It will arrive next week Hawa Kodah visiting Forlì for four days, Somali woman, deaf, civil rights activist. Hawa was a student at the school of Annalena Tonelli in Borama in Somaliland, the place where, on 5 October 2003, the missionary from Forlì was murdered. Hawa, together with other deaf students, twenty years later (5 October 2023), returned to the school to plant a tree in Annalena’s memory.
The story of Hawa Kodah
Hawa has a “novelistic” personal story, became deaf together with her sister at the age of 8he comes excluded from the school system. AND the mother of the two little girls not to give up and, a few years later, discovered through the radio that a “white woman” had opened a school for the deafdecides, despite the war, to take his daughters and cross the mountains, to go to Annalena, from whom, after three days of travelthey are welcomed. Hawa remembers this way: “I will never forget the first time I entered Annalena’s school, when I saw the deaf teacher writing on the blackboard I cried tears of joy. I didn’t believe a deaf person could write. From that day I learned everything […] I owe Annalena everything, of his hard work to create the first and only school for the deaf in all of Somalia and for the hospital which changed my life and the lives of many others.”
The Hawa school
Hawa opened today an organization that trains sign language and women’s rights teachers. Her life represents the flowering of Annalena’s concrete message towards a world of peace and dialogue.
Appointments with the Somali activist
Hawa will hold two meetings open to the publicone at the Peace Center in Forlì, Wednesday 19 June at 6pm. This meeting is organized in collaboration with the National Deaf Organization, an LIS interpreter will in fact be present. The other meeting will be held at the Committee for the Fight against World Hunger, Thursday 20th at 7pm, together with the youth of Camp Shalom.
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