Conquering The Odds Journey Of A Shepherd Girl [Paperback]

?Given up by her mother at the young age of six months to live in a remote, primitive village in south central Somalia, she slept in a hut built by her grandmother on the dirt floor. As a toddler, while her grandmother grazed the sheep and goats in the grasslands, Habibo was left to stay in the hut by herself. Unfortunately, this is precisely when she was taken advantage of, molested by neighbor boys.?

By the time she turned five, Habibo's grandmother taught her how to graze the animals by herself, which she did each day, seven days per week in the grasslands of Somalia fending off jackals by day and hyenas by night. By the age of eleven, she was grazing her grandmother's cattle as a nomad for months on end in a male dominated role having to fend for herself, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Habibo lived through, not only the attacks of crocodiles in the Shebelle river next to her village, but the attacks of guerillas during the breakout of civil war and the disintegration of her country into its current state of chaos. Sleeping in the forest at night with the other females of the village and herding the animals during the daytime, she survived the murder and rape which went on around her, much of which she personally witnessed.?

At fifteen years old, providence brought Habibo to the largest refugee camp in the world - Dadaab located in western Kenya. Built to hold 90,000, it had swollen to 150,000 by the time she arrived there; it is now 460,000 and growing bl“;