Somali teen shares her heart-wrenching story of survival, search for parents

At the 32nd Avenue Dairy Queen in South Fargo, one of the workers has a life story that could be turned into a book.

Fatma Abdulahi came to this area with her five siblings after armed men kidnapped her parents in Somalia, after they asked her parents for herself and her sister.

Her father refused to hand over his girls to the men.

“When you have your parents one day, and the next day they are gone and you have to raise your siblings,” said Abdulahi.

Not long after Fatma, her five siblings, fled Somalia, with nothing.

“We did not know what the next step was, we lived every day as it came, i felt like my childhood was robbed,” said Abdulahi.

After time in a refugee camp, Fatma and her siblings got to Fargo.

“Coming here was the best part of our journey, a milestone, it was a relief I was waiting for years and years,” said Abdulahi.

She and her sisters and brother got into school. She also worked. And always the worry, the hope. Did her parents survive?

“I used to pray every night, two in the morning and beg God, let them be alive, please,” said Abdulahi.

Prayers were answered when recently the phone in her South Fargo apartment rang.

“We were like, who is calling at this time of the night and the youngest picked up and she just froze,” said Abdulahi.

It was her mother, alive in a refugee camp.

“And everyone started crying,” said Abdulahi.

The two talk every day and Fatma is trying to get her mother to Fargo, so the family can be nearly whole again.

“That would be the best thing that ever happened to me, I don’t know if I can be happier,” said Abdulahi.

Fatma is working with the Red Cross in getting word out to refugee camps in Africa, as the search for her father continues as well.

Source: WDAY