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By Fartuun Adan, as told to the One Billion Rising team
I guess to a lot of people, it would have seemed impossible for me and my friends to take part in One Billion Rising. All over the world a billion women have gone through physical or sexual violence, and every Feb. 14 we rise up against it, across the planet, to dance. Women do it in almost every country — but I am a Somalian. In my life I have seen my country go from a peaceful, normal place to being physically destroyed and then conquered by extreme, fundamentalist militias. It is not an easy place to gather in the streets if you are a man; if you are a woman, it is even more risky. But we were determined to express ourselves.
I was born in 1969, and I grew up in Mogadishu when it was a magnificent city often referred to as “the gem of Africa.” We didn’t have much money, but life was good. My grandmother ran a small business: She had a stall selling furniture and clothes and made all the decisions. I went to the local state-run school for free, and there was no sense that, as a girl, there was anything I couldn’t do.
I went to Mogadishu University, and at 18 I married my husband, a good, kind man named Elman. When we were in our last year of studying, in 1991, an uprising began in central Somalia.
