Source:
http://www.globeandmail.com. Jun. 13, 2003
Fahima Osman making her rounds at McMaster University Medical Centre
DREAMCHILD
One in five Canadians in their 20s are the children of immigrants. Driven to make good on their parents' sacrifices, they tend to excel beyond their peers. Fahima Osman is more exceptional yet: At 25, she is a year away from becoming the first Canadian-trained physician in Toronto's large Somali community. And as ERIN ANDERSSEN reports that's only a start.
By ERIN ANDERSSEN
June 14, 2003 - Page F1
The envelope arrived on a Tuesday, a sunny and hot June 4, 2000, just before 1 p.m.
All the Osmans remember it: The day before, Fahima and her mother had gone to the end of their street in Markham, Ont., to the brown super-mailboxes, shoving the key into 10A slot with their hearts pounding, only to find it empty. They knew the mailman delivered just after noon. They knew McMaster University had sent their answer off on Friday. Fahima hadn't slept all night; she had borrowed a cellphone to call the long list of family waiting to hear. On Tuesday, her mom, Zahra, who considers herself "a lucky woman," insisted on being the one to open the mailbox and reach inside. It was a package so deliciously fat and bulging, they didn't even have to open it. There was no mistaking what it said. Screaming, Fahima tackled her mother in a hug and kissed her. Zahra started crying. Her daughter was going to medical school.
"I used to wonder how people cried with joy," Fahima, now 25, recalls. "That day I found out."
The next big date is May 14, 2004, when Fahima Osman will have earned the right to put two long-dreamed-of letters before her name. And in that moment, the Somali refugee -- whose parents had no formal schooling, whose father nearly drowned trying to flee a life of poverty, and whose high-school guidance counsellor once warned her not to aim so high -- will become an original: the first Canadian-trained medical doctor in the country's largest African community.
To reckon with how far Fahima has come, you have to look back more than 50 years, to an enterprising 10-year-old named Adam Osman, born to a long line of nomads in the desert. He spent his early years wandering in the dust with the sheep and camels, trading for water or food and living under makeshift canopies of branches and cloth. Years later, when his children refused to finish their suppers, he would tell them about getting rationed his one cup of milk every second day.
Adam's mother died when he was little, and his father remarried. As the second-oldest boy among 12 children, he was sent to make his way in the northern city of Hargeysa, working for a local merchant and farmer. At 15, he learned to drive a taxi and he saved enough money to bring two brothers into the city, and send the youngest to school.
But he had ambition and he was clever, and with a bit more money, he managed to buy a one-way ticket to Yemen, where he paid 500 Yemen shillings -- a fortune -- to join 100 other stowaways on an unstable fishing boat bound for the United Arab Emirates. Finally, approaching land after days of motoring, the boat began to sink. Adam Osman could not swim. But while people churned helplessly in the water around him, he was pulled to safety by one of the other passengers and dropped on the beach.
His luck held in Abu Dhabi: He landed a job with a Canadian oil company, and worked himself up to a public-relations position that saw him organizing visas and ferrying around staff members. He paid for more siblings to go to school.
At 38, well past the age Somali men typically marry, he decided he was settled enough and sent home to his brothers and father to look for a wife. The name they produced was Zahra Ali, the 17-year-old daughter of the now-deceased merchant who had given him his first break.
Zahra was nervous about marrying someone so old, but she knew the way of these things. "I didn't have a choice," she says now. "I respected my family." She was married in white in Abu Dhabi. Two years later, in April, 1978, their first daughter, Fahima, was born.
By the late 1980s, the Canadian oil company had come up dry. Adam was given six months' notice, and with no job, he was not allowed to stay in the UAE. But the couple could not go home. They had six young children, and the political situation in Somalia was deteriorating, heading toward civil war. Zahra's family fell on the wrong side: "If we had gone back, they would have killed me," she explains, wiping a finger across her throat.
Her husband, who knew his way around bureaucracy, got them all visas to the United States, and they spent everything they had to fly to New York City. They went to Buffalo and crossed over to Canadian soil in July, 1989, carrying nothing but a few bags and a framed wedding picture, and declared themselves refugees. The children spoke some English, with heavy accents, but their mother none at all. On the ride to Toronto, she watched the taxi driver speak into his radio and worried they were being kidnapped. In the back seat was Fahima, springy curls down past her shoulders, at 11.
Their story was by no means the worst. In those years, a flood of Somali refugees -- including many single mothers -- came directly to Canada, arriving poor and traumatized by violence and famine. Most settled in Toronto, where they are now believed to form the largest African community in Canada.
How large is unclear. The 2001 census records less than 20,000 Torontonians who named Somali as their ethnic origin, but Farah Khayre, co-ordinator at the African Canadian Social Development Council, estimates the number at closer to 60,000. People move often, she says, and may list themselves as African or be nervous about sharing personal information. The community is very young (almost half below the age of 15) and very poor, with an average income per adult of about $15,000, less than half the average for Toronto as a whole.
Somalis in Toronto have struggled to find affordable housing for their large families, Ms. Khayre says, and the parents, who see a growing generational gap, worry about keeping their children in school and out of gangs.
But in the past decade, they have formed outreach organizations and women's centres. The first Somali restaurant has been followed by about 30 more. They have begun to produce university graduates: While the three eldest Osman offspring remember being virtually alone in their first years at York University, they now see a crowd of Somali-Canadian freshmen.
In all that time, though, the community has yet to produce a doctor. There are at least two dentists, and an older, U.S.-trained psychiatrist in nearby Whitby, but Somali Torontonians have survived without a single family physician who could speak to them in their own language and relate to their largely Muslim culture. None of the Somali doctors who arrived as refugees have been able to get their foreign credentials recognized. Often, they work as counsellors or taxi drivers.
To Deqa Farah, a community mental-health consultant, Fahima's achievement is both a symbolic triumph for her young community and a practical necessity: No matter what she does after medical school, others will have an example to follow. "It means we are here," Ms. Farah says. "We are no longer a refugee community. We are citizens."
In the Osman home in Markham, Fahima's family is fast consuming a table loaded with baked chicken, rice and homemade samosas. There are at least four conversations under way.
Her youngest sister, Shukri, who turned 6 the day before, is proudly toting her new Barbies in a shopping bag. Her brothers, Mohamed and Hamza, have set up around a plastic table in the back yard with two cousins -- their father, a banker in the UAE, was the first brother Adam Osman put through school.
Fahima's mother straightens her hijab with an easy smile, and goes hunting for forks. Except during Ramadan, when they try to break the fast together, it is rare that her nine children are all under the same roof.
Though money is always tight, it is a given in the family that everyone will go to university -- not college, their father tells them sternly, but a "brand name" education.
On that subject, Fahima's parents, who can read and write only a little English, are of one mind. Zahra has been the sole breadwinner since Adam fell ill and retired from his valet job; she keeps the house and works nights making humidifiers on the Emerson factory assembly line. Flanked warmly by her daughters in the kitchen, she describes what she wishes for her children: "Just work hard and have a good life."
Hodan, the second oldest, laughs. "Notice the emphasis on hard work. There is no room for laziness."
The children have complied: Hodan, 23, graduates this year from York University and plans to get her MBA. Hibo, 22, is taking statistics. Mohamed, the eldest boy, is in computer science at Ryerson University. Huwaida, 18, starts next year at York; she wants to be a teacher.
And then there is Fahima, who came first and set the family bar. Her siblings, who gave her nicknames like Party Crasher and Mood Killer, tease her mercilessly about how she pulled all-nighters studying just to "get into" high school, how she decorated her room in A-pluses for motivation, how she made them watch medical documentaries and World Vision programs.
The conversation goes something like this:
"We'd watch them for hours," Hibo says. "The worst ones were the leprosy shows. I still can't get those out of mind."
"It was to remind us to be more grateful for what we had," Fahima protests.
"She once made me watch an episode of Law and Order and write a report on it," sister Deqa, 13, says.
"To practise writing," Fahima explains.
They all tell of the time Fahima returned home from university having had no food and seven cups of coffee. When her mother saw her quivering hands and head, studying was banned for the rest of the day.
"You wish you could have gotten that punishment," Fahima shrugs.
She is used to the ribbing. "You see my house," she says later. "Everyone's partying. I had to put those A's in front of me, to say, 'This is my focus.' "
It has been that way since she was six years old, still living in the UAE, and announced to her mom she wanted to be a doctor. "God willing," her mother answered, "you will be."
But like other children of immigrants, Fahima and her siblings now have an added motivation. They are the so-called second generation -- who account for one in five Canadians in their 20s and who, despite lower family incomes, language barriers and less-educated parents, are outpacing their more settled Canadians peers in the race for higher education.
According to the 2001 census, members of visible minorities in their 20s born in Canada but with parents from other countries were almost twice as likely to have a university degree as third-generation-plus white Canadians. Even those who arrived in the country young had higher levels of school attendance, and a higher presence in high-skilled occupations.
They get an extra push from their working-class parents, who do not want their sacrifices to be wasted. "It's not an accident that we are here," Hodan says. "We have a prophecy to fulfill."
The Osmans arrived with some advantages: They were not burdened with the first-hand trauma of war, and they had learned some English in school, which they perfected watching soap operas and The Simpsons. But there was little money. Fahima took a paper route at 11 to help with the bills, and when they got jobs as teenagers, the older children helped cover the cost of clothes and school trips for the youngest.
At home, they had to tutor each other, and at school, they had to be their own advocates, translating for their mother at parent-teacher meetings (which, Hodan observes, had certain advantages).
But Fahima and her siblings all say they felt diminished by a school system that too easily slotted black kids into lower-level courses; this, they say, is the subtle form of racism they have experienced in Canada.
"You think, okay, people don't expect much of me," Hodan says. "I am going to use that to my advantage."
Fahima cannot name a single high-school teacher who inspired her toward medicine, but she does remember a Grade 10 biology teacher announcing to the class how impossible it was to become a doctor: "Do you think I'd be here if I'd made it?"
She also remembers the guidance counsellor who looked at her low mark in calculus and refused to let her take the course over, suggesting that she was setting her goals too high.
Fahima was one of only two black students taking university-track courses, keeping her marks up while working part-time at a Hallmark card store and helping out at home. She stopped saying at school that she wanted to be a doctor, and Ms. Farah, who first met Fahima at 17, remembers her unhappiness.
She had looked within her community for doctors who could advise her and found none. "She was losing her confidence," she says. "She is a genuinely kind person, but she bruises easily. She needed encouragement and she wasn't getting it in school."
But her family pushed her forward, along with close high-school friends such as Sunita Chowmik, 22, another second-generation Canadian, who is now a teacher. After graduation, the two went together to York, where Fahima could always be found in her favourite spot, among the stacks near the second-floor balcony of the university library.
She made a practice of parking in the most expensive lot on campus to force herself to study past 11:30 p.m., when the attendant left and she wouldn't have to pay.
Her life, except for chatting in coffee shops or going to the movies (she loves goofy comedies like Dumb and Dumber), was all about studying.
"If I really wanted to pull an all-nighter," Ms. Chowmik says, "I'd stay with her."
That night, after the Sunday dinner at the Osmans, Fahima's brother Mohamed sends an e-mail. He is worried, he writes, that in all the funny stories, the truth did not get out -- that Fahima has also been the generous big sister who helped mediate between the parents, who helped all the siblings with homework and gave them a model to follow. "I wanted," he says, "to do what she did."
In the summer before she graduated from York, Fahima went back to Somalia, and had her eyes opened. She was already planning to apply to medical school, but her backup plan was to work for an aid agency. She talked her way into an unpaid internship, split between Save the Children and CARE International. It was not a perfect experience: Looking back, she says, she spent too much time in meetings, and too little time on the ground with people.
But not even her endless viewing of World Vision programming had prepared her for what she saw -- the life she could have led, had fate gone a different way. She remembers starving children wandering the streets without clothes, and the lone hospital that was missing technical things such as medical supplies and equipment, and human things like curtains between the beds.
Clearest in her mind is one conversation she had with a young woman seven months pregnant, whom she met sipping water in the sunset at a roadside café. The woman said she was hoping for a daughter, because her three other daughters had all died before they reached their first birthday. There was something about the matter-of-fact way she said it that stunned Fahima; though Somali, she was seeing their world with Canadian eyes.
"It's something normal to them, losing their children," she recalls. "They have a word for it, iga saqeeruy."
The woman told her how mothers were left to die when they could not produce the $40 in American money -- or a necklace or bracelet in barter -- for the cost of a cesarean section. Women had taken to starving themselves when they were pregnant, so that they could have easier births. She asked a doctor about it. "It's gotten to the point," he told her, "where I am delivering skeletons."
At the café, with the sun dropping in the desert, she told the woman about her plans to be a doctor. The woman leaned forward and said, "You must come back. Once people get out, they forget to come back and help us."
When Fahima got home, she worked harder than ever. "I was so motivated to get into medical school. It was a lot of sleepless nights. When you know what your life would have been like, versus how it is now, you just have to work hard." She told her family that if she didn't get in, she would keep applying until she was 55.
But of course, she did. Now in her second year, with one left to go, Fahima is aware of being unique. In a diverse class, with student backgrounds from around the world, she is the only African. But it has been that way at school for much of her life -- and it has mostly come in handy. In a group of 128, people remember her.
It has even paid off in the operating room, where students stand for hours, their main official responsibility to hold organs out of the way of the scalpel, while the surgeons rapid-fire questions at them. "You're the target," she says. But in Fahima's case, they sometimes forget to quiz her because they are so curious about her background.
At McMaster, learning is done in groups, not lectures. Fahima says she had to get over being shy to speak in front of people, but now her class is a close group, who got together on Wednesdays to watch The Bachelor and vote on which bride-wannabe should be next to go.
On request, Fahima enthusiastically rhymes off a list of diseases that fascinate her, and makes the kind of statement that gets her teased at home: "I really like reading about the acute abdomen."
Her career goal has shifted from obstetrics to general surgery; her final decision will be based largely on what would be most useful in Africa. She plans to divide her time between practising in Canada, the country that trained her, and working in Somalia, the country that needs her badly.
She will never go to the United States, she says, no matter how much money she could make (and she will graduate with $100,000 debt in student and bank loans): "I am Canadian first."
But she strongly believes she has a duty to give up movies and ice-cold Cokes and go to the desert where there is electricity only half the day, the hospitals shelves are always empty and people die daily from medical problems she could solve. She has started a student group for international medicine.
Dr. Goffredo Arena, who was the resident on her surgical clerkship this spring, recalls Fahima as the first person he ever met who said she wanted to be a surgeon so she could travel to a developing country and help people.
"We're all brothers and sisters in the world," Fahima says earnestly. "We all have a duty to help each other. It was just a matter of luck that we're born privileged and not a kid starving in Africa."
Her teachers and mentors see this as one of Fahima's greatest gifts. She has not forgotten her roots. While many of her peers come from privileged, educated families, she had to find her own role models outside of her community -- and she understands the importance now of being one.
"She sees the world in a different way," says Dr. Samantha Nutt, the executive director of War Child Canada, who has helped to coach Fahima through medical school. "You just know she is going to accomplish great things."
The envelope that arrived that day in June and changed her life is now stored carefully in a file folder, which travels everywhere with her. "I look at it every time I get frustrated, to remind me how much I wanted to get in."
And to remember why.
Part 2: Dreamchild
By ERIN ANDERSSEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Her husband, who knew his way around bureaucracy, got them all visas to the United States, and they spent everything they had to fly to New York City. They went to Buffalo and crossed over to Canadian soil in July, 1989, carrying nothing but a few bags and a framed wedding picture, and declared themselves refugees. The children spoke some English, with heavy accents, but their mother none at all. On the ride to Toronto, she watched the taxi driver speak into his radio and worried they were being kidnapped. In the back seat was Fahima, springy curls down past her shoulders, at 11.
Their story was by no means the worst. In those years, a flood of Somali refugees - including many single mothers - came directly to Canada, arriving poor and traumatized by violence and famine. Most settled in Toronto, where they are now believed to form the largest African community in Canada.
How large is unclear. The 2001 census records less than 20,000 Torontonians who named Somali as their ethnic origin, but Farah Khayre, co-ordinator at the African Canadian Social Development Council, estimates the number at closer to 60,000. People move often, she says, and may list themselves as African or be nervous about sharing personal information. The community is very young (almost half below the age of 15) and very poor, with an average income per adult of about $15,000, less than half the average for Toronto as a whole.
Somalis in Toronto have struggled to find affordable housing for their large families, Ms. Khayre says, and the parents, who see a growing generational gap, worry about keeping their children in school and out of gangs.
But in the past decade, they have formed outreach organizations and women's centres. The first Somali restaurant has been followed by about 30 more. They have begun to produce university graduates: While the three eldest Osman offspring remember being virtually alone in their first years at York University, they now see a crowd of Somali-Canadian freshmen.
In all that time, though, the community has yet to produce a doctor. There are at least two dentists, and an older, U.S.-trained psychiatrist in nearby Whitby, but Somali Torontonians have survived without a single family physician who could speak to them in their own language and relate to their largely Muslim culture. None of the Somali doctors who arrived as refugees have been able to get their foreign credentials recognized. Often, they work as counsellors or taxi drivers.
To Deqa Farah, a community mental-health consultant, Fahima's achievement is both a symbolic triumph for her young community and a practical necessity: No matter what she does after medical school, others will have an example to follow. "It means we are here," Ms. Farah says. "We are no longer a refugee community. We are citizens."
In the Osman home in Markham, Fahima's family is fast consuming a table loaded with baked chicken, rice and homemade samosas. There are at least four conversations under way.
Part 3: Dreamchild
By ERIN ANDERSSEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Her youngest sister, Shukri, who turned 6 the day before, is proudly toting her new Barbies in a shopping bag. Her brothers, Mohamed and Hamza, have set up around a plastic table in the back yard with two cousins - their father, a banker in the UAE, was the first brother Adam Osman put through school.
Fahima's mother straightens her hijab with an easy smile, and goes hunting for forks. Except during Ramadan, when they try to break the fast together, it is rare that her nine children are all under the same roof.
Though money is always tight, it is a given in the family that everyone will go to university - not college, their father tells them sternly, but a "brand name" education.
On that subject, Fahima's parents, who can read and write only a little English, are of one mind. Zahra has been the sole breadwinner since Adam fell ill and retired from his valet job; she keeps the house and works nights making humidifiers on the Emerson factory assembly line. Flanked warmly by her daughters in the kitchen, she describes what she wishes for her children: "Just work hard and have a good life."
Hodan, the second oldest, laughs. "Notice the emphasis on hard work. There is no room for laziness."
The children have complied: Hodan, 23, graduates this year from York University and plans to get her MBA. Hibo, 22, is taking statistics. Mohamed, the eldest boy, is in computer science at Ryerson University. Huwaida, 18, starts next year at York; she wants to be a teacher.
And then there is Fahima, who came first and set the family bar. Her siblings, who gave her nicknames like Party Crasher and Mood Killer, tease her mercilessly about how she pulled all-nighters studying just to "get into" high school, how she decorated her room in A-pluses for motivation, how she made them watch medical documentaries and World Vision programs.
The conversation goes something like this:
"We'd watch them for hours," Hibo says. "The worst ones were the leprosy shows. I still can't get those out of mind."
"It was to remind us to be more grateful for what we had," Fahima protests.
"She once made me watch an episode of Law and Order and write a report on it," sister Deqa, 13, says.
"To practise writing," Fahima explains.
They all tell of the time Fahima returned home from university having had no food and seven cups of coffee. When her mother saw her quivering hands and head, studying was banned for the rest of the day.
"You wish you could have gotten that punishment," Fahima shrugs.
She is used to the ribbing. "You see my house," she says later. "Everyone's partying. I had to put those A's in front of me, to say, `This is my focus.' "
It has been that way since she was six years old, still living in the UAE, and announced to her mom she wanted to be a doctor. "God willing," her mother answered, "you will be."
Part 4: Dreamchild
By ERIN ANDERSSEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
But like other children of immigrants, Fahima and her siblings now have an added motivation. They are the so-called second generation - who account for one in five Canadians in their 20s and who, despite lower family incomes, language barriers and less-educated parents, are outpacing their more settled Canadians peers in the race for higher education.
According to the 2001 census, members of visible minorities in their 20s born in Canada but with parents from other countries were almost twice as likely to have a university degree as third-generation-plus white Canadians. Even those who arrived in the country young had higher levels of school attendance, and a higher presence in high-skilled occupations.
They get an extra push from their working-class parents, who do not want their sacrifices to be wasted. "It's not an accident that we are here," Hodan says. "We have a prophecy to fulfill."
The Osmans arrived with some advantages: They were not burdened with the first-hand trauma of war, and they had learned some English in school, which they perfected watching soap operas and The Simpsons. But there was little money. Fahima took a paper route at 11 to help with the bills, and when they got jobs as teenagers, the older children helped cover the cost of clothes and school trips for the youngest.
At home, they had to tutor each other, and at school, they had to be their own advocates, translating for their mother at parent-teacher meetings (which, Hodan observes, had certain advantages).
But Fahima and her siblings all say they felt diminished by a school system that too easily slotted black kids into lower-level courses; this, they say, is the subtle form of racism they have experienced in Canada.
"You think, okay, people don't expect much of me," Hodan says. "I am going to use that to my advantage."
Fahima cannot name a single high-school teacher who inspired her toward medicine, but she does remember a Grade 10 biology teacher announcing to the class how impossible it was to become a doctor: "Do you think I'd be here if I'd made it?"
She also remembers the guidance counsellor who looked at her low mark in calculus and refused to let her take the course over, suggesting that she was setting her goals too high.
Fahima was one of only two black students taking university-track courses, keeping her marks up while working part-time at a Hallmark card store and helping out at home. She stopped saying at school that she wanted to be a doctor, and Ms. Farah, who first met Fahima at 17, remembers her unhappiness.
She had looked within her community for doctors who could advise her and found none. "She was losing her confidence," she says. "She is a genuinely kind person, but she bruises easily. She needed encouragement and she wasn't getting it in school."
But her family pushed her forward, along with close high-school friends such as Sunita Chowmik, 22, another second-generation Canadian, who is now a teacher. After graduation, the two went together to York, where Fahima could always be found in her favourite spot, among the stacks near the second-floor balcony of the university library.
She made a practice of parking in the most expensive lot on campus to force herself to study past 11:30 p.m., when the attendant left and she wouldn't have to pay.
Her life, except for chatting in coffee shops or going to the movies (she loves goofy comedies like Dumb and Dumber), was all about studying.
"If I really wanted to pull an all-nighter," Ms. Chowmik says, "I'd stay with her."
That night, after the Sunday dinner at the Osmans, Fahima's brother Mohamed sends an e-mail. He is worried, he writes, that in all the funny stories, the truth did not get out - that Fahima has also been the generous big sister who helped mediate between the parents, who helped all the siblings with homework and gave them a model to follow. "I wanted," he says, "to do what she did."
In the summer before she graduated from York, Fahima went back to Somalia, and had her eyes opened. She was already planning to apply to medical school, but her backup plan was to work for an aid agency. She talked her way into an unpaid internship, split between Save the Children and CARE International. It was not a perfect experience: Looking back, she says, she spent too much time in meetings, and too little time on the ground with people.
But not even her endless viewing of World Vision programming had prepared her for what she saw - the life she could have led, had fate gone a different way. She remembers starving children wandering the streets without clothes, and the lone hospital that was missing technical things such as medical supplies and equipment, and human things like curtains between the beds.
Part 5: Dreamchild
By ERIN ANDERSSEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Clearest in her mind is one conversation she had with a young woman seven months pregnant, whom she met sipping water inthe sunset at a roadside café. The woman said she was hoping for a daughter, because her three other daughters had all died before they reached their first birthday. There was something about the matter-of-fact way she said it that stunned Fahima; though Somali, she was seeing their world with Canadian eyes.
"It's something normal to them, losing their children," she recalls. "They have a word for it, iga saqeeruy."
The woman told her how mothers were left to die when they could not produce the $40 in American money - or a necklace or bracelet in barter - for the cost of a cesarean section. Women had taken to starving themselves when they were pregnant, so that they could have easier births. She asked a doctor about it. "It's gotten to the point," he told her, "where I am delivering skeletons."
At the café, with the sun dropping in the desert, she told the woman about her plans to be a doctor. The woman leaned forward and said, "You must come back. Once people get out, they forget to come back and help us."
When Fahima got home, she worked harder than ever. "I was so motivated to get into medical school. It was a lot of sleepless nights. When you know what your life would have been like, versus how it is now, you just have to work hard." She told her family that if she didn't get in, she would keep applying until she was 55.
But of course, she did. Now in her second year, with one left to go, Fahima is aware of being unique. In a diverse class, with student backgrounds from around the world, she is the only African. But it has been that way at school for much of her life - and it has mostly come in handy. In a group of 128, people remember her.
It has even paid off in the operating room, where students stand for hours, their main official responsibility to hold organs out of the way of the scalpel, while the surgeons rapid-fire questions at them. "You're the target," she says. But in Fahima's case, they sometimes forget to quiz her because they are so curious about her background.
At McMaster, learning is done in groups, not lectures. Fahima says she had to get over being shy to speak in front of people, but now her class is a close group, who got together on Wednesdays to watch The Bachelor and vote on which bride-wannabe should be next to go.
On request, Fahima enthusiastically rhymes off a list of diseases that fascinate her, and makes the kind of statement that gets her teased at home: "I really like reading about the acute abdomen."
Her career goal has shifted from obstetrics to general surgery; her final decision will be based largely on what would be most useful in Africa. She plans to divide her time between practising in Canada, the country that trained her, and working in Somalia, the country that needs her badly.
She will never go to the United States, she says, no matter how much money she could make (and she will graduate with $100,000 debt in student and bank loans): "I am Canadian first."
But she strongly believes she has a duty to give up movies and ice-cold Cokes and go to the desert where there is electricity only half the day, the hospitals shelves are always empty and people die daily from medical problems she could solve. She has started a student group for international medicine.
Dr. Goffredo Arena, who was the resident on her surgical clerkship this spring, recalls Fahima as the first person he ever met who said she wanted to be a surgeon so she could travel to a developing country and help people.
"We're all brothers and sisters in the world," Fahima says earnestly. "We all have a duty to help each other. It was just a matter of luck that we're born privileged and not a kid starving in Africa."
Her teachers and mentors see this as one of Fahima's greatest gifts. She has not forgotten her roots. While many of her peers come from privileged, educated families, she had to find her own role models outside of her community - and she understands the importance now of being one.
"She sees the world in a different way," says Dr. Samantha Nutt, the executive director of War Child Canada, who has helped to coach Fahima through medical school. "You just know she is going to accomplish great things."
The envelope that arrived that day in June and changed her life is now stored carefully in a file folder, which travels everywhere with her. "I look at it every time I get frustrated, to remind me how much I wanted to get in."
And to remember why.
Erin Anderssen is the Social Trends reporter for The Globe and Mail.