Lessons from Abdullah

You never know when you are going to meet someone, receive a gift, and really reinforce something important. John and I were on our way to the Vienna airport to catch our flight to Krakow, and we were picked up by a very congenial taxi driver.  Sort of the polar opposite of the guy that threw our luggage in his trunk with malice and drove us from the rental car return to the hotel on our arrival to Vienna.  We almost bought it as he swerved to avoid a truck and the tram with not much physical solution to the problem except inelastic collision.  As I said, this guy, Abdullah, was different.  He was interested in us, so we became interested in him.  He has been in Vienna for 5 years.  He said, “this place is like heaven compared to where I’m from.”  He was born and raised in Mogadishu, Somalia.  The civil war is over, but the terrorists (Al-Shabaab) and pirates are a constant threat to public security.  The government was weak after the war and these bandits remained strong.  There are 10 million people in Somalia, and 3 million expats like Abdullah.  Since the parliament is completely corrupt, only bribes influence elections of the top government officials.  The expats and countrymen interested in progress raised a collection, a lot of money, to bribe the parliament to vote in a capable president, who happened to have spent his last ten years in the US.  The government is making progress, but there is a lot of work to do, like build military strength, capability and armament to provide public security and reduce corruption.  It is difficult to eliminate corruption on the continent.  Somalia has improved its standing from the world’s most dangerous country to just the third most dangerous.  Abdullah was proud of this seemingly small step.

Abdullah plans to finish high school and then attend college.  He told John- “Now is your time, John.  You have to study and learn.  Work hard.  Don’t play video games…or you will end up driving a taxi!!”

Although this picture does not really go with the story, it is the last photo I took of Vienna.  The gilded Johan Strauss statue in Stadtpark (City Park) is the most often photographed monument in the city, so I wanted to be sure to keep the rate trending upward.  It is in a park created on what was the glacis outside the city walls (open field of fire on the approach to the city).  The city walls turned out to be of little practical military use, so Emperor Franz Joseph decreed that they be torn down and a Ring road built in their place in the late 1850's.