Despite the horror of her last trip to Ethiopia, Fowsia Musse plans to return.
Musse said she wants “to go back someday” and build a memorial wall in front of the airport in Jigjiga to honor her slain sister and the five people injured in the Oct. 25 shooting spree at the terminal.
Her younger sister, Juweriya Subcis, a member of a regional parliament in Ethiopia, died almost instantly when a federal police officer shot her in the head.
Musse, who was badly injured in the attack, said she would also like to move forward with a youth shelter plan that she and her sister discussed during a visit by Subcis to Lewiston and Auburn last summer.
“We had so many dreams, all focused on humanitarian work,” Musse said. “We gotta continue doing that on her behalf.”
She said that during Subcis’ visit to Maine, she only took her sister to see one place in particular: The Store Next Door in Lewiston.
They took a tour, Musse said, and her sister was impressed by its clothing closet, food pantry and more.
The two thought some of the ideas could be incorporated into a much-needed youth shelter in Jigjiga, capital of the Somali Regional State in Ethiopia, a sprawling, impoverished city of about 130,000 people.
“This is what we wanted to do,” Musse said.
She said she still intends to make it happen.
Abdirizak Dahir Budul Gaaruun, a friend of Musse’s sister who lives in Minneapolis, said Subcis helped open a school, Mount Vision Academy in Jigjiga. She had already created a nonprofit, OWS Development Fund, that employs more than 400 people throughout the Somali Regional State, he said.
“That is how much impact she had,” Gaaruun, the father of Subcis’ youngest son, said.
Musse said she’s determined to continue the work of helping poor Somalis in Ethiopia.
She said she is not going to let the gunman whose bullets caused her to lose a leg “defeat me.”
“One of these days I’ll go, just to do the memorial and see if I can get a land donation” for a shelter, she said.
Musse said her son Moby, now 15 and who was grazed by a bullet at the airport, said he would return with her.
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