Imagine yourself at twenty-six years old. Now imagine being forced to leave everything you know behind and flee your country at that age. This is the story of Omar Bah ’10, a graduate of URI’s College of Arts & Sciences (A&S) with a B.A. in Communications Studies and a minor in Political Science. Dr. Bah was kidnapped and tortured for working as a journalist in Gambia under a dictatorship in the early 2000s. He left with nothing, not even his wife who he had no way to communicate with. “I did not plan to ever leave my country. I just wanted to live a normal life and I woke up one morning and I had to leave,” he says. “I had the name Rhode Island the day before my travel. So, imagine coming to a new place and you are not prepared, you have to start from scratch, from the bottom, no family and no friends.” With the chance to start over, Dr. Bah had no intention to continue being a journalist as he says, “I was traumatized. I was scared. I wanted to move on.”
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