TERESA KRUG: Samia left Beijing just before the closing ceremony and arrived back in Mogadishu quietly. There were no cheering crowds, no parade, or speech from the president. In fact, very few people in Somalia were even aware that she’d competed in the Olympics. Part of this was because Samia had finished in last place. But mostly, no one new about Samia’s race because Somalia had gone through a lot of changes. It had been two decades since legendary runner Abdi Bile’s 1987 race. And in that time–

 

ABDI BILE: The whole country collapsed.

 

MALE VOICE: Somalia, at the very tip of the Horn of Africa, a country ripped apart by civil war and bloody feuds between clans. Lawless gangs have taken over the streets of Mogadishu. The once-beautiful Somalian capital, today a city of ruins.

 

TERESA KRUG: Civil war in the late ’80s and early ’90s turned Somalia upside down. Abdi Bile remembers that time.

 

ABDI BILE: The government was overthrown and the national fabric just destroyed. (UNINTEL) was just a no-man’s land.

 

TERESA KRUG: To survive more than a million Somalis left the country looking for safety elsewhere.

 

ABDI BILE: People went all over the places, all over the world, just to– to seek– look for a better life.

 

TERESA KRUG: That included Olympians and other national-level athletes who sought asylum or secondary nationality in other countries, creating a huge vacuum of talent. Instead of finding ways to nurture and retain young athletes, Somali leaders were driving them away.

 

ABDI BILE: Unfortunately, they never had any idea the importance and the value that sport contribute to bring our people’s unity and nationalism and patriotism back together.

 

TERESA KRUG: By the time Samia was training in the 2000s insurgent groups like al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam were in control of most of the country. The most militant of them drove around town with loud speakers and guns, warning against the temptations of enjoying things like music, movies, and sports.

 

TERESA KRUG: Soon they outlawed sports jerseys. And eventually they banned sports all together. Athletes who stepped out of line, who continued to train or play were harassed. Most received threatening phone calls. Some were tortured or even killed. So, when Samia returned home from the Olympics in 2008 she wasn’t just getting caught in the general cross-hairs of war.

 

TERESA KRUG: She was now a target. It caught up to her one day when she and another athlete were shopping in Bakaara Market, the largest market in Somalia. Instead of dressing in a robe like her peers, Samia was wearing pants and a shirt. As she and her friend shopped, they were being watched.

 

TERESA KRUG: Minutes later two young men from al-Shabaab appeared, their faces covered with checkered cloths. They pulled a gun on Samia and pushed her and her friend down a side alley away from the crowd, away from witnesses. With the gun pointed at them, Samia and her friend pleaded their cases.

 

TERESA KRUG: In the end they were let go, the experience left Samia shaken. After that she never visited the market again and she changed the way she dressed in public. Samia still had her sights on the London Olympics, but she was now keenly aware that she would have to start training underground.

 

TERESA KRUG: It’s at this point, when Samia was chasing the next Olympics in secret, where her path and mine crossed as Samia was trying to figure out could she live out her dream of being a professional athlete if she stayed in Somalia or would she have to leave. I’m Teresa Krug and from 30 for 30 Podcasts this is The Fastest Girl in Somalia, episode two, Nowhere to Run.

 

TERESA KRUG: In October 2009 I moved to Somaliland. It’s a self-declared republic in East Africa that’s internationally recognized as part of Somalia. Unable to get a job in journalism in the wake of the Great Recession, I took a teaching position in Hargeisa, the capital, to cover my room and board while I taught myself to be a freelance reporter.

 

TERESA KRUG: I arrived just before my 25th birthday. Fortunately, for my worried parents back in Arkansas, Somaliland turned out to be pretty safe. It was easy to move around. I was welcomed. And I was able to turn those early days into articles for local papers back home.

 

TERESA KRUG: But editors at bigger newspapers and magazines weren’t interested in stories about peace and stability. They wanted to hear more about what was happening in the south, in Mogadishu, which was experiencing some of its worst violence in decades.

 

TERESA KRUG: Venturing into Mogadishu was risky and it would require thousands of dollars for flights, security, transportation, hotels. If I wanted to report on what was happening there, I’d need to find a way to cover it from a distance. And so, I began plugging different key words into Google to get ideas.

 

TERESA KRUG: Somalia women? Somalia economics? Somalia sports? And that’s how I stumbled across a single-profile story of Samia. It gave an overview of her race in the 2008 Olympics with a little bit about her family background. The article was more than a year old.

 

TERESA KRUG: Her story really moved me. It was different from any Olympic story that I’d heard before and in the days after I read it I found myself wondering what had happened to her after the standing ovation. I tried Googling her name, and I was surprised that I couldn’t find anything newer about her.

 

TERESA KRUG: She wasn’t even on social media. At the time I was unaware of the ban on sports, so I didn’t understand why Samia was so hard to find. Had she stopped training? How could an Olympic athlete just vanish? For months I sent emails to whatever address I could find that was connected to the Somalia Olympic Committee but received zero response.

 

TERESA KRUG: Then, just as I was about to give up, the webmaster wrote me back, explaining that Samia was still in Somalia and she was open to meeting me. The safest and cheapest option would be to fly her up to Somaliland, which would require permission from Samia’s mother, who was nervous about her daughter traveling alone to visit with a stranger, me.

 

TERESA KRUG: The webmaster advocated on my behalf and got her mom’s blessing. For the next two months I saved up money for Samia’s flights and waited for a break in my teaching schedule. My first memory of Samia is when she arrived at Egal International Airport.

 

TERESA KRUG: She was dressed in a long royal blue dress and a matching head scarf. I greeted her on the windy tarmac with all the earnestness of a young reporter meeting her first famous person, locking my eyes on hers and smiling ridiculously. Samia, all of 18 or 19 years old, mostly avoided eye contact.

 

TERESA KRUG: Later, as we sat outside on white plastic chairs at a nearby restaurant, the webmaster, the one who had connected us by email, sat triangular to us, translating our conversation. I was talking to much, fast and with too many words. But Samia held herself differently.

 

TERESA KRUG: To my questions she answered politely but with short responses. “Yes. No.” She was reserved, not at all the confident athlete I expected to meet. I wondered if it was me, if there was something that I was doing that made her uncomfortable. How could I put her more at ease.

 

TERESA KRUG: As I was trying to figure out what to do next, that’s when I noticed her blue track pants peeking out below her dress. I had brought Samia here because I wanted to write a story about her, one that would show what it was like to be an Olympian from Somalia.

 

TERESA KRUG: But now I wasn’t sure if this was going to happen. She didn’t trust me. In fact, it would take us more than two and a half weeks of interviews spread out across 2010 for her to feel comfortable enough to talk about her life and her Olympic goals.

 

TERESA KRUG (ARCHIVAL): Okay. Let’s talk about racing. So, in 2008–

 

(Foreign Language Not Transcribed)

 

TERESA KRUG: –who would she train with? (BACKGROUND VOICES)

 

TERESA KRUG: We recorded in a bunch of different places, including the school library and nearby restaurants. Because I was living on a salary of $250 a month, I leaned on my friends and students to help translate.

 

NUJUUM HASHI: Her personality was really tough.

 

TERESA KRUG: Nujuum Hashi is now a celebrated artist living in Spain. Back then she was a nurse assistant at Abaarso, the school where I worked and where we did a lot of the interviews.

 

NUJUUM HASHI: If she don’t like something she would directly tell you like, “I don’t like that question or I don’t like that thing and I don’t wanna talk about it,” in a direct face. (LAUGH) And sometimes Samia was really getting like, “Let’s finish. I– I need to get out.”

 

TERESA KRUG (ARCHIVAL): Describe to me how you got there? Like, did you take a bus? Did you take a plane?

 

SAMIA YUSUF OMAR (TRANSLATED): Plane.

 

TERESA KRUG (ARCHIVAL): Plane? Okay.

 

TERESA KRUG: To get there we discovered that my initial read of Samia, of being quiet and docile, was off, way off.

 

NUJUUM HASHI: She was always in a hurry. She was always like, “I need to do this. I need to do that,” and– and she– she had a lot of energy.

 

TERESA KRUG: But in the long breaks in between interview sessions Samia would dash outside and do laps around the school compound of play soccer. She was immediately at ease with my students in a way that she wasn’t with me.

 

NUJUUM HASHI: Usually only boys do this stuff. She wasn’t scared to play with them or to interact with them or to run around them. And they were also surprised at how athletic she was. She was running five, three, four laps without– without stop, and they were, like, watching her. “Oh, my God. This girl can do a lot of things.”

 

TERESA KRUG: Looking back, it makes sense why Samia was quiet when we first met. Given what was happening in Somalia, she was right to be cautious with me. She was obsessed with sports. But pursuing that and talking about it put her and her family at risk.

 

NUJUUM HASHI: I think it’s because she was scared of the security of her family or for herself when she goes back there. She was scared that if you really share– the– her story, people will find out and maybe she gonna get hurt. Some questions were certain hard for her to say it.

 

TERESA KRUG: In a conversation with Najib Hassan (PH), a friend of mine and human rights advocate, Samia told us that running was her whole life, explaining that she didn’t think about anything else. She said, “I don’t even think about marriage at all. I just take off running. That’s it.”

 

NAJIB HASSAN: But you don’t have, like, a two-track mind. You just have one-track mind and it’s just concentrated on your–

 

SAMIA YUSUF OMAR: Yeah–

 

MALE VOICE: –game, your sports. You know, that’s it.

 

TERESA KRUG: She talked constantly of making it to the 2012 London Olympics and about finding a coach, about training for her favorite distance, the 1,500 meter. She wanted to redeem herself, to win.

 

SAMIA YUSUF OMAR (TRANSLATED): You see, if– if I woulda won, my name would’ve been known but my country, I woulda won for my country–

 

MALE VOICE: She said.

 

TERESA KRUG: Samia and I spent a lot of time together over those two and a half weeks, which led to some friction between us. Me, annoyed when she would sleep through our scheduled time together, Samia, annoyed when I began banging on her door to wake her up.

 

TERESA KRUG: Eventually, we got used to each other. She began calling me Teresa Waalan, Crazy Teresa, an affectionate nickname she said. And she’d loop her arm through mine as we walked across the school’s campus, laughing at how serious I took the whole interview experience.

 

TERESA KRUG: To say that we became super close is a stretch, but we developed some inside jokes and I did start to feel more like a friend than just a reporter. One evening Samia mentioned that she’d never seen herself run, so we pulled up a Russian-language video clip of her race in the 2008 Olympics, one that my colleague had scoured the internet to find.

 

TERESA KRUG: He and I stood behind a seated Samia, the three of us staring at his laptop. In the video the announcers described the race, focusing on the first-place winner, Veronica Campbell Brown, following her every second as she raced toward the finish line.

 

TERESA KRUG: Once Veronica crossed the line, the announcers turned their attention to Samia, suddenly wondering aloud why she was so far behind the other runners. At one point one announcer mused about whether she had fallen. She was that many seconds behind.

 

TERESA KRUG: The camera panned to a full-body shot of Samia, the young Olympian swinging her arms across her chest, all alone on the track. I watched Samia watch herself, her eyes glued to the computer. I was worried about how she would react, whether she’d be upset watching herself fail.

 

TERESA KRUG: But instead she turned toward me with a pretty big smile, almost laughing. And then she turned back to the computer and pushed repeat again and again. If I hadn’t realized the danger Samia was in as an Olympic athlete in Somalia before, by the time we got midway through our interviews I was starting to understand, especially when she told me about her family life.

 

TERESA KRUG: As a kid, Samia had been very close to her father. She would sit on his lap and listen to the radio (BACKGROUND VOICE) with him. When she got in trouble with her mother, who would chase her around the house, Samia’s father would stick up for her, laughing about whatever indiscretion Samia had done and telling her mother not to bother.

 

TERESA KRUG: Every morning he would go to the mosque and return home to wake his kids for school. After spending breakfast with them, he would kiss them goodbye and go to work as a tailor in Mogadishu’s Bakaara Market. One morning her father left for work but for some reason he kept coming back.

 

TERESA KRUG: She said he came back three times to check on things in the kitchen while her mother was cooking. It was like he didn’t wanna leave but eventually he did. Hours later Samia learned that there had been gunfire near her father’s stall. A stray bullet hit her father, killing him. After that life came at her fast. The funeral was swift, that afternoon. Soon after Samia dropped out of school to take on domestic duties while her mother took over as the breadwinner. Here’s Nujuum again.

 

NUJUUM HASHI: She always talked about her mom, how hard-working she was, how she wanted to help her brothers, sisters, and her mom one day. She had a lot of motivation that one day she also gonna help herself, her family, and will make her country proud.

 

TERESA KRUG: Increasingly, Samia wondered whether running could help her financially support her family. Without her father, they were struggling to make ends meet, but it was tough to make any future plans. The violence kept getting worse. One day in early 2010 the fighting between insurgent groups and government-allied soldiers was so intense that Samia and her family had to flee for their lives.

 

TERESA KRUG: In order to escape, Samia and her family paid an exorbitant bus fare to go to a camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Mogadishu. The camp was controlled by Hizbul Islam, one of the insurgent groups that threatened athletes. Here out in the open Samia had to completely hide her identity.

 

TERESA KRUG: She never told anyone about her Olympic run, worried that the wrong people would overhear. Living in the camp became so unbearable that eventually Samia and her family moved back to their home in Mogadishu where violence was still raging.

 

MALE VOICE: She said the last– few months were really the hardest ones, and it was difficult to not go around and– the shelling and the bombardment, you know, and the harassment of people and other things just, like, massive.

 

TERESA KRUG: Living in Mogadishu with all that fighting, Samia said she never knew from day to day if she would live to see the sunset. The summer of 2010 was an especially violent summer to be a sports fan in Mogadishu. For the first time in FIFA history an African country, South Africa, was hosting the World Cup.

 

TERESA KRUG: Soccer fever swept through the continent. But in Somalia the excitement was muted. It had to be. A group of Mogadishu residents dared to watch the championship anyway, hosting a small watch party. The insurgent group Hizbul Islam found out, broke in, and attacked, killing two people as the other fans escaped.

 

TERESA KRUG: Three months later the violence still hadn’t stopped. During Eid al-Fitr, a Muslim holiday where it’s common to go out and socialize for multiple days, Samia’s family instead stayed indoors. They marked the end of Ramadan trapped, unable to leave.

 

TERESA KRUG: The more I got to know Samia the harder it was to square her big Olympic dreams with the reality of her life. She and her family could barely exists in their own home. Her father had been killed and she couldn’t even tell people she was an athlete, let alone train in public or find a coach to help her train.

 

TERESA KRUG: It started to feel like she was chasing something impossible. But that’s not how Samia saw it. Instead of giving up, she was getting restless. The halfway point between the Beijing and London Olympics had passed. The clock was ticking. In our early conversations Samia always made it sound like no matter what she would stay in Somalia. It was her home, where her family was. But I started to hear her say that she was ready to leave, to join other champion athletes who had fled Somalia over the last two decades.

 

TERESA KRUG (ARCHIVAL): Do you have– ever have dreams about running?

 

FEMALE VOICE: She said– in– only dream about me leaving the country and– and actually being with– with the other athletes and getting ready for the race.

 

TERESA KRUG: She wanted to go somewhere she could train safely, where she could pour all her time and energy into getting faster, somewhere she could find a coach who would take her under their wing. In her eyes that place was Somalia’s neighbor to the northwest, Ethiopia.

 

TERESA KRUG: Ethiopia is a beacon in the running world with world-class facilities and coaching. To train at the Olympic level it seemed like an obvious place to go. But this idea made me nervous. Samia’s passport was expired, and there was no way to get a new one while she was in Somaliland.

 

TERESA KRUG: She couldn’t just pick up and leave. I pushed her for details. How would she pay for the travel? How would she cross the border? Where would she stay? How would she find a coach? She had no patience for my questions and rushed our interviews along, treating them like they were in the way.

 

TERESA KRUG: Every day spent in Somaliland was one more day not in Ethiopia, not training, not getting any closer to the Olympics. I realized I had a choice to make. I could stay totally neutral and let Samia try to figure this out himself or I could try to help her. So, we formed a plan to get her to Ethiopia. It would become her first border on her journey to London.

 

MALE VOICE: If they see you’re going with a Somali, they might think you are a terrorist or trying to help a terrorist. So, it’s not easy for Somalis to travel.

 

TERESA KRUG: That’s next time on The Fastest Girl in Somalia.