My reflection on the Blog Writing and Storytelling Training: "The month that my blogging dream came true"

It’s very important to get a place where you can express your ideas and know how to share your thoughts with others in an appropriate manner. Blog writing becomes an essential skill nowadays because technology develops quickly, and everything becomes digitalized.

Firstly, I had the desire to learn blog writing skills, and it is one of my dreams that I become a blogger one day. Finally, I am getting closer to becoming a regular blogger after the successful completion of an eye-opening blog writing training course at the Somali Public Agenda. I used to read more blogs that were written by some of my friends, the SPA team, especially internship reflections and others, and I really enjoyed it when I read them and I liked to become like them, and that made me love blogging even more.

However, the biggest motivation was that I wanted to share with people my stories and experiences and hustle in my life such as my university journey, which was a wonderful story as I became one of the first university graduates who studied social work in south-central Somalia. I am a social worker, and I wanted to write something about community problems and share them through blogging, which I want to use as advocacy.

I have met most of the expectations that I had before the blog writing training. I also got the chance to meet experienced bloggers that were invited to the SPA who shared with us their interesting stories about blogging. I had the chance to ask them questions about blogging because it's where I want to go. I really got enough experience in blogging.

The first time when the teacher told me that I’ll have a class two days a week, I asked myself if it is too short and not enough. But when the training started, it became too long because the teachers sent us assignments, and I was required to write one blog post every week.

I had helpful teachers that guided me and reviewed my assignments and I was able to conduct interviews, write transcripts and produce a blog post out of the interview. One of my great opportunities was I learnt new good friends during the training, which increased my network “your network is your net worth”. The good thing is I and two of my blog training classmates started a reading challenge called (thirty days, one book), and each day we committed to read 10 pages. We also agreed to send our blog posts to each other and review them before publishing.

 I learned three lessons during the training:

1. You can realise every dream that you have if you commit to it. 

2. Before you become a writer, become a reader. 

3. Write more in order to get your name on Google.

Finally, I want to thank Allah ‘SWT’ who allowed me to finish one-month blog writing and storytelling training. Second, I want to thank my family, especially my older brother Farah who always helps me to make my dreams true and thirdly, I want to thank Somali Public Agenda (SPA) for offering me this wonderful opportunity, which is aimed to improve our quality and skills in blog writing.

I commit to continue my blogging journey and become a regular blogger If Allah says.