young girl who is disabled and to that boy who want to give up on life? “A disabled person is equally able. You don’t need sympathy, you need empathy. You need opportunity.”

Fatuma said she was grateful to her grandfather who wrongfully injected her with the wrong medication that set her on the road to her discovery.

“If I were not disabled, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I am grateful to my Awowahey (grandfather),” she ends the interview.

By: Abdikadir Okash (@abdikadirokash)