Cabbies

In the land of Uncle Sam the most interesting and knowlegable conversations that you can have are with cabbies. They are the people who know it all . It just needs some respect for them on your part to get them to talk and once they do they open your eyes to a world of knowledge .

My own cabbie Sadik is from Somalia . We often talk about customs in his country and how they are similar to ours back home . Now Somalia is nation which has been in civil war for almost 17 years now and has no government at all . Sadik told me a lot of interesting facts about Somalia . For once since they do not have a govt they are official refugees in every country . They can just drop in in any country and the govts there are supposed to support them . Minneapolis for once has a very big somalian population .

The conversation we had today was most interesting . He asked me how many siblings I have and I said one younger sister . He said thats it ...back in somalia even today ppl have 10 - 11 kids ..as many as they want . So then I asked how do ppl offord to have so many kids ..he said thats easy ..we dnt have to pay for education..actually rite now there are no govt schools ..only private schools , healthcare anyways is screwed . I asked so what about college education and he said well we dnt have any colleges .. Any body who wants to study further has to run away from the country to neighbouring countries like Kenya...and from there they can go to any country like US or Australia ..and find a Job there ...if they still want to , some of them go on to study further ..most of them dnt ...

I was shocked to find out that an entire nation of 5 million people is without education and govt ..this is the state of just one of the countries in Africa...lack of education and healthcare epidemics ..God knows how those countries even manage to survive .