Citizens of Nowhere

By Debi Goodwin

An inspiring story of courage, adaptation and determinaton — a year in the life of 11 refugee students entering universities across Canada.

"Most journalists have stories they never forget. This is mine."

When Debi Goodwin travelled to the Dadaab Refugee Camp in 2007 to shoot a documentary on young Somali refugees soon coming to Canada, she did not anticipate the impact the journey would have on her. A year later, in August of 2008, she decided to embark upon a new journey, starting in the overcrowded refugee camps in Kenya, and ending in university campuses across Canada. For a year, she recorded the lives of eleven very lucky refugee students who had received coveted scholarships from Canadian universities, guaranteeing them both a spot in the student body and permanent residency in Canada. We meet them in the overcrowded confines of a Kenyan refugee camp and track them all the way through a year of dramatic and sometimes traumatic adjustments to new life in a foreign country called Canada. This is a snapshot of a refugee's first year in Canada, in particular a snapshot of young men and women lucky and smart enough to earn their passage from refugee camp to Canadian campus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 14, 2010
• ISBN: 9780307376039

Debi Goodwin

Debi Goodwin is the author of Citizens of Nowhere and a former CBC television producer. She is also a travel writer, blogger, and avid photographer.

Reviews for Citizens of Nowhere

[_zoe__1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a very interesting look at 11 mostly Somali students who had been living in refugee camps in Kenya until they won scholarships to Canadian universities. It describes their first year of study, including the major adjustments that they had to make. They had left behind their families and the whole world that they knew, and were suddenly living in a completely different culture. Compounded with all the basic pressures of first-year university was the knowledge that they needed to succeed and start making money as quickly as possible so that they could help out the family members who had been left behind. There's also a fair bit of information about the political situation in Somalia, which I had previously been entirely ignorant of.I love books about people adjusting to new worlds, so I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Almost my only complaint is that the author tries to cover too many different students; it's just not possible to do justice to the stories of 11 different students in such a short space while still trying to explain the background of the situation. I sometimes found that I had lost track of who was who, and I was left wanting a more complete version of their stories. I hope some of them will eventually choose to tell their own stories themselves.Still, this was an interesting overview and the pages went by quickly. I would recommend it if you're interested in the subject.