Meet the pageant queen who is raising awareness about climate change WorldRefugeeDay
in the area. Ali pours a sack of dried acacia pods into the trough and explains that there has been no rain in the region for months and therefore no food for the animals to eat. The team at the giraffe sanctuary is keeping them alive on the pods and water trucked in from the nearby Tana River. Omar, recently crowned Miss Somalia, listens attentively. Then she takes her phone out for a well-timed selfie—herself in the foreground, the hungry giraffes in the background.
In recent years, due to mounting criticism about what some deem as an anti-feminist inclination of the pageantry, many beauty competitions have pivoted toward putting more emphasis on the education and intelligence of the contestants. Each woman who participates in the Miss World pageant is asked to choose an activist platform to promote during their year-long reign. Omar chose climate change in the Horn of Africa.
When Omar was nine, her family was granted asylum in Canada after waiting for visas for more than a decade. She attended school in the small city of Kitchener, Canada, but she never felt like she fit in. As a young Black woman wearing a hijab, Omar says she was picked on and ostracized by the other students. “The way that I was bullied when I was young, like that made me so insecure in myself,” Omar remembers. “I always felt like I stood out, like I was the different one.
“The reason I care so much about climate is, right now, due to the drought, there are families who are trying to go from Somalia to come to refugee camps, and they die on the way there due to not being able to have food, not being able to have water,” she says. “And it’s sad that as a Somali, I’ve never been able to live in my country. I’ve never visited my country…That’s never going to be possible if the issue of climate is not solved.
These projects are still in their infancy. Omar is working to get partners on board who can manufacture the type of makeup she wants and to secure permission from the government of Kenya and the United Nations to visit the refugee camps. And while Omar admits that she doesn’t have the startup business acumen normally required to get the organization started, she does have passion and a growing platform.
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